In an ironic or unironic way, we all have said “hashtag selfie” at least once. Although hashtags are taken lightly by people using social media casually, they are much more than just #IDidIt and #Selfie. The importance of hashtag research is unknown to many individuals and business owners as well.

So, what do you think hashtags are for?

They are certainly not only for changing the text color and getting a focus on some word. They are a great way to increase the reach and engagement of your content on almost all the major social media platforms.

What’s a Hashtag Anyway?

Putting # symbol with any word will turn it into a hashtag. They are more labels used to help people find what they’re looking for on social media platforms.

For instance, you are looking for beauty tips, posted by people on Instagram, Twitter, or any other social media platform. All you have to do is just type #beautytips in the search bar. You will stumble across millions of photos and videos from people across the world. 

You can follow hashtags on many platforms as well and see the posts in your feed as well.

Are Hashtags Really Helpful?

Just a few well-researched hashtags can change your digital marketing game for once and all.

Using hashtags might not be very useful if you use social media platforms to post your pictures or share cute photos of your pets. But, if you are using social media platforms to build an image of yourself or your business, then you need to harness the power of hashtags.

Let’s dive deep into the importance of hashtag research and how it can help you!

The Magic of Hashtags, How to Master it & Why:

If I have to call something a shortcut for creating successful posts, I’d nominate hashtags. They are simple, easy to use, and effective quickly and works in long term as well if you do thorough research on them.

We will go through some key points of the importance of hashtag research. So hold tight because they may blow your mind!

1.    Find the Competitors & Beat them

If you’re starting fresh on social media, you should know that there are a lot of competitors already, you have to know them before you try to stop them.

Hashtags are the easiest way to find competitors in the industry. You can discover competitors globally as well as locally through hashtags. Let’s suppose you’re a copywriter and you want to gain some traction on Instagram and expand your reach as well.

First, you will just type “Copywriter” in the search bar. The search results will show you the top copywriters and top hashtags. When you tap the hashtag, you will see the top and recent posts sections.

As your primary goal is to figure out competitors, you have to analyze the top posts and see what kind of posts they’re creating and what other hashtags they’re using. Analyze top posts by different profiles and find the similar or same hashtags in them.

You then have to use those hashtags carefully and use them in your favor. On the other hand, you can also analyze what kind of content is being liked and shared. Identify what their contact doesn’t have and look at what people are asking for in the comments as well.

You got it all, thanks to simple hashtag research!

2.    Give the Hashtag Tools a Shot too!

I told you all about how you can search hashtags on Instagram and use them to turn the tide in your favor. If you are willing to go the extra mile in your hashtag research, then you should check out the hashtag tools as well.  Here are a few of the best hashtag tools:

• Hashtracking
• Keyhole
• Agorapulse
• All-hashtag
• Seekmetrics
• Tagsfinder

These tools have been tested and tried for providing help with hashtag research. There are both free and paid services and you can choose the one that seems best to you. All of them are very easy to use.

It is recommended to try and test out the free versions of these tools to get a hang of their features first. For professional uses, you should get a premium subscription to get the best out of these tools.

3.    Convey Your Content to the Users

Whether you’re writing a blog for a Chinese B2B Platform or a caption for your Instagram post, it needs to have a message that you want to convey to the target users. 

Not everyone spends time reading every single post on their feed. People go through specific hashtags to find the information or type of content they are looking for. You have to find out what people are searching for and what are the common questions and if you can answer them.

Specific hashtags narrow down the search of a user. You can localize or globalize your content using location specific hashtags in your posts as well. On the other hand, aside from hashtags, adding the location tag in your post as well can help you narrow down and pinpoint the target audience as well.

4.    Eliminating Negative Hashtags

When you thoroughly research your hashtags, you will come across the negative hashtags as well.

There might be some hashtags that would be similar to your industry but would refer to something totally different. For example, you’re creating content around the beauty/skincare/cosmetic industry. #BeautyofNature is one of the top tags that would come up.

Some tools offer the feature to blacklist some words and tags to avoid hashtag crowding and increasing the reach to the targeted audience.

5.    How Many Hashtags Should You Use?

A very common newbie mistake many people make while adding hashtags to their posts is that they either add too many or too few hashtags.

The optimal and recommended amount of hashtags in a post is 15 plus. Although you can add up to 30 hashtags in a post, it doesn’t mean that you HAVE to add 30 hashtags to every post. 30 is the last digit that you must not cross.

You have to use at least 15 hashtags revolving around your content, industry, and location. If you cover all three aspects, your reach will be wide as you want it to be.

6.    Where Can You Put the Hashtags?

People who don’t know much about the importance of hashtag research often think that hashtags can only be used in captions to increase the reach.

It can be safely said that social media platforms have changed over time and there are more ways you can use hashtags.

On Instagram, you can use hashtags:

• In the captions, separating them from the caption text by adding some spaces.
• If you don’t want to add the hashtags in the post caption, you can also add them in the comments. Just simply comment on the hashtags.
• You can add a few hashtags to your Instagram stories as well. The stories show on the story-hashtag feed as well on the hashtag page.

Although many people add hashtags to their bios profile, which doesn’t help at all. It just acts as a link to the hashtag’s page.

• On Facebook, you can use hashtags:
• On post captions.
• On stories.

Hashtags on Facebook comment don’t work like the way they work on Instagram.

On LinkedIn, you can use hashtags:

• In your posts.
• In your LinkedIn articles, also known as pulse.
• In your comments.

Hashtags in LinkedIn Profiles and Company pages are not highlighted and aren’t searchable either.

7.    Same Hashtags for All Platforms

Even if the platforms are different, the users and hashtags are almost the same. It is obvious that every platform has different user demographics, but your content’s target is the same everywhere.

You can use the same hashtags for Twitter, Instagram, Facebook, Pinterest and LinkedIn. The only thing you should be careful about is when you share content on Twitter. As Twitter has character limits, you might need to skim down the hashtags a little.

8.    The Simpler the Effective

Many people believe in the idea of complexity. They make very simple things complicated with the use of extra-long and uncommon words.

First of all, you have to strive to make your content as simple as possible. That is because everyone wants something that they can scan and understand at a first glance without having to search for the meaning of words.

Many people would simply just skip through anything that they wouldn’t understand. Simple as that, before finalizing the hashtags for your post, make sure that all the hashtags are easy to remember and understand.

Many people follow simple hashtags like #Beauty #Fashion #Gaming #Music. You have to use such simple hashtags in your posts to make sure that your target audience understands it and relates to it in one way or another.

Bottom Line – Don’t Ignore Hashtags

It has been clear that hashtags play a huge part in digital marketing. If you ignore hashtags, you are saying no to a lot of traffic and engagement on your content.

Now it’s all up to you, whether you want the content to have skyrocketing reach & engagements or if you want your content to be seen by a fraction of your followers only.

After knowing the importance of hashtag research, you should start working on making your hashtags game stronger than before!

Author Bio

Alice Sophia is passionate about digital marketing and often writes on related topics to help the newbies in digital marketing. She works for a well-known Chinese B2B platform and loves to practice the ukulele in her free time. 

#hashtag