Hashtags are part and parcel of the social media and online landscape. They attract new viewers, expand the reach of your content, and improve the returns against paid marketing posts. Let’s look at how hashtags work and how you can best utilize them in your digital marketing content creation.
As one of the many tools marketers use to gain attention and traction on heavily populated social media platforms, hashtags are a great way to improve brand awareness and engage with viewers who have interacted, shared, or liked posts and content with a similar theme.
Most social media channels have a search, discover, or explore page that curates content based on each user’s previous history. If your hashtag is popular, unique, or consistent with the types of content viewers like to see, there’s a good chance you’ll be featured.
Originally, hashtags were unique to X (formerly known as Twitter) but are now everywhere, making it important that every digital marketer involved with any cross-channel or social media campaign knows how it all works.
Understanding the Role of Hashtags in Modern Social Media Marketing
We all know the basics – a hashtag can be one or several words that accompany the text snippet or body of your post, preceded by, you guessed it, the hashtag symbol: #.
There are some simple formatting rules since you can’t use spaces, icons, emojis, and most punctuation, but other than that, you can create your own hashtag, use obvious descriptors of the service, product, or brand you’re promoting, or tap into higher-volume search terms.
While we’ve previously looked at the increasing preference, especially within younger demographics, for using social media as a search tool rather than a traditional search engine, the key takeaway is that a hashtag can be as generic or offbeat as you wish. Still, it is a marketing technique rather than a throwaway feature.
You’ll find a few examples throughout this guide showing how top brands utilize hashtags and where they’ve worked successfully. However, it’s also essential never to rely on hashtags to boost the visibility of low-quality content or to flood your feed with huge paragraphs of hashtags—this often looks messy and disorganized.
Top Tips for Strategic Use of Hashtags
The best approach may depend a little on the type of content you’re publishing, the brand you work for or are representing, and the customer groups you’re trying to reach, but as a few golden rules:
- Stick to a maximum of roughly three hashtags per post – using a few carefully selected hashtags based on data research is better than overdoing them.
- Try to keep each individual hashtag concise; if it contains more than four or five words, the string will become difficult to read.
- Mix up well-used and unique hashtags, remembering that high-volume hashtags, just like search terms, will be hard to compete for but also have the highest potential number of active searches.
- Avoid very generic terms; if you’re posting a campaign for a new energy drink, for example, using #energydrink isn’t going to make your post too distinctive or memorable.
The sweet spot is to opt for a medium-volume hashtag where you have a solid chance of having your content shown to your desired viewer without being buried under the volume of millions of similar posts.
Let’s start with a quick example of a perfectly executed ad and show how the three simple hashtags work nicely.
Finding the Best Hashtags for Your Social Media Advertising
As you know, if you’ve ever worked in SEO, hashtags work like keywords, and there is a delicate line between high-traction hashtags that add humor or interest and hashtags that are so widely used it’s impossible to get noticed.
A good starting point is to look at what other competitors and influencers relevant to your sector, industry, or niche are using – and take that as inspiration rather than duplicating the exact same hashtags everybody else is already posting.
There are also numerous online resources you can choose from, some free, some paid-for:
- BuzzSumo is a tool that helps marketers find influencers, including those that a large proportion of their viewers or target audience follows. You can look for the hashtags they use and identify trends or posts with great engagement metrics.
- HashtagForLikes provides marketers with instant hashtags generated based on current statistics, viewer trends, and viral posts across TikTok and Instagram.
- AI Hashtag Generator is an AI-based hashtag generation tool that can suggest hashtags based on your parameters.
Of course, you can also conduct in-depth research across your chosen platforms and access alternative social listening channels, apps, plug-ins, and tools to keep pace with emerging trends or to help you come up with newly created hashtags that you can put a spin on.
Below is an example of how a Facebook search might work looking for a generic hashtag – and how this can throw up ideas for similar or related searches and hashtags used in other posts.
Using Hashtags in X Digital Marketing Campaigns
Best practice when using X for advertising, promotions, and social reach campaigns is to keep to the two or three hashtags we’ve mentioned. You can also use interesting or funny hashtags as a form of audience engagement, incentivizing followers to retweet your posts with their own spin.
Here’s an example of an Adidas tweet celebrating athletes competing in the Boston Marathon – and how they’ve created a shareable, engaging campaign without cluttering the post or directly advertising their brand.
Creating Facebook Ad Campaigns With Relevant Hashtags
Most digital marketers use hashtags to improve organic reach across Facebook. While hashtags aren’t used as extensively on this platform, they’re more prevalent now that Meta allows cross-sharing, with most users automatically replicating an Instagram post to the channel.
As with most platforms, try not to overdo the hashtags since they can take up space within the text caption box and distract viewers. You can run a quick search on Facebook as we showed earlier to find hashtags that correspond to your core messaging.
It’s also wise to track performance and see which hashtags do well—you can create signature hashtags you use on every post, which can help group your content together when a viewer enters a similar or identical search term.
Here’s a quick example of a sponsored (paid-for) post and how one unique hashtag has generated excellent engagement alongside humorous phrasing and graphics.
Creating High-Performance Hashtags for Instagram
Hashtags are widely used throughout Instagram, and the formatting of each post means you have a bit more space to use more hashtags if you wish. The max is 30, although we’d always reiterate that quality, relevant hashtags used sparingly work much better than a huge list of hashtags.
Marketers can mix and match hashtags, incorporating trending terms, hashtags relevant to the content, brand, or niche, and even location hashtags if you’re promoting a specific event, product launch, or service.
Hashtags in Pinterest Marketing
Pinterest is very much a visual and design-centric platform, but it has become an incredibly valuable way for brands, especially those in beauty, interior design, and fashion sectors, to reach larger audiences who can ‘pin’ posts they love to their own mood boards and collections.
Hashtags aren’t as important on this channel, nor are they always directly clickable, BUT they matter because you can help publicize content to a wider audience by ensuring you add context to clarify what your post is about and who might like to see it.
This screen grab shows how Pinterest search terms work – and why using a similar hashtag will help your content rank higher. You can see that the search field returns both popular phrases and suggested accounts to visit.
Incorporating Hashtags Into TikTok Promotions
TikTok relies on hashtags to categorize content. Because hashtags are clickable, you can help your content gain traction and appear on more ‘for you’ pages, extending your reach and showcasing your videos and graphics to more users.
Since TikTok is a visual and video-focused channel, captions are limited, although you can add up to 4,000 characters. The best approach is to select relevant hashtags that make sense alongside your content and keep captions short and snappy, letting your content and the context of your hashtags do the rest.
Note that trending hashtags change incredibly quickly, so it’s worth heading to the Discover page to keep pace with the latest trends rather than reusing dated hashtags that are dropping down the most searched-for terms.
LinkedIn Promotions or Ads and Hashtags
Finally, LinkedIn is more of a professional and networking channel, but it still uses hashtags and search terms to help display posts to an engaged audience – and can be a powerful tool for digital marketers looking to build a community of brand followers.
When you create a post, you’ll usually want to add up to three hashtags. Unlike other platforms, you need to manually add these to your post rather than typing them into the body text.
Omitting hashtags can limit your potential readership, restricting it only to your existing connections. Adding a few well-selected hashtags can help you reach as many as three times the number of viewers.
Here’s a quick example of the types of content you’ll see if you type ‘digitalmarketing’ into the search field.
Putting Your Knowledge of Social Media Hashtags Into Practice
Once you’ve mastered the art of social media hashtags, you’ll be able to engage in more granular market research, trend analytics, and hashtag generation—but for now, we hope this guide helps clarify how it all works and gives you a great starting point.
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