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Social media is an important vehicle to promote any event. But as they get busier and noisier. This can make attracting attention to your posts much more difficult.
So for an event to be noticed more and engage with the right audience, you need to be using #Hashtags. This guide will give you all the tools you need to use hashtags more effectively for your next Event.
What exactly is a hashtag?
Hashtags (#) are used by social media platforms to categorise content. Usually a word or key phrase that relates to the content or topic of your social media post.
Used but most social media platforms, it helps people find your content when searching for a term or particular hashtag. It can also be effective in getting in front of people that are following popular hashtags.
How to choose a Hashtag?
How to use a Hashtag
There are tactical ways to use hashtags, you need to use specific ones that target the audience that will be interested. Being too broad and it will be lost within the clutter of thousands of posts. Using a hashtag that’s too targeted and it won’t be seen by anyone.
Spending a few minutes to research the hashtags you want to use. Check their relevancy and using the hashtagify.me website, Research what is popular and trending. Does the hashtag add value to the post? Will it be searched for? Can it be used to stimulate interaction or debate? All these will all help your post have a wider reach on social media.
Having a quick peek at your competitor's hashtags is a great way to research what they are using and if it is working. If they are repeatedly using hashtags, This can give you some great ideas for your own hashtags that research tools might not pick up on.
Check in on influencers in your market. If you’re not sure who they are, the influencer tools on hashtagify will give you a good starting point.
Finally, you can start your own hashtag. The key to this is to be consistent, using it in messages and posts. Maybe even promoting it on your website. Using your events brand or the personality of the event is a great way to create your very own Hashtag. But be aware of your competitors using it for their own event marketing.
Hashtag Etiquette
There are certain rules to using hashtags, the obvious ones are, put a hashtag sign (#) in front of every word. Don’t use special characters (% and &) these won’t be accepted, and don’t use punctuation or spaces (#dontusespaces) they will simply show as normal words and the effect will be negligible.
Make sure your hashtags are short and sweet, the readability of it is important. The object of the hashtag is to target people searching for particular keywords. So don’t #use #them #for #every #word. This ends up targeting each individual word, making it far too broad.
Twitter says it is good practice to use 2–3 hashtags per post, they don’t put a limit on how many you can use. Instagram doesn’t have a good practice number but does set a limit of 30 tags per post.
Always proofread your hashtags, punctuation without spaces is a minefield. Much Like the embarrassment of Susan Boyle’s 2012 album launch hashtag. #Susanalbumparty was used to promote it. Quite innocuous at first glance, but reading it again and the sentence changes completely.
Social media
Hashtags aren’t an exact science and you have to manage each individual platform differently.
Twitter the birthplace of the social media hashtag. Tweets with hashtags, get twice the amount of engagement as ones without.
They are used to search for conversations or trending news. Research carried out by TrackMaven showed that tweets with just one hashtag had the most engagement. This reducing slightly with two, but any more and the results drop sharply.
They also found that 18 characters were the best performing hashtag, but really this is a false economy. Using hashtags that are relevant and specific to your post, is a much better consideration.
Similar to Twitter, hashtags are a large focal point for people searching and engaging with Instagram posts. But with more of an emphasis on discovering people and content. Users are able to follow hashtags, with updates being placed on their timeline, whenever anyone uses one.
The TrackMaven research found that posts with 9–12 hashtags had the best engagement. Utilising a larger number of hashtags to increase your reach is good practice, but be careful to not look too desperate for attention.
A quick look around facebook and you won’t see too many hashtags being used. This is because of their many privacy settings. Peoples profiles are guarded behind many different levels of privacy.
Unlike Twitter, where everything is open, or Instagram, where they are either private or open. Facebook has many different nuances within their settings, making it far more complicated to see which hashtags are being shared.
Using hashtags won’t harm what you are posting, but it won’t benefit you either.
Much like facebook. Linkedin uses hashtags, but it isn’t the main driver to promote content. Use hashtags sparingly and only when you are definitely going to benefit from using it.
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