It is a well-established concept that in 2016, social media is essential to your business health. You and your business should be actively tweeting, posting on Facebook, hanging out in Google+, and posting photos on Instagram, amongst others. Getting the word out about your business and connecting with your customers in 140 characters shows that you are on top of the trends and pay attention to your customers and their wants and needs.
The Mechanics
Hashtags are commonplace on Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, (and now becoming commonplace on LinkedIn even) to name a few. The mechanics are quite simple. You may remember the hashtag by its former name, the pound sign. The pound sign quickly became a way to create tags and categories that can link similar subject posts together for search purposes and advertising. You simply place a hashtag (or #) in front of a word or phrase and you’re good to go! For example, if we wanted to share a post about our upcoming workshop on Social Media, we might add the following hashtags at the end of our post: #socialmedia #facebook #skolworkshops. Once you add a # to a word it becomes a linked term, enabling people to click the term to find all other related posts. You can also search for hashtags with the search bar on each social platform to find all posts related to that hashtag. It is extremely simple and allows people to feel united.
The Benefits for Business
On social media new posts pop up every second of the day, and it can be quite difficult to follow along. However, using hashtags in your posts and tweets can help. Adding a hashtag will increase the discoverability of your business on social media and often times lead to more likes, followers or interaction. People actively use hashtags to search for topics and find related content or profiles, like yours!
You can also use hashtags in your advertising campaigns. Hashtags attract attention giving your target audience an interactive way to follow your campaign specifically without looking at your page. They can see new photos, ideas, and stories just through the use of the hashtag. Many companies utilize this type of campaign to entice people to “join the conversation” through photos and ideas. People become engaged and begin to take an interest in the product because of the campaign.
Hashtags are also a great way for people to follow contests or news campaigns related to fun and exciting things, like the first day of school photos or showing pride for a sports team. In addition, the business promoting the campaign can now easily collect data regarding the people following them, such as age, gender, and location, allowing them to determine their target demographic for other types of advertising campaigns.
Finally, hashtags keep people invested in your company, brand, and products. People feel as though they now have a vested interest and want to know other ways to get involved. Most businesses work on the mentality that people need to feel as though they are part of something to want to spend their money. Hashtags on social media enable this type of feeling, increasing the flow of commerce.
To learn more about creating an effective social media hashtag campaign for your business, contact the experts at Skol Marketing at (612) 787-7565. #Skol!
