The cycle continues. New year. New practices. And more hashtags!
Instagram hashtags give you the ability to to expose your brands to large and targeted audiences. How can hashtags help your business? Well, that will depend on how you’re using the hashtag and how popular your post is.
When you attach one (or 30) to your post, it is categorized with content that is also using those hashtags. Popular hashtags like #love, #instagood, and #fashion can get you new followers, but they probably aren’t the “right” ones. That’s where brand hashtags come into play. This strategy is important for a business that wants to expose the message to people looking for a specific thing.
How brands hashtags work.
Brand hashtags are tags that are specific and unique to your business or campaign. It’s common for a brand hashtag to be as simple as the company name, tagline, or line of products. You can also create one for an Instagram contest you are running.
Daniel Wellington does a great job of using their brand hashtag (#DanielWellington) along with their daily (#DWPickoftheDay) tag, for a campaign to encourage users to share high-quality photos that include their line of watches and hashtag, of course.
Using brand hashtags is also a great way to organize and choose winners for contests since they are all placed on one hashtag page. For other marketing campaigns, creating hashtags to showcase your company culture, products, and services and is a great way to drive engagement.
Helpful tips and practices
- Keep your brand hashtags relatively short and easy to remember
- Don’t use too many hashtags! Using too many or irrelevant hashtags can make you look desperate for engagement. You do have a max of 30 hashtags, but keep it down to around 10-12, as long as they are consistent and relevant to your brand.
- If you want a cleaner look to your post caption, you can “hide” your hashtags by including them in your comment section underneath a few dots and line breaks.
We hope 2017 is as great for social media as last year was. We can’t wait to share the newest trends, strategies, and tools that can help your business!
Are you using brand hashtags? Let us know what your experience was using them in marketing campaigns and contests in the comments below!
