Hashtags weren’t just invented to make tweets and publications on social networks looking more fun and attractive. You may have noticed the huge number of hashtags abused by the brands and people in their tweets and posts without any apparent reason or relevancy.
Hashtags, when used the right way, will act as the most effective way to engage in current conversation and trends, while acting as a perfect tool to follow up your marketing campaigns on social networks.
When it comes to hashtag tracking, many companies struggle to do that correctly and effectively. So let’s discuss why do you need to use hashtags in first place? What hashtag should you use? How can you track hashtag usage? And where can you trace their performance?
Hashtags Usage
Hashtags were originally used in unmoderated, ad hoc discussion forums; then spread out to social media platforms starting with Twitter. any combination of characters led by a hash symbol is a hashtag, and any hashtag, if promoted by enough individuals, can “trend” and attract more individual users to same discussion.
On Twitter, when a hashtag becomes extremely popular, it will appear in the “Trending Topics” area of a user’s homepage. The trending topics can be organized by geographic area or by all of Twitter. Hashtags are neither registered nor controlled by any one user or group of users.
How to create an effective hashtag
The first thing you will have to determine is “who will be using your hashtag?” In order to reach the best possible result; the hashtag must be unique, distinctive and used for the first time. This will greatly help you to track and monitor it in more easier way.
Selecting the right hashtag may look simpler than really is, thus, try to follow those 3 tips to get the best possible results out of your marketing campaign using the hashtag:
-
Perform Hashtags search
If you are struggling coming up with good hashtags’ ideas to use it in your campaign, do a quick search on the social network you’ll work on them. Start searching using the keywords associated with your marketing campaign, and begin to write down relevant ideas and results. This research will help you fueling your creativity and will help you with some good ideas you can start with. It would be better to rely on some tools such as Lucidya to save time and get more effective results.
-
Use small, simple hashtags
Long hashtags that contain a large number of words or letters are usually difficult to remember, allowing the audience to commit misspellings while typing your hashtag. This will affect the hashtag performance negatively. Not to neglect that, Twitter already enforces a limit of 140 characters on your tweets which you have to use them in the perfect way.
Hashtags are strongly recommended to be less than 16 characters.
-
Make it unique
Unique hashtags will be easier to track, monitor and respond. You don’t want to use a word like #love as a hashtag for your holiday gifts campaign. This will end with filtering thousands of irrelevant social media posts / tweets.
Instead, you can use unique hashtags that really represent you and your marketing campaign. You also don’t want to use more than one hashtag for the same reason.
