August 18, 2020
You may have seen hashtags circulating different social media platforms. It can be found on Facebook, Pinterest, TikTok, YouTube, and other channels, but it has grown immensely on Twitter and Instagram. Don’t underestimate the power of Hashtag.
A hashtag has become a powerful movement to raise awareness on a particular topic.
When done correctly, hashtags can help your brand or business a massive number of benefits.
With hashtags and social media, you can place your brand strategically before your target audience.
It can also bring you to a broader and new audience out of your target market.
It can even help boost your SEO campaigns.
However, how can you use hashtags to harness your marketing strategies?
Does it even still work?
And how can it be beneficial with your SEO tactics?
What Are Hashtags?
Before delving into the topic further, we need to define first the meaning of hashtags.
Hashtags are words or phrases that come with the pound symbol # at the beginning (e.g., #hashtag).
It was first used by Chris Messina in the summer of 2007 when he tweeted:
From the first tweet of Messina in 2007, the use of hashtags has grown immensely.
It has become a useful tool for many marketers and business owners to strategically put their brand forward in the realm of social media marketing.
How the power of the Hashtag enhances your Marketing Strategies
1. Help Your Organic Post Become Visible
With the influx of social media users and the amount of traffic, each platform gets, your brand will sometimes get drowned with all that social media noise.
Your posts can take a hard time cutting through and struggle to make its way to your target audience.
Social media platforms like Instagram have also implemented new algorithms, making it even harder for most of your posts to stand out.
To aid you in making your organic post stick out amidst the challenges, you can incorporate hashtags in your post.
Hashtags can help boost your posts to reach your audience.
To achieve this, you need to use precise hashtags and something relevant to your niche.
2. Expand Brand Awareness With Branded Hashtags
Make your hashtags more effective in bringing your business name and brand to the spotlight and bank on branded hashtags. Use the power of your hashtag in the right manner.
These types of hashtags contain your name, whatever product you are highlighting, or your company slogan.
Branded hashtags can be an excellent way to spread awareness to your brand and make you popup amidst all the social media noise.
To do this effectively, you need to make sure that your branded hashtags are unique and creative.
It should embody your brand and should ring a bell towards your brand whenever your audience encounters it.
Your hashtag should also be short and easy to spell.
When you have a long branded hashtag, your audience might have a hard time spelling it and most likely abandon their quick search related to your brand. Remember! Power has nothing to do with length. So Hashtag will remain powerful even if it is short crisp and easy to remember.
3. Build Your Brand And Community
Crafting a branded hashtag is beneficial in promoting your business.
It can build your brand, establish your place in your niche industry, create a relationship with your audience, and start to make your community.
When you include the use of hashtags in your promotional posts or particular campaign, it can connect users toward your brand.
It can also connect people either in your niche industry or outside of your target audience that shares the same value, interest, and goals.
When these people come together with your brand, they can build a community with your brand in the center.
4. Increased Engagement
When you lean on social media marketing and make your campaigns a success, one of your primary goals is to increase engagement with your audience.
You want them to interact with you as it can become beneficial in growing your followers and establishing your authority as a brand.
As the power of hashtags allows your posts to become visible to your audience, it can spark any engagement.
It may be in the form of likes, shares, comments, retweets, and mentions.
It can even gain you new followers as it can help you be visible outside of your followers.
5. Boost Promotional Contents and Giveaways
No one can deny the effectivity of contests and giveaways.
People always free stuff like freebies, gift vouchers, and more.
They also love getting discount coupons or codes.
As a brand, conducting contests and giveaways can help people know about you and have them talk about your brand.
Either you do a simple giveaway or a blown-out contest, as long as you do it correctly and effectively, it can positively impact your business.
Content and giveaways help you build momentum in social media.
With the use of hashtags, it can create a better awareness of your ongoing promotional activity.
It allows your followers to join your giveaways quickly, and it spread among users.
It will create a drive even to your new customers, which makes your brand grow.
6. Become Part And Show Support On Social Issues
Using the right hashtag can bring you to the conversation taking place on different social media platforms.
It can elevate your brand and your business, putting your best forward in a massive audience.
Incorporating a hashtag that tackles social issues is a way to make your brand rally behind an important cause or effect in the community.
You can participate in momentary events like celebrating women around the globe or work-life balance that promotes mental health.
7. Allow Your Audience And Prospects To Find You Easily
The use of hashtags allows your brand to be in front of your audience.
This move means that it can also help your followers easily find you when searching for the particular hashtag you use.
Moreover, it is not limited to your followers alone.
Even those who do not follow you or do not have any idea of your brand can see you based on the hashtag that they used to search.
It can help you gain new followers and extend your awareness outside of your audience.
Hashtags And SEO
It was way back in 2014 when then of Google, Matt Cutts released a video stating that that social media does not affect your search engine optimization (SEO) rankings.
While this is true in a way, time does prove that social media can make a difference in your SEO strategies.
Though social does not directly make an impact on your SEO tactics, it can still influence your SEO campaigns.
The hashtag has become a driving force in your social media strategies.
Failing to use hashtags in your social media platform can reduce your chance of growing your brand.
With SEO, hashtag and social media are drivers to make your content develop and help drive traffic to your website.
So how does hashtag create an impact in your SEO rankings?
As you continue to share your content on your various social platforms, it can generate social signals necessary in your SEO campaign.
When people click on your content, it drives your website back, which then helps your click through rates.
With the use of the correct hashtag, you bring your content in front of your audience.
Once your audience clicks on your link, it will create a positive impact on your search ranking.
If your customers share it on their profiles, it can widen the reach and bring a lot of potential quality traffic towards your website.
To add up, hashtags and social media can contribute to the distribution of your content across possible social platforms, promote a longer lifespan of your content, drive and improve organic traffic, build brand recognition, and create a positive effect on your local SEO.
Final Thoughts
Hashtags remain to be valid until this day in building brand awareness for your brand.
It can boost your business in many ways and help grow your company in the process.
Hashtags can easily encourage people to engage with you and build connections.
For your SEO campaigns, social media, and your use of hashtags can influence how your SEO ranking would fare.
Though it does not directly affect your rankings in search engines, it can create a correlation with the elements that help you land the top spot in search engine results.
Author Bio
Maricar Morga worked as a marketing professional for almost a decade. She became part of the biggest real estate company/mall operator in the Philippines and handled concerts, events and community service-related activities. One of her activities became a nominee in the ICSC Asia-Pacific Shopping Center Awards 2018. Leaving her corporate job for good to pursue her dreams, she has now ventured in the path of content writing and currently writes for Softvire Australia and Softvire New Zealand. A Harry Potter fan, she loves to watch animated series and movies during her spare time.
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