How to Run a Successful Hashtag Marketing Campaign

Before hashtags become a thing, they were annoying snippets that teenagers used to “tag” their conversations. Today, hashtags have become how people find content on social media. As the amount of content on social media platforms has grown, so has the need for a way to navigate this content. Hashtags do this. But just jumping in on any hashtag is a poor strategy for a business. For instance, there are trending hashtags on Twitter that may not be a good fit for your business. The same thing goes for Instagram. For you to run a successful hashtag marketing campaign, you must first understand why hashtags matter to businesses and how to properly implement a marketing campaign that does not harm or devalue your brand.

Why Hashtags Matter

Besides allowing social media users to navigate social media content, today hashtags matter because they have become a marketing channel of their own. If you visit your Twitter or Instagram trending topics feed, you may see a sponsored hashtag or topic. You may also notice a branded hashtag trending. This is because today, brands add hashtag marketing to the list of marketing channels used when running campaigns. So, a brand may have a TV ad that prompts users to use a certain hashtag, and then augments that promotion on social media by using sponsored hashtags. This matters to you as a business owner because it can be a cheap and effective way to connect with your audience.

Use Evergreen Branded Hashtags

As a brand, the most important hashtags you will ever create are branded hashtags. These are hashtags with your brand name included. An example is #FreeAmazonShipping. Such hashtags are evergreen and are termed so because they will only ever refer to your brand and exclusively point users to your content. Unbranded hashtags can be used by anyone and thus do not have an evergreen component for your brand. When using branded hashtags, be sure to create a context for the hashtag. For instance, if you are running a promotion, or have a new product you are launching, which gives relevance to the hashtag.

Perform Hashtag Research

Whether branded or unbranded, you need to perform hashtag research before launching a campaign. You can do this by using tools like Hashtagify, Sprout Social or Keyhole. All these tools help you find the most popular hashtags in your niche. By generating a list of related terms to your search term, you can construct hashtags that are in use and can direct traffic to your content. Other data you can view using these tools include the search volume for each tag, how many posts are associated with the tag, how much attention your tags can get and so on. Sprout Social goes a step further to help you monitor your hashtag campaigns by showing you how many people used your

tag and how many people your tag reached.

Some Things to Remember Before Going Live

When using hashtags, you need to remember the limitations of each social media platform. For instance, Twitter will limit the number of hashtags you can use because of the tweet character count while Facebook is not designed for multiple hashtags. On the other hand, Instagram seems to favor multiple hashtags with some correlation between posts with many tags and their success. Also, try and use geographic hashtags, especially if your audience is local. As you publish your posts, switch up your hashtags but make sure to use your branded hashtags in all your posts. Lastly, piggyback on trending hashtags whenever possible and appropriate. Creating content optimized for trending hashtags will give you an extra boost.

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