Relevant hashtags monitoring

Hashtags are a big part of social media marketing. They are a great tool to use on most social media platforms. That is why you must use hashtags correctly on each social media platform. Hashtags allow new users to find your posts and profile. They also can be used for branding purposes and to help execute other digital marketing campaigns.

But not all social media platforms are created the same in terms of hashtags. They all have different rules when it comes to hashtags. To get the most out of your hashtags, you want to make sure you follow each platform’s best practices.

What Social Media Platforms Use Hashtags?

Most of the big social media platforms all have hashtags. Let’s take a look at the ones that do, and how to best use hashtags on each platform.

Hashtag Basics

While each platform is unique, there are a few overarching tips, rules, and perks of hashtagging that apply across all platforms:

• Hashtags cannot have any punctuation.
• Incorporate hashtags within your copy. So, instead of writing “I’m drinking a local cold brew coffee #local #coldbrew #coffee” write it like this: “I am drinking a #local #coldbrew #coffee”.
• If you’re looking to be the content leader of a specific hashtag but there are too many players, consider related or niche hashtags. For example, #IceCream has 36.1M posts on Instagram alone, but #CherryIceCream only has around 5K.
• Use a hashtag generator, such as Hashtagify, to research your hashtag. A generator provides important information that will guide you in analyzing and amplifying your hashtag’s success.
• Struggling to create content? Look at your most successful posts for trends. Were there certain hashtags you used in posts that lead to more follower engagement?
• If you’re creating a hashtag for a campaign, make sure you do your research. Make sure your hashtag is:
  • Formatted nicely. It is of the utmost importance that you verify your hashtag doesn’t mean something completely different if capitalized or read a different way.
  • Not already being used by another brand.
  • Easy to remember and spell.

Instagram

Instagram is a top contender with Twitter as the most effective platform for hashtags. Instagram is without a doubt visually-driven but with 1 billion users on the platform, brands need to think past just posting a pretty picture and strategize how to make their voice heard through all the noise. This is where hashtagging comes into play.

• An Instagram post with at least one hashtag averages 12.6% more engagement than posts without a hashtag, but don’t overdo it. Instagram allows up to 30 hashtags, but we found that posts with 5-10 hashtags receive the most engagement.
• While #Instagood #Like4Like and #FollowMe may be in the top 10 most popular Instagram hashtags, don’t include the popular hashtags just for the sake of it. Be strategic in your hashtag choices. Choosing tags relevant to your photo/video and brand is the best way to get discovered by new audiences, which translates to more engagement, followers, and, in turn, customers for your business.
• Business profiles can track a hashtag’s success via Instagram Business Tools.
• Instagram Stories are another way for brands to reach a specific audience using hashtags. Users can include up to ten hashtags in a Story; the user’s Story will then be added to a Featured Story compiled with all other Instagram Stories using that hashtag.
• In late 2017, Instagram introduced to its users the ability to follow hashtags. The order of hashtagged posts is determined via an algorithm, taking into account factors such as popularity (likes/comments), when it was shared, and the strength of the poster’s audience.

Hashtags are popular on Instagram.

Facebook

Facebook’s algorithm is ever-changing, but according to a study of one billion posts, BuzzSumo found that hashtagged Facebook posts actually perform worse than untagged ones. With that said, however, there are a few ways businesses can take advantage of hashtags on Facebook without hindering success.

• Location-specific hashtags are successful across the board. This will not only boost event awareness but will promote user engagement with the event.
• Playing along with certain social trends could be beneficial just for brand awareness. While generic hashtags such as #ThrowbackThursday may not reach an audience exclusively interested in your business, they could pay off in the long run just by getting your brand’s name out there.
• Use a hashtag to create consistency in multi-channel campaigns. A great example of this is Coca-Cola’s #ShareACoke campaign. The hashtag is used across all social platforms, thus bringing forth different types of content, making content consistent for the audience, and building a strong multi-platform social media campaign for the brand.
• If you choose to include a hashtag or two, make sure the hashtags are relevant to the topic you’re sharing.

LinkedIn

While hashtags aren’t as prevalent on this professional networking site and other social platforms, they play an important role in the connections and conversations occurring between professionals.

• Be deliberate. While you’re typing an update for your connections, LinkedIn will suggest relevant hashtags to include in your post. If they seem relevant, use them, but don’t include a hashtag just to include a hashtag.
• Hashtags can be used to target a specific audience for users publishing articles on LinkedIn. The platform asks you to “tell your network what your article is about” before posting where you can include a short intro and relevant hashtags.
• Post a maximum of five hashtags; otherwise, LinkedIn’s algorithm will mark it as spam.
• As with Twitter, Facebook, and Instagram, location-specific hashtags are very successful in targeting a specific event or region.
• LinkedIn offers users the option to follow hashtags. Users can follow their hashtag(s) simply by searching the same way one would search for a job or industry professional.

Hashtagged Facebook posts actually perform worse than untagged ones.

YouTube

Did you know nearly 2 billion people use YouTube every month? It is second to Google as the most visited site in the world. With mind-blowing statistics like this, it seems like a no-brainer to use the video-sharing platform to market your brand/products.

• Use hashtags in titles and descriptions to help viewers find your video when they search for a specific hashtag. Proper use of hashtags can positively affect the video’s search engine optimization (SEO), helping the video rank higher in searches.
• Do not over-tag. YouTube’s algorithm sees videos with too many hashtags as spammy. According to YouTube, “if a video has more than 15 hashtags, all of the hashtags on that video will be ignored.”
• Misleading or irrelevant hashtags violate YouTube’s policies and can result in the removal of your video.

Hashtag Tracking Tools help you discover popular and relevant hashtags. They show the popularity of certain hashtags over time. Unfortunately, most of the best hashtag tracking tools aren’t entirely free, although most do offer some form of free trial. However, there are free tools that can help you, depending on your exact needs. Even Twitter offers a robust hashtag search system to assist you in hashtag discovery. Tracking and finding relevant hashtags can be a challenge without expensive paid tools. However, it is possible with a combination of these free tools, combined with organized systems.

Brand24

Brand24 is primarily a tool to monitor your brand or product on the internet. However, it does include a powerful hashtag tracking search tool. This consists of both hashtag tracking and hashtag analytics. The hashtag tracking allows you to track hashtags across Twitter, Instagram, and other social networks. You can track and analyze contests and campaigns based on hashtags. Brand 24 helps you find top influencers and measure the social media reach. You can use the tool to count the number of tweets/posts for a specific hashtag. This helps you analyze a hashtag’s popularity and performance. You can also use Hashtag Tracking to find your estimated Social Media reach. Brand 24 helps you access the most influential social media profiles using specific hashtags. If you subscribe to Brand 24’s Max plan, you can even track your hashtags in real time.

BuzzSumo

BuzzSumo can be an invaluable tool for discovering “what’s the buzz” on social media. You can use it to analyze what content performs best for any topic or competitor.  You can search for specific hashtags to see how popular they have been across various social channels. If you enter a hashtag in their Content Analyzer Buzzsumo lists the social posts where they most frequently appear.  Indeed, as you start to enter hashtags, Buzzsumo will make hashtag suggestions.  Buzzsumo also offers brand monitoring, where you can track your brand mentions, the impact of your competitors’ content, who is linking to you and monitor your progress over time. You can use this to track the success of your custom hashtags and whether people are using them across the social web.

BrandMentions

As BrandMention’s name indicates, its primary purpose is to he[p you track all of the online mentions of your brand. It claims to “dig every corner of the internet to find all the relevant mentions about anyone or anything.” It considers some of its major uses as competitor spying, brand monitoring, reputation management, and media monitoring. Obviously, a product that claims to monitor the internet for relevant mentions of anything will allow you to track specific hashtags. This can be useful for any hashtag, but particularly for your own custom hashtags. You can use BrandMentions to determine whether your custom hashtag has become popular and has had much use. You can also use BrandMentions to listen to industry trends. It can help you discover some of the best hashtags to use if you wish people to see you as an industry trendsetter. At the same time, you can spy on your competitors and determine which hashtags they have been following and using regularly.

The significance of hashtags for Instagram cannot be stressed more upon. However, before you go on using hashtags on each of your posts, look at the different kinds of hashtags you should ideally go for!

1. Industry-centric hashtags
These hashtags are broad and common terms that are specific to your niche. These hashtags are also relevant for influencer marketing campaigns because they convey what the post is all about. For instance, #FashionDaily for clothing brands, #fitness for sports brands, #wanderlust for travel-related accounts and so on.

2. Branded hashtags
These hashtags directly tell you about the brand. Most brands use their names in the hashtags itself like Hermes.

3. Location hashtags
Location hashtags have always been underestimated by brand managers. However, these tags work best because they act like search refines and are specific. Adding location hashtags to your posts also give them a personal touch. This works well for travel brands! Additionally, you can club your niche hashtag with location to give it a more clear approach. Influencer marketing campaigns can make great use of location hashtags to increase the scope of their post reach.

4. Hashtags for celebrations
Brands bank on special days like Mother’s Day, Halloween, Valentine’s Day, etc. Using these in your hashtags can fetch you amazing results too. This also applies to your celebration-related influencer campaigns . The above-mentioned hashtags should definitely be a part of your influencer marketing campaigns . Apart from the stated, you can also use general hashtags like #mondaymotivation, #beauty, #travel, #fitness etc. depending on your post themes.

By now you have figured out what kind of hashtags will suit your posts. Let’s see how to use hashtags on Instagram for an influencer campaign effectively.

1. Know your audience thoroughly
If you don’t know what your audience is searching for then you may never crack the hashtag strategy for your influencer campaign . Study your audience behaviour with the help of a tool like Unbox Social . This platform helps you get data on audience demographics which helps create relevant content. With the help of insights on audience age, audience location, audience gender split, audience language, and audience interest, you can support your content with better and result-oriented hashtags.

2. Monitor your competitors
Wondering why your competitors are getting a high number of likes and comments on their posts? It’s time to rework on your hashtags and content. You do not have to simply copy-paste the hashtags but you need to analyse where you are lacking and which hashtags they are using. With this, you may also recognise the gaps in your hashtag strategy.

3. See what your niche influencers are up to. 
Influencer marketing campaigns need to be analysed on a regular basis. Be it the post-performance or engagement rate, one needs to analyse each metric closely. Check your post insights and see how many impressions have you received from your hashtags. This will help you improve your hashtag game! Compare posts with the best hashtag impressions and choose your hashtags accordingly.

4. Keep a check on your Instagram analytics
Influencer marketing campaigns need to be analysed on a regular basis. Be it the post-performance or engagement rate, one needs to analyse each metric closely. Check your post insights and see how many impressions have you received from your hashtags. This will help you improve your hashtag game! Compare posts with the best hashtag impressions and choose your hashtags accordingly.

5. Avoid making your posts look spammy
The presentation of your posts matters a lot on Instagram. Filling up your posts with several hashtags will make it look spammy. The best way to do this is to put all the hashtags as the first comment to your post. Moreover, this technique also gives you the necessary space to add text to your post.

6. Avoid hashtags that are negative and controversial
See to it that your influencer campaigns have no hashtags that may be flagged or reported. This can not only ruin your brand image on the platform but can also make you lose followers. Keep the hashtags relevant and in sync with your brand guidelines.

7. Take a lot at the top posts for the hashtags you use
As a brand manager, you need to monitor the top posts trending for the hashtags you use. This will help you understand what is lacking in your content. Additionally, you will also get a glimpse of related hashtags along with the regular ones that you predominantly use. These insights can also help you shape effective influencer marketing campaigns.

We are sure these hashtag practices will give the much-needed push to your influencer marketing campaigns. Before signing off, here are some quick tips to help you with Instagram hashtags.

• Don’t forget to use relevant hashtags on Instagram stories
• Keep the number of hashtags below 10, otherwise, it may look spammy
• Make sure your brand hashtags are easy to understand
• Experiment with emojis along with hashtags
• Don’t just use popular hashtags, also focus on less competitive hashtags