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Tips for creating a great hashtag
Posted by Stuart Walters on February 03, 2019
What is a hashtag?
A hashtag is a word or phrase preceded by the hashtag sign (#) to identify a particular topic on social media. They are hyperlinked making it easy for users to explore a hashtag. Businesses use hashtags for various reasons:
There are various benefits to using and creating hashtags for your business for example:
Obviously, you can jump on the back of a trending hashtag. This is particularly useful for optimizing your discovery. Hashtags are often time sensitive and will trend because of a particular day or event. For example, every year on International Women’s Day there is a trending hashtag. If your business posts anything related to this day on their feed, be sure to include the trending hashtag to optimize your exposure.
Alternatively, hashtags such as #WednesdayWisdom and #FridayFeeling will trend regularly and are good to jump on the back of for your content.
How can you make a good hashtag?
Creating a new hashtag is no easy feat. Super brands like Nike will have a team of copywriters to come up with their new, exciting hashtags.
Examples of Nike hashtags
So here’s some tips for creating your own good hashtag that people will actually use so that you can reap all of its benefits.
A good hashtag is unique and creative
Sure, you can use somebody else’s hashtag, but if you’re going to create your own it must be unique! If you create anything too similar to somebody else’s it will get confused. Think about the way that people use hashtags, to summarize of a topic, join a discussion etc. they need to recognise the hashtag so that they can do this. If it isn’t unique this may be a problem.
It goes almost without staying but it needs to be creative in order to be unique. Don’t go for the first thing that comes into your head but have a little brainstorm and think about it carefully before you execute it.
If you want to use a hashtag for an event, make sure to plan ahead and think of your hashtag before the event begins. You can then advertise the event using the hashtag and then use it throughout the day on your business’s accounts. Plus, you can then encourage other people on the day to use your hashtag through other marketing materials. Perhaps you can ask people to share their thoughts or photos of the events using the hashtag so that you can see the responses.
It is important to be clear
For similar reasons the hashtag should be clear. For example…
People won’t use a hashtag if it’s not easy to use. It needs to explain clearly what it is summarizing.
Less is more
Whilst being clear, it also shouldn’t be too long. Your hashtag shouldn’t be anywhere near the length of a sentence, it should be a few words maximum. Especially for Twitter when you are only allowed 280 characters per tweet. Also, it is meant to summarize and categorise the post, not encompass the entire thing, so it is important to keep the hashtag short. Think of any acronym’s you may be able to use and cut out any stop words.
Keep it consistent with your branding
A good hashtag will promote the topic you are wishing to promote but it will also promote your brand, so keep it consistent with your branding and marketing strategies. It needs to be unique, but unique to you. If you are using social media frequently (which you should be!) it might be something that you want to include in your digital marketing strategy. This is something we can help with.
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