Hashtag Campaign Basics: How to run a hashtag campaign on social media
HASHTAG CAMPAIGN BASICS: HOW TO RUN A HASHTAG CAMPAIGN ON SOCIAL MEDIA
Marketing has long been a business practice that has been in play since the inception or development of business models. No business can exist without a marketing plan or strategy.
It is only logical that you want people to able to know and patronize your goods and services. Think about it for a sec! What is the point of producing or rendering a service that no one knows about or is not willing to pay for?
Good question—the point of going into business or trade is to render some sort of solution and get paid for it. And one of the ways of knowing or identifying someone who is or has become successful is through social proof.
In other words— What is their asset worth? How many employees do they have, what are their annual returns, and how have they been able to influence the community.
Now, fast-forward to the present generation, whereby the media has changed, and the traditional system of conducting marketing campaigns has been upsurged as a result of the internet and many social media platforms.
It has, therefore, become paramount for any person—persons—or even companies and organizations who want to survive in this digital age to stay abreast of the new trends.
That is why we are going to be exploring one of the significant trending techniques out there (HASHTAG)—that for some reason has been misunderstood and misused to a considerable extent, thereby negating the marketing outcome for which it was first intended.
Meaning of Hashtag
This is simply a word or phrase preceded by a hash mark (#) used within a message to identify a keyword, topic of interest, and to facilitate a search for it.
Purpose Of Hashtag
l It’s for people to be able to find content (be it visual or written) on a particular topic of interest or specific niche.
l It can be used to grow a person or companies’ influence over a particular demographic and specific niche content.
l On many occasions, the sole purpose of marketing or putting yourself out there is to eventually make money, which is what hashtag will ultimately help you do, especially if you are within a niche-specific field.
l We live in a world where people can influence or be influenced. And in this case, we are talking about being an influencer and having people who are more or less addicted fans. Now hashtag can help you do this by linking several of your content so that you can have more subscribers and followers.
l A hashtag, when used right, can be used to grow and establish your brand.
l It is one of the easiest and perhaps the fastest way to get discovered and brought to limelight.
l One of the phenomena that go parallel with being an influencer is the ability to create impact—positively or negatively—in the lives of your followers. So in retrospect, hashtag helps you to create impact…..period!
l A hashtag campaign can help you get more views if you are the type that just wants to pass a message across without any monetary motives attached, say like you just want to draw people’s awareness to something happening in a community or region.
l It can be used to rank within your niche, i.e., establish you as an authority within your industry, an event or even on social media platforms like Facebook and Instagram.
l It can be used to bridge content, in simpler terms—it can be used to act as an interface or broker between various materials you have done in the past and current content, which can mainly play to your advantage as it can be used to resuscitate old content that didn’t gain traction but is still very relevant today with just a click of the finger.
Bad Hashtags
Most oftentimes, when something starts trending, everybody just takes it up and turns it into a style or something which might negate the purpose it was supposed to serve.
Excellent examples of these are; #my mom is so cool, #party mode #my baby boo is incredible.
The examples above are technically not good hashtag denotations; in fact, they are terrible for hashtag campaigns. Why are they terrible, you say?
For starters, they are not topics or phrases that one might be interested in; secondly, they are not niche-specific, and thirdly they are more like, funny, sarcastic and mocking phrases, which is not the purpose of a hashtag in the first place.
Good Hashtags
So examples of the right hashtag might show up as something like these; #Aquaponics gardening, #Fake urine, #Green houses & accessories. From these examples, you will notice that they are more niche-specific and better still, they give people a topic that can be centred around a discussion.
Three Tips For Launching Your Hashtag Campaign
Own Your Own Hashtag: You need to start creating several series of hashtag content, not just one or two. You need to have a well laid out plan of how many hashtag content you are going to produce, the quality of the message and in what type/sequence you intend to run the campaign. Whether it is going to be written, verbal or visual.
Observe And Evaluate 15 to 30 Ideal Hashtags In your Niche: the reason you want to identify reasonable hashtag campaigns within or closely related your chosen niche is to know the strength of your competition and evaluate if your proposed hashtag campaign plan can match the game or if it will fizzle out.
Build A Community: You want to go right off the bat and start developing a community of your own. I mean how else are you supposed to have influence if you don’t have a populace of your own. Plus hashtag is specifically built for that.
And the easiest way to do that is to research and think of what people are already searching for on social media platforms and try and integrate that already existent organic traffic into your community.
Where To Place Hashtags
They can be placed on your description.
They can be placed on the title—but try not to put more than one, as it can be very off-putting for a prospective subscriber or follower.
It can basically be put anywhere. Most social media platforms have algorithms that search for it and tags it for any search.
In Conclusion
Don’t use too many hashtags in each of your publication, Youtube for instance, only allows for fifteen within each release, but the best industry practice is, using no more than three hashtags in each edition.
You have to remember that less means more, more so, all these social media platforms are trying as much as possible to get the right and most valuable content to the end-user. If you use too many hashtags, then you are going to be penalized and your content will be disregarded—or—treated as spam.
