How to Find the Best Hashtags for Your Industry
Hashtags are one of the most misunderstood tools in social media marketing. Most business owners don’t realize that finding the best hashtags for your industry will help people who aren’t currently following you, to find you.
In an ideal situation, people will find your posts and they’ll see that you offer enough value to them that they’ll decide to follow you. And just like that, you’re growing your social media presence online.
Hashtags are a great way to bring new people in. Not only will they boost your luck with social media’s challenging algorithms, but you also know that the people who find you through your hashtags have at least some interest in what you do. If they’re searching for or following these hashtags, then they care about what’s going on in your industry.
So, what are the best ways for you to use hashtags? And how do you figure out which ones are the best or will bring you the greatest results? Be sure to try out these proven methods:
Vary your hashtags
The first thing you should make sure you’re always doing is varying your hashtags. Hashtag success can be a little unpredictable. The hashtag that works for one business might not work for another. A hashtag that’s trending on Monday might be overused or outdated by Friday. Varying your hashtags will give you the most variety to analyze. You also avoid the risk of being flagged as spam.
Use the right number
It matters how many hashtags you use. Because of character restrictions, you probably won’t be able to use more than two or three for any given tweet on Twitter. That’s okay — you don’t need more than that as long as you’re using popular ones.
On Instagram, on the other hand, you can use up to 30 hashtags — and you should try to use as many as you can. Although it might be tempting to use hashtags that are highly popular, going for some less used hashtags could be to your benefit because your post has a better chance of standing out.
LinkedIn and Facebook allow unlimited hashtags, but you shouldn’t use more than 10 to 15. Hashtags aren’t a primary way of finding content on these platforms, so excessive hashtag use can make your post look amateurish.
Look to see what others are using
Check out what hashtags your competitors are using. Check out what hashtags your followers are using. You can even use things like the explore tab on your social media platform of choice to see what hashtags are popular with brands that are similar to yours. These will give insight into what hashtags most people are looking for. But be careful — if you’re going with this method, you know that other brands are doing the same thing. You could be late to the party and end up using a hashtag that is overused. Overused hashtags means that brands will have a difficult time standing out and followers will feel bored or spammed.
Use predicted hashtags
When you hit the hashtag symbol in your post and start to type something, you’ll likely see a few predicted options. Pay attention to what these predictions are — some of them might actually be relevant to your post, but you’ve never thought of or seen that hashtag before; however, the platform is predicting or suggesting these tags because they are popular. This is an easy way to discover new hashtags as they are growing.
Brainstorm
Yes, this is an old-school method, but it works — ask your team to come up with clever ideas for hashtags that might be relevant. Think in terms of word play, rhymes, and abbreviations. How can you vary hashtags that you consistently use to make them a little more niche to your brand? You might add your city or state to the hashtag so you attract the attention of social media users who are looking for a local voice in your industry.
And this leads nicely to the final method you can try…
Create your own unique hashtag
Plenty of brands have been creating and promoting their own unique hashtag. They use these tags on all of their own posts and encourage customers to do the same. This is a great way to have all content related to your brand (whether it’s generated by you or generated by a follower) located in the same place on any social media platform. Just make sure you check the hashtag on social media before promoting it — you don’t want to assume something is unique only to find out that there are hundreds of thousands of people already using it.