Using hashtags on Twitter is imperative for any business looking to grow their audience and promote their products and services. Not only are hashtags a great way to boost your social media engagement with new users, but they also help categorize specific content making your post more discoverable to users. Hashtags are basically a search engine for social media content. The hashtags selected don’t always have to be 100% related to your business, but they must be relevant to your intended audience. Don’t be afraid to be creative with your ad or post, but you must be careful using hashtags, some can lead to miscommunication or reach the wrong audience. A company using hashtags effectively can build a high audience base. A high audience base increases the potential for converting users into followers, and potential buyers.
When deciding which hashtags will be most effective you have to ask the following questions.
- Who is my intended audience?
- Where is my business located geographically?
- Where is my intended audience located geographically?
- What are you wanting the user to do?
- What KPI’s (key performance indicators) am I using to measure my awareness?
Answering these questions will give you a larger perspective of what attracts new followers to your brand.
There are a plethora of online social media tools that can assist in tracking and finding trending hashtags, but first and foremost, is Twitter itself. On the Twitter page or mobile app you can view the 20 most trending tags or phrases in real-time along with a readout of how many times they were tweeted. By default this readout is personalized to your account by pages you follow, and your location, which is great for a local business trying to stay current with the community.
You might be saying,”My audience isn’t local.” No worries just adjust your settings next to the list titled, “Trends for you” on the mobile app or website to the area closest to your audience. To adjust your location use the setting controls pictured above. This tool gives you a pulse on what’s trending in certain areas and allows better communication of your message to that region. You can also use the advanced search application to look for, or to avoid, certain keywords keeping your results more relevant.
RiteTag
Need to make sure your hashtags are valid in the Twitter world? Look no further than the easy-to-use application, RiteTag, an amazing service that measures the strength of your hashtags. RiteTag will also provide you with a list of trending hashtags related to your intended audience. Another powerful tool, RiteTag allows you to run a query on any hashtag and see, not only the history of its use, but also every tweet, image, like and retweet. Most importantly RiteTag displays who the main influencers are. Influencers are pages that advocate for certain hashtags and have a large following. An industry related influencer is a great place to look for other trending hashtags that you can incorporate into your post or to engage with online.
RiteTag offers a one week trial to test their products and can be purchased for $12 to $150 a month based on your needs. There are many other services like RiteTag, but it is definitely one of the best and most feasible sources out there.
Hashtagify.me
Hashtagify.me is the biggest free search engine, with data about several millions of hashtags it makes it easy to find the hashtags popularity, similar hashtags and languages. Free is a funny word isn’t it? For enhanced features, consider the Pro feature that ranges anywhere from $19 to $250 a month based on your needs. The Pro version allows multiple users, trackers that analyze up to 200,000 datapoints, 30 top influencers, and full access of the ranking of the most popular hashtags. Not only will Hashtagify.me help boost your tweets, but it also stores data for 24 months. That’s two years of data helping you measure the effectiveness of your hashtags and how to decide which ones to keep in your arsenal. Also, for those struggling to stay relevant, the pro feature automatically suggests related hashtags so you don’t have to rack your brain on a daily basis.
Hashtags are key to targeting your intended audience make sure to post frequently and use trending hashtags that are relevant to your business, and your audience. Look for related hashtags from the top influencers of your industry to keep your tags trending. All of the resources provided will assist you in finding a way to engage with your followers and encourage them to interact (retweet, comment or like) with your post. Interaction leads to growth of your followers, and an increased chance of converting them to buyers.