The Power of the Hashtag - #TuesdayThoughts

Hashtags are one of the things that are a necessity when using social media as a marketing tool. They are crucial to SEO and the visibility of the content you are producing and can be the key to building up brand awareness across various platforms. By using hashtags, you are making your content and platforms more visible to a much wider, global audience. People and businesses will search through hashtags daily to discover new accounts and topics that relate to them, and by using them you are drawing in potential business you would never have discovered otherwise. However, be careful to not overdo it. Make sure that the hashtags you are using are relevant to your content so that you do not come across as spammy and maintain your professional status.

When you start using hashtags, there are many ways you can go about it. Firstly, you can use the daily hashtags to draw in attention from a wide audience. This is what we at Big Red Digital like to use for our blog posts. You are currently reading one of our #TuesdayThoughts articles, and we have a wide variety across many topics that we produce throughout the week. By doing so, you can showcase the expertise of your business to prospective clients and push traffic into your website. Social media funnels potential business into your website, where the aim is to convert them to a CTA (call-to-action). Using the hashtags will increase this flow of traffic, with the idea to increase your inbound enquiries.

Another technique to gain notoriety through using hashtags is to utilise current events that relate to your industry. For example, if there is a story in the news about the oil & gas industry and you are in that market, make sure that you post relevant and key content to your social media platforms with the associated hashtag. Therefore, when people are searching for that story they will come across your page and be compelled to hear more about your professional insight.

In order to cross-promote onto different social media platforms some businesses make up their own hashtag. This will normally just be the name of their organisation but is a creative way to synchronise all of your social media posts so that when someone visiting your profile clicks onto your personalised hashtag they will be able to view all of your past posts that are related to your business. This also allows past clients to use your hashtag if they were to post about the product or service that you have provided and is an effective way to showcase some of your past successes.

Using relevant hashtags efficiently can ensure that your companies content stays on top of Google rankings and not get lost within your competitors. To discuss other ways to improve your SEO contact me here – advice is free!

By Amy Carpenter