The importance and application that hashtags have gained in social media marketing was unbelievable until a few years ago. Today, hashtags play an essential role in all social media marketing strategies, and even several websites have been launched to analyze hashtags in social media. If the large number of hashtags that you see on Instagram pages or the hashtags that are sent in the comment section of the post is strange to you, or you want to get to know the nature, how it works and how to use hashtags and hashtag marketing.
Hashtag is known and used everywhere with the sign # and until 2007, it had many uses on the Internet until a product design expert named Chris Messina in Silicon Valley, America, introduced the hashtag to Twitter and officially changed it to He used social networks as part of the title.
After the official start of using hashtags on Twitter, hashtags became a part of digital marketing. The commercial use of hashtags found a strong place in social network marketing and became widespread among people. Brands use hashtags to reach their target audience faster and more purposefully, and this means they do marketing with the help of hashtags.
For example, a user who searches for #health on Instagram is concerned about body health and is looking for educational materials or products in this field. A brand that produces organic and dietary products can publish an educational or promotional post on this topic with the health hashtag to easily introduce its brand, attract followers and make sales.
The interesting thing is that hashtag marketing in social networks is completely free and does not require a separate budget. More access to the target audience with hashtags requires research and planning, and attracting that audience requires content marketing and advertising techniques.
We can use any common hashtag or even create our own new and exclusive hashtag and with this method, create a path for us to reach the audience and for the audience to reach us. But hashtags are a double-edged sword, as it is free and functional for us, it is also the same for our competitors, and we may lose the hashtag marketing competition to our competitors or get a lower share of engagement and sales from our industry hashtags. As you can see in the image below, the three posts displayed for the kitchen appliances hashtag are from three different pages and stores, and all three pages are exposed to the audience, but the target audience may enter your competitor's page.
If used correctly, hashtags can be a useful marketing tool. But if hashtags are not properly researched, you should remember that anyone can use that hashtag and cause damage to your brand. If inappropriate hashtags are chosen to be seen more, it will have a negative impact on your branding and may cause you to lose customers. It will also hurt your marketing efforts when disgruntled customers use hashtags associated with your brand to hurt you or just to express their displeasure.
Use few hashtags.
Hashtags are for you to be seen more, but how you are seen is also important. If you use too many hashtags in one post, your post will look bad and may even be considered a spam post on Instagram (or other social networks).
Ask yourself: is it worth it?
Do you want to be seen at any cost? Ask yourself, are you willing to use any irrelevant and inappropriate hashtag for a business brand for more followers and visibility? Choose hashtags that give a good impression of your brand in the eyes of customers.
Choose a hashtag based on your needs
Hashtags are usually divided into the following categories:
Brand and campaign hashtags
Content hashtags
Trending and seasonal hashtags
Brand and campaign hashtags
These hashtags are created from the name of the brand (for example, #Caprilla_Academy) or are created according to the campaigns of a brand (for example, the #Snap_Charm campaign). These hashtags are used in marketing and promoting the brand or its products.
Content hashtags
These hashtags are more common and widely used and are used by all businesses and ordinary users. These hashtags are related to the topic of each post. For example, it can be the name of a city (#Tehran), the name of a place (eg #Tajrish) or a specific topic (eg #Cooking).
Trending and seasonal hashtags
These hashtags become popular and ubiquitous at some point in time and are usually short-lived. For example, during Nowruz, many people and brands use hashtags like Nowruz, and after a few days, this hashtag is abandoned, or when a positive or negative event occurs, such as an earthquake in a city, a hashtag related to it becomes popular. Using trend hashtags is important for businesses and increases the potential of brand visibility in social networks, but it should be kept in mind that some trend hashtags are not suitable for business pages and official brands and should not be used; Such as political-ideological hashtags, hashtags against a person, hashtags with unethical themes or generally hashtags that are not compatible with the ethical and professional principles of the brand.
Which hashtag to use depends on your strategy and goals. You need to know which hashtags bring you to your goals and have more benefits for you and which ones harm your brand and sales.