Hashing Out The Almighty #Hashtag [Infographic]

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Hashtags are a powerful tool on social media, if you use them correctly. Sadly enough though, most people don’t seem to understand the concept of hashtags, and how to make best use of them.

Also Read: Hashtags: How You Should Use them, and How You Shouldn’t

As I was researching hashtags lately, I came across this infographic from SurePayroll that outlines pretty much everything you’d want to know about hashtags. Let’s take a closer look at the infographic and its main areas of interest.

Why Should We Use Hashtags?

Well, because they make it easier for people to find and follow discussions about our brands, events and promotions. The also allow brands to track performance of their promotions, across different social channels. They help increase the engagement of our posts. Brands using hashtags can see up to 50% increase in engagement, whereas individuals 100% in many cases!

On Which Social Networks?

Hashtags were always about Twitter because they started out there, however they have moved onto Facebook, Instagram, Google+ and other platforms. It’s important to remember how we should use them slightly differently on different platforms. On Twitter, we use them to categorise and we use fewer of them, on Instagram we could generally use up to 11 hashtags, whereas on Facebook, many hashtags lower the performance of a post.

Too many hashtags on Facebook leads to fewer interactions!

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What’s Up With Facebook?

Data scraped from over 200,000 brand Facebook posts shows that our posts will get the best engagement with 1-2 hashtags. Engagement drops down significantly with posts using 10 or more hashtags. On Facebook, hashtags should be used to categorise posts, or build communities.

When choosing hashtag for TV or billboard, keep it simple, easy to understand, and memorable!

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Hashtags On Other Media

You can use hashtags on your traditional media as well, to drive offline conversations online and create an online-offline bridge. TV, billboards, signs, posters, etc. Thus, hashtags have to be memorable, clear and easy, so that everyone can understand them. You should avoid abstract concepts and instead go totally on topic. Your brand name is good to be included if you can. Similarly, check that de-capitalised words in your hashtag do not form other sentences or create other meanings.

Make sure to monitor your hashtags and whether they are being used negatively or positively!

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Always Monitor Your Hashtags

Make sure you know where they are being used and for what reason. Is your campaign in danger of being hijacked for something that will ultimately damage your brand? Is it being used by people to spread your message? You have to know. Therefore, you have to always monitor your hashtags.

Have a look at the infographic, for further information