Social media may be teeming with hashtags now but its power cannot be underestimated. Its usefulness can be seen by how information is spread and how it aids online searches. It is for this reason that if you are marketing using social media, you should consider employing hashtags in your marketing strategy.
The hashtag is not entirely fail-proof. However that’s nothing to worry about so long as you follow basic hashtag etiquette and do enough research. Adhering to hashtag tips like keeping it short and testing them also helps to minimise the risk of your hashtag campaign failing. By using them strategically, you’ll be able to make hashtags work for you and your brand.
Why Use Hashtags For Marketing
Hashtags are great for marketing purposes, for instance to inform others of your latest products, events and campaigns. It also helps you gain reach for your brand, increasing exposure and helping people easily find you and your brand. With hashtags, it is also easier to communicate with your audience and the networks within the same industry.
On top of that, you get to monitor who is talking about you by keeping track of your hashtags and even check in on your competitors. Best of all, the data you can gather are real-time and of great value in terms of market research. You can also cross over multiple social media platforms with the same hashtag, and best of all, you can find plenty of tools to help you hashtag more effectively and productively.
Hashtag Tools
Here are some of the hashtag tools you should consider using in your marketing campaign.
Not sure where to start out first? Search Hashtags.org for its extensive list of hashtags that are popular or currently trending. You’ll be able to find out what and which hashtags are already in existence as well as the analytics on when a particular hashtag is being tweeted most within 24 hours. Additionally if you need to know more about how to use hashtags, you can read some of their articles, available on the site.
Hashtags can branch out and hashtagify.me will show you all the relevant and related hashtags to a particular keyword, in a mind-map like manner. When you hover over a related hashtag, you’ll be able to see how popular it is and how it relates to the main hashtag. You can even switch to “Advance Mode” to discover more associations or “Table Mode” if you prefer to view information in a more structured form.
Not sure what to hashtag? RiteTag tells you which hashtag is more likely to be seen and used by others. When you compose a tweet with hastags, it will highlight them in either red, blue or green to indicate how high a chance your tweet has of being discovered. RiteTag will also recommend alternative hashtags that are more likely to be noticed.
Want to keep track of the hashtag for your campaign or event? Hashtracking will be able to do that in real time. Some of the things it will keep track of are tweets, retweets and who is contributing to the conversation. It will also provide graphs and charts as well as in-depth analysis which you can export and share.
Can’t keep up with the many hashtags you are tracking? TweetBinder allows you to create “binders” for a particular hashtag or hashtags. A report will be generated to show the statistics of conversations, tweets, pictures, links and contributors surrounding that hashtag. Extremely useful for keeping track of your various campaigns and events, the data gathered can be used for future marketing references. You can even browse things by binders too.
Most of the tools featured here are mainly for Twitter. TagBoard on the other hand, lets youtrack hashtags from five social media platforms; Twitter, Facebook, Google+, Instagram and Vine. If you are marketing on various platforms, this will come in handy for seeing how your hashtag is doing. You can even create your own tagboard if the hashtag is still available.
