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Shout & Co. Hashtag Strategy: let's chat and get yours spruced up

Do you have a social media hashtag strategy in place for your business?  

if you haven't given much thought to it previously, perhaps it's time to start.  hashtags can be hugely beneficial to helping potential new followers find you: the hashtag term will be what users input into the search bar to follow a topic that interests them (and thus find your related pin or post).  so if you're not categorising your posts effectively, users simply won't find you in amongst the millions of other posts that are being published.  in short, hashtags help boost your post's visibility on social media.

research has shown that tweets with hashtags get 2 times more engagement than those without. instagram posts with between 9 and 11 hashtags perform better than posts without them or hashtag counts that fall outside of this range.  the only media platform where hashtags don't work as well is Facebook - so you might as well not even bother.

here are some tips on improving your hashtag strategy to help new followers find you:

- group your hashtags at the end of the post: on instagram in particular, leave the hashtags off the original post.  Instead, immediately after publishing your post, put your hashtags into the comment section: this will help to boost your post and engagement in accordance with instagram's algorithm criteria.

- use between 9 and 11 hashtags.  even though you have 30 hashtags at your disposal, this range has proven to get the best engagement.  

- do some research on key hashtag terms being used in your industry.  you can do this simply by going into the search bar on the platform you are posting to to gauge the popularity of certain terms.  it's also important to think like your ideal customer: if you were them, what search terms would you be using?  thinking like them will help you nail down the best hashtags to use.  

- find hashtags that have between 10k and 10m posts.  

- use a combination of hashtags: very niche (i.e. ones that you are able to corner for you and your business), mainstream (between 10k and 10m posts) and popular (10m+ : use sparingly amd steer clear of hashtags that are *too* popular as your post could get buried almost immediately by other posts published using that term.  

- only use hashtags relevant to that post

- always use a hashtag when posting a story on instagram 

needing a bit of help with your hashtag strategy?  let's chat - get in touch and Shout & Co. can help you develop one