Everyone will tell you one of the best ways to see growth in social media marketing for your business is to use hashtags. What they don’t mention is that utilizing the right hashtags for your business is essential to attracting your core audience (and not just randos browsing the internet). But how do you go about finding the most effective hashtags for your business? In this post I’ll show you how to find hashtags that convert into growth, along with some of my favorite hashtag research tools and a few tips.
Let’s get back to basics.
Hashtags aren’t one size fits all! Finding the RIGHT hashtags for your business is essential for attracting an audience that will convert into engagement, traffic and sales later on.
The main thing to remember about hashtags is that they are search functions. Thinking of them as such may help you decipher whether a word is worth hashtagging or not. Consider how you conduct searches for information you want to find, and how your audience may also be searching for info.
Finding Hashtags That Work for Your Business
- Your Industry’s Keywords: Find relevant hashtags by looking at keywords used within your industry. Try hashtagging them within captions and messaging.
- Find Hashtags Within Your Content: The simplest way to figure out what words will get your in front of the right audience is to look at the content itself. What are you discussing? Hashtag the subject, or words related to the main subject.
- Check Out the Competition: There’s nothing wrong with taking a peek to gather inspiration. Take a look at how some of the “top players” in your industry are using hashtags, and try the hashtags they use with your own accounts.
- Look at Customer Conversations: If there are people talking about your brand or similar, take a look at how they use hashtags to discuss the product or service. Learning how consumers speak to each other will give you great insight into exactly how to reach them.
- Good Old Research: Nothing will beat a good research session. Write down your industry, your product or subject of the content you will be pointing to. Then hit the social media networks or use tools to conduct research into how popular your keywords may be as hashtags, and what other related hashtags come up.
Some of My Favorite Hashtag Research Tools:
- Ritetag: Ritetag lists all the trending and popular Twitter hashtags. You can plug in your own keywords to review performance and related hashtags along with a slew of other statistics like hashtag retweets and views.
- Tagboard: Sometimes I like plugging a keyword into Tagboard and being able to look at one grid of content being shared with the specific hashtag. Additionally the layout makes it visually easier to pick up new, related hashtags from user captions.
- Hashtags.org: This one is a classic, and another simple, visual way to do a little research on new hashtags you may be missing out on.
- Tagsforlikes.com: This tool is specific to Instagram, but will also break down the most popular hashtags by different subjects.
After you’ve done all your research, compile and organize your business hashtags. Test different hashtags in your messaging and analyze the performance of each tweet, Instagram post or Facebook post in which you used the hashtags. Analyzing will be the only way to know what’s working (unless you see a serious spike). Then compare, and use the ones that are working for you!
A few things to keep in mind:
- Keep hashtags relevant to your brand, business, product or service. Using irrelevant hashtags just because they’re popular or trending will bring you a useless audience.
- Mind the network rules of engagement – pay attention to how the network uses hashtags (if at all). Generally, no more than 2 hashtags on Twitter, up to 30 on an Instagram post and about 11 for Facebook posts.
- Update your hashtags! Hashtag popularity will change with the wind. Make sure to audit and update your hashtag lists periodically
I hope this post gets you track to choosing the right hashtags for your business, lead to social media growth and attract the right audience/potential customers. Have a question? Drop it in a comment below and I’ll be happy to answer.
P.S. Learn more about hashtags: How to Use Hashtags Effectively for Social Media Growth
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