How to Use Hashtags to Drive More Engagement

How to Use Hashtags to Drive More Engagement

Hashtags are an excellent tool for increasing the number of views, likes, and shares of content posted on social media platforms to promote a company's brand. The hashtag, which was once known as the symbol (#), is a method for making your material discoverable to an audience that is already interested in it.

Twitter was the first social media platform to widely use hashtags, but since then, other social media platforms, including Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn, Pinterest, and TikTok have also adopted their use. If you can master the hashtag, you will have a powerful tool to engage your audience and enhance your social influence for no expense other than the time to conduct some research and pay attention to trends. This is a powerful approach to engaging your audience and raising your social impact.

How Do Hashtags Get Their Results?

Spell out a phrase to use as a hashtag; for example, #usinghashtags. Do not include any spaces between the words. It can contain numerals, but not symbols or punctuation. Your social media post or remark can include the hashtag at any point — the beginning, the middle, or the conclusion — and doing so makes it possible for the social media network to index what you have put there. People who are not your fans or followers will still be able to locate and read your material if you employ this tactic.

Instagram Hashtag Insights for 2022:

Without hashtags, Instagram just wouldn't be the same. Because this is the platform that gave you #ThrowbackThursday and #InstaGood, they are not going anywhere.

On a global scale, the greater the number of hashtags, the better! It doesn't appear that using as many as possible would hurt post-performance, so feel free to use them - just make sure that the hashtags you use are still relevant to your audience and specialty.

Source: Hubspot Instagram Engagement Report

It should come as no surprise that the most often used hashtags are extremely generic terms like "love" (678,611 occurrences) and "photography" (635,149 occurrences).

That could seem interesting, but considering that millions of posts are published every day using these categories, it will merely lose you in the noise if you do that.

Therefore, make an informed decision, and use one of these top hashtags in only the most interesting of circumstances.

The most engaging and active hashtags are those that are used by a community. Even if there are not too many posts using these hashtags, they have already been looked for and sent about by organizations that wish to connect with others who are interested in obtaining relevant material.

Source: Hubspot Instagram Engagement Report

It was common for the hashtags that received the greatest interaction to be opposed to the most popular and overly generic choices.

On the contrary, the most engaging hashtags were quite specialized, addressing certain groups and areas of interest. A few popular categories? places in the world, popular television shows, and famous people from India and Korea.

High-Engagement Niches:

The most engaging hashtags were controlled by specialized groups and fandoms, with a significant amount of activity coming from Indian media.

Users who speak English are likely already familiar with several of these brands, like Formula 1 (#F1), Honda, and GoPro.

For hashtags, the second-best category is to utilize over 10. Therefore, if you want your material to be noticed by as many people as possible, you shouldn't be scared to slap some tags on it, especially when you're just starting.

A large number of accounts in North America utilized hashtags to publish material that was associated with fitness and tourism.

Instagram was also a popular platform for individuals to use to advertise their small businesses through the use of hashtags such as #ShopLocal, #SmallBusiness, and #ShopSmall.

Basketball, the natural world, and interior design led the list of hashtags that received the most engagement in North America. Many hashtags, such as #NBAPlayoffs, #livelovecanada, and #vintagedecortour, were found to be among the most popular.

To be more specific, certain specialized hobbies, such as bird photography and tiny houses, claimed top levels of involvement.

The trends seen in this region mirror those seen worldwide. Including more than 11 hashtags in your post is still your best strategy in this regard.

The most common was #London. They also found a predominance of hashtags relating to small businesses and arts and crafts in the material that was shared in the United Kingdom and Ireland.

Instagram is continuing to be one of the most accessible avenues for individuals to talk about their interests and hobbies, as well as monetize those.

The Most Engaging Hashtags In the UK And Ireland:

Just as in North America, sports hashtags produced great interaction; but, in this region, it was football tags such as #Euro2020 and #PremierLeague that attracted national interest. Most popular:

It is interesting to see that #ad ranks as the second most popular hashtag. This year, new laws were adopted that require users and all influencers, to declare to their followers whenever they make a sponsored post. It would appear that people in the UK who use Instagram are not put off by sponsored material, as the average number of engagements is around 2000.

Tags relating to nail art and manicures fared very well, and picturesque photographs of Britain, both urban and rural, were also a prominent feature.

How Can We Improve Hashtag Strategy?

Hashtags are extremely useful since they are one of the few ways to attract users who don't follow you to view your material on social media.

Using relevant hashtags in your posts is another way to increase their visibility on the Explore page.

1.     Go For Variety:

There are five primary classes of hashtags, which are as follows:

·        Location (#London, #exploreBC)

·        Branded (#AbsolutVodka, #GotMilk, #NikeByYou)

·        Industry (#MakeupLovers, #cars), "Makeup Lovers," etc.

·        Community (including #arianators and #lakersnation on Twitter)

·        Descriptive (of makeup and house décor, for example)

Choose tags from each of the five categories when you're just getting started for a well-rounded strategy that appeals to a wide variety of demographics and subgroups of individuals.

2.     Get Some #Inspiration:

Examine the activity of other accounts in your field to get a sense of the hashtags that are most commonly used there.

When you have selected one or two pertinent hashtags, the next step is to investigate the most popular posts that already make use of them. Have they selected any additional hashtags that you think would go well with the information you're sharing?

3.     Discover The Optimal Balance of Keyword Usage:

You should search on Instagram for each potential hashtag to see how many other users are already making use of it. If there are too few, your message will hardly be noticed; if there are too many, it will be lost in the clamor.

·        Choose hashtags that fall somewhere in the center, with a total number of postings ranging from 10,000 to 200,000.

·        Instead of attempting to employ many words in a single tag, strive to keep hashtags succinct and easy to remember.

·        Do not make the mistake of trying to cram hashtags into every single post. Instead, utilize them in situations when they will bring value and are likely to spark dialogue and connection with others.

4.     Use the Keyword Generator Offered by Postly:

Postly - a comprehensive social media automation tool- enables users to manage your social media calendar - even for multiple accounts for multiple platforms- like a breeze. In addition, the social media planner distinguishes out because of its fantastic extra features, such as an integrated AI writer, social media automation, bulk uploading, and post-scheduling capabilities. These are just some of the amazing additional features that the social media scheduler offers.

In addition to that, it has a hashtag generator as a component of its AI writer. This will assist you in finding hashtags that are appropriate and interesting for each of your respective contexts.

Through the usage of an AI writer that can be accessed via the platform, it also gives users content ideas that can be used for social media posts, captions, descriptions, and other applications.

You can also automatically use trending hashtags in your nation if you use Twitter. This is useful if you want to build some buzz on Twitter or keep up with current happenings.

A Few Key Techniques For Using Hashtags On Instagram:

1.      Follow the #hashtags as you do with people. This shows that material from any author can show up in your feed so long as it has the hashtag that you're following.

2.      You may also search for hashtags by going to the Explore area of Instagram and clicking on the Tags tab.

3.      Not only can you use hashtags to attract members of your target audience, but you can also use them to gather information about your competitors. If you search for information using hashtags, you will find stuff that applies to your subject matter.

4.      The best strategy is to compile your hashtags and place them after your caption

5.      Alternatively, you could want to consider adding your hashtags as the first comment on the post so that followers can concentrate on the wonderful caption you've written.

6.      You'll get access to Instagram Insights if you upgrade to an Instagram Business account. After that, you'll be able to view the total number of impressions the hashtags brought to your profile.

7.      It is best to not use hashtags in the middle of your captions or comments because doing so has the potential to render your information inaccessible to users who rely on text-to-speech readers.

 

Read more