Hashtags Do’s and Don’ts
Hashtags are a great way to label your social media posts and help get them seen by your target audience. They serve a wide range of purposes in your marketing strategy, whether you’re inputting keywords that describe your business or tagging a popular trend or event. However, there are plenty of wrong ways to use them so consider this your ultimate #guide to hashtags!
DON’T:
Use Tags with Over 1M Posts
It may be a tough choice to exclude the top hashtags that are relevant to your content, but it is likely that hashtags with over one million posts won’t get you seen anyways, especially if you’re a small business. Think of it like searching for a needle in a haystack. Try narrowing down to more niche tags between 50K to 500K posts.
Exceed Hashtag Limits
Believe it or not, there is such a thing as too many hashtags. While some social media sites are free of limits, Instagram only allows up to 30 on a post and 10 on your Story. If you’re struggling to stay under, consider taking out ones that may be more broad or unrelated to your post.
Spam Irrelevant Hashtags
We can’t stress this enough: Avoid including a bunch of random hashtags in hopes that it will get you more reach! Spoiler alert; it won’t. Your marketing strategy should be to find those who WANT to see your content, so focus instead on thinking like your target audience.
DO:
Know the Context
It can often be tempting to hop on a trending tag or include them for extra visibility, but this can lead you into some controversy if you’re not careful. Learn from the companies DiGiorno and Entenmann’s, who mistakenly included hashtags that were being used to discuss sensitive subjects. Always make sure to check the context of trending hashtags before posting to ensure that it is an appropriate topic to use for promotion!
Read Your Hashtags Out Loud
We’ve all seen it happen before, always double check how your unique hashtag could be misinterpreted or misread when there are no spaces or capital letters. You don’t want to be trending for all the wrong reasons!
Spellcheck
This may seem obvious, but always make sure your hashtags are spelled correctly. Not only will spelling errors make you seem less professional, but your post will not make it into the intended hashtag!
BONUS: Use Our Hashtag Strategy
It also helps to create a hashtag strategy by including different hashtags based on the content pillars you post about regularly. That way, you can simply copy and paste your go-to hashtags for every post. If you’re stuck on which hashtags to use, we suggest following this formula:
3-5 post specific
3-5 location based (if applicable)
5-10 keywords
