The aim of hashtagging is to improve the visibility of your company’s brand or products when certain keywords that pertain to your brand are being searched for.
So what exactly is a hashtag?
A hashtag is a curation component that filters all the posts about a particular subject into one single feed across sites like Instagram, Pinterest, Facebook, Twitter and Google+.
The importance of hashtags across all major social channels cannot be overemphasized, multi-million dollar companies make use of this phenomenon and it works well for small businesses too.
The Benefits
- Hashtags improve brand awareness. They help in creating engaging and well-structured conversations between a business and their target audience.
- Networking and building business relationships. They connect your brand with your most ideal consumers.
- Brand Loyalty. The more your hashtags are used, the more people want to know about your products and services.
Just create it and they will come
Hashtags are easy to create. Come up with a hashtag that’s associated with your business, a company event, or even a product or service.
Make it unique, stay consistent and watch your brand depth expand.
Another popular strategy is to utilize generic hashtags that are commonly used on various social media sites that are relevant to your business’s branding objectives.
The list below outlines 2015’s top generic hashtags across the US.
Top Hashtags of 2015
- #love 546,312,756 posts
- #instagood 252,226,047 posts
- #me 238,166,943 posts
- #follow 208,003,100 posts
- #tbt 205,718,608 posts
- #cute 203,174,797 posts
- #like 193,577,034 posts
- #photooftheday 189,818,506 posts
- #followme 183,736,791 posts
- #tagsforlikes 171,593,674 posts
- #happy 165,534,554 posts
- #beautiful 163,122,231 posts
- #girl 162,838,871 posts
- #picoftheday 140,266,148 posts
- #instadaily 126,075,675 posts
- #fun 124,017,892 posts
- #smile 120,121,394 posts
- #igers 118,454,910 posts
- #selfie 117,998,320 posts
- #friends 117,809,423 posts
Creating synergy around your hashtags on Instagram and other social platforms shows your company or brand is committed to growing and meeting the needs of their clients and if used correctly, they can be a digital marketing gold mine.
Just ask our favorite New Orleans beignet shop, Café Du Monde. With over 100,000 #CafeDuMonde posts, it was the number one geo-tagged restaurant in the country in 2014 and held that momentum into 2015 as well, being the top geo-tagged restaurant in Louisiana.
Even one of the most hashtagged celebrity’s in the world, Kim Kardashian, got a little piece of the Café Du Monde beignet action. She stopped in last August and gave the 154 yr old establishment a few strategic geo-tagged posts – not one, not two, but three times over two days. Coincidental or strategic? You can decide. Either way, 75,000 plus likes and thousands of multi-platform social media shares later, I’d say it was a pretty “sweet” series of posts.
Krista Pouncy-Dyson
Managing Principal
Performance First Digital
www.performancefirstdigital.com
twitter.com/PerfFirstDig
