How to Use a Hashtag for Your Business

Hashtags are a big part of social media today. It’s a way of sharing your thoughts with the world on recent events such as #grammys or the republican presidential #debates. Hashtags are used for categorizing content on social media, and widely used by businesses on Twitter and Instagram. Using a hashtag in your post is a great way to get your voice heard by others in relation to the topic you’re talking about. These four tips will help you properly use a hashtag when posting on social media for your company.

Use the Same Hashtag as Others

When you’re talking about a common theme, you want to use the same hashtag as other people so you can be a part of the conversation. Often the shortest and simplest version of something is the common hashtag. For example, fans of the show Orange is the New Black will often use #OITNB versus spelling it out fully when on Twitter since it takes up less of the 140 characters. Events and conferences may create and promote their own hashtags for you to use, which usually include a reference to the date or year of the event in the hashtag. The Digital Marketing for Business Conference that several of our employees spoke at this year promoted #DMFB15 as theirs. Tools such as https://hashtagify.me and www.hashtags.org can help you in determining the most common phrase to use.

Limit the Amount of Hashtags

#Reading a #post that is #full of #hashtags can be #tedious. You should limit your hashtags to one or two that are relevant about what you’re talking about. A tweet needs to be more about what you’re trying to say then your hashtags. On Instagram, having a high quality picture with a relevant description is key, and the hashtags can supplement that. If you’re posting about going to Starbucks for a coffee run, then using #Starbucks and #coffee are sufficient. People are more likely to be engaging around those words than the title of your specific drink #skinnyvanillalatte.

Hashtag Trends

Some hashtags have become commonplace for people to use and search, so it’s good to take advantage of them for your company’s posts. There’s hashtags for every day of the week that you can use such as #selfiesunday (posting selfies of yourself/employees on Sunday), #motivationmonday (motivational quotes/images on Monday), #tbt (throwback Thursday), #caturday (posting about cats on Saturday). To find currently trending topics, look on the left hand side of your twitter page. It’ll show hashtags or phrases that are really popular that people are talking about right at that time. Be sure if you’ll talk about these trending topics you do so quickly – talking about something a week later may make your company seem behind on the times.

Creating your own Hashtag

If you’d like to create a hashtag for your own brand or event, you should start with a search to see if anyone else is using the phrase you’d like to use. If someone else is has used the phrasing you’d like in the past, that may be okay. Look at the context of it and as long as it’s not derogatory, and if it has been more than a year since anyone used it, it should be fine. No one “owns” a hashtag so you don’t have to get permission from the people using it in the past to start using it. Your new hashtag should be relevant and unique to your company or event. You want to try to keep it short and easy to remember. We created #TDSPumpkin for our annual Pumpkin Carving Party. If we had chosen #PumpkinCarvingParty, a lot of other people would also be using that same hashtag to talk about other events versus ours. So we used TDS on the beginning to represent TheeDigital, and shortened it to Pumpkin.

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