How to create a hashtag for your brand

With so many advertisements, billboards and commercials in our faces, it’s tough to find one without a hashtag. In the late ‘90s, phone numbers were slowly replaced by AOL keywords and websites. Eventually, social media handles made their way into ads.

Now brands create a hashtag for consumers to find more information about a product or service. Whether it’s a branded term, phrase or call to action, hashtags increase social media engagement and brand awareness.

When you create a hashtag, you give users a new way to get in touch with your business on social. Or users simply engage in the conversation happening around that hashtag. This is just another way for people to engage, discuss and connect with brands on social media.

You just can’t discount the power of a good hashtag for your business.

Why Create a Hashtag?

Creating a hashtag for your brand has a lot of benefits. Essentially, hashtags give you additional strength toward customer engagement. Not only that, but hashtags tend to be great marketing resources.

Certain hashtags work like call-to-action phrases where users interact with brands. By using them, you give consumers another method to remember you.

https://twitter.com/Tostitos/status/986385171099324416

For example, Tostitos used the hashtag #GetTogetherAlready to encourage get-togethers with a trusty snack–chips and salsa. The brand gives you a source of conversation about what it means to do with “friends + chips,” with a little clever wordplay. But Tostitos also hopes you’ll use this hashtag the next time you think of a get-together.

When to Use Hashtags

People use hashtags for several different things. For example, some of the most optimal hashtag uses include:

Promotions

Events

Contests

Product Launches

Career Opportunities

Cross-Channel Discussions

Targeting

All of these examples require some sort of conversation. For company-specific hashtags, they should entice discussion and ultimately engagement.

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How to Create Your Own Hashtag

Create a hashtag by developing your end goals first because having a hashtag tied to a metric is essential to effective marketing. Do this before you start coming up with clever phrases or keywords for your brand.

Like we mentioned earlier, hashtags have the chance to increase traffic, clicks and engagement. All these things should factor into your social media ROI strategy. So before you start, consider the hashtag goals best aligned with your brand goals, such as:

Increase brand conversations with your company

Be more visible on a specific social network

Increase total link clicks

Measure total reach

Increase mentions

These goals should tie in with the aims of your overall social media marketing strategy. Planning goals first is always the best step toward seeing results.

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Determine Your Social Network

Once you have your goals down, it’s time to determine the social network you want to use. Depending on your goals, your network could change in importance. If you’re creating a branded hashtag that generally supports your company, you’ll probably want to use it on multiple social networks.

However, here are a few things to consider for each network’s approach to hashtags:

Twitter Hashtags

Hashtags started on Twitter. So you know this is the perfect space to use hashtags for discovery, conversations and hopping on major trends. If you’re using a popular keyword in your hashtag, you have the chance to get more eyes on your Tweet.

Tweets with hashtags have advantages over Instagram hashtags because you can post a link in each Tweet. While Instagram allows links in the bio, every Tweet could have a hashtag and a link. This makes it less confusing to get customers from social media to your marketing pages.

Also, Twitter’s search features make it simple for branded hashtags. These hashtags are unique to a brand but are easily discoverable from other Tweets. This is why so many brands do social media campaigns on Twitter.

Instagram Hashtags

While Twitter supports images and videos, users tend to engage more with visual content on Instagram. This platform is perfect for contests, promotions and other heavily visual content.

Instagram hashtags are frequently searched, so your chance of discovery is high. However, Instagram hashtags aren’t very cross-network promotional. While you can link to your Facebook or Twitter in your bio, typically you want to save that space for your promotional or marketing site.

A major benefit of Instagram hashtags is you can use up to 30 per post. Brevity is essential with hashtags–but you can hide hashtags on Instagram. This lets you avoid over-tagging posts and boring your current followers.

Facebook Hashtags

Facebook hashtags are unique. While they’re not nearly as popular as Instagram or Twitter, hashtags are still effective here. With Twitter, you see every Tweet using a specific hashtag. But on Facebook, hashtags are categorised by popularity and date used. However, you can filter by who posted the hashtag, tagged location and date posted.

Unlike Instagram hashtags, it’s best to use as few as possible. A Surepayroll infographic showed Facebook posts with 1-2 hashtags receive 177 more interactions on average per post compared to those with 3-5 hashtags.

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Final Conclusion

It's time to get out there and showcase, engage, and build traction with your hashtags. It's important to realize the power a hashtag can bring to your brand. And if you use it correctly and follow the steps in the article, you have a good chance of seeing a real impact on your social strategy.