How to Use Hashtags?

Hashtags are a great way to present your business to a wider audience and create engagement with current and potential customers. You should always use relevant hashtags in your social media posts to connect potential customers with your business.  Facebook, X (formerly Twitter), Instagram, and other social media accounts hashtags allow you to highlight your business and help clients to find your product online.

What Is a Hashtag?

A hashtag is a keyword or phrase (with no spaces) preceded by a hash symbol (#), that is used with social media posts to connect you with potentially interested audiences. For example, people interested in specific content can conduct keyword or hashtag searches on social media platforms and find relevant post.

Hashtags are widely used on X, Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn, and TikTok. If you are using social media to market your brand, then you should use hashtags. Hashtags can help boost your brand’s social media reach and engagement.

Ideally, your posts should include a mix of popular, relevant, and branded hashtags.

Why Use Hashtags?

Social media uses sophisticated algorithms, so it is often difficult to remember and find organically the social feeds of interest. Today, users are presented with so many uninteresting or irrelevant posts, so without hashtags, it could be difficult to find the posts you need.

Hashtags group together related posts to help people find relevant content.

Hashtags are used for a variety of reasons:

• Hashtags are a great way to promote your products or services and to connect you with your customers. Once a hashtag is published, it becomes a clickable and searchable link.
• Hashtags can increase engagement with your followers. Using hashtags in your posts means that you are interested in conversation with your followers. Hashtags make your posts visible in that conversation.
• Hashtags can build brand awareness. Branded hashtags can be an efficient way to promote your business or brand and your brand becomes more noticed. You should use your company or product name in a hashtag.
• Hashtags can add additional context to your posts. Hashtags make it easier for your audience to find, relate to, and engage with your content.
• Hashtags are used to disclose sponsored partnerships. When working with brands, influencers must disclose that some content of their post is sponsored. It’s the law in the USA. In 2019, the Federal Trade Commission released advertising disclosure guidelines for online influencers. Failure to comply with the law can result in high fines for both the influencer and the brand.
• Hashtags can help you to connect with like-minded people. If you have some interest, you want to share with, or are looking for a solution to a problem- hashtags can help you.
• People also use hashtags to raise awareness. Hashtags are used to present and spread social, political, ecological, and other problems or concerns.

How to Create a Hashtag?

First, start your hashtag with a # symbol and spell a word or phrase as a hashtag without spaces, for example, #howtousehashtags. It can include numbers but not symbols or punctuation. The hashtag can be placed anywhere on your social media post or comment- at the beginning, middle, or end of a post. Hashtags are indexed by social media algorithms independently on the place of insertion.

Follow Postus’ recommendation on the creation of hashtags:

• First, search on Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, and other social media accounts if your hashtag is not already in use.
• Decide the purpose of your hashtag. Do you want to use your hashtag for marketing your company, promoting your personal brand, announcing an event, or sharing a message with your friends? Should your hashtag be inspiring, funny, or represent your brand?
• Make sure your accounts are public. If your account is private, only your current followers will see your content, so the wider public will not have access to your posts.
• Always start with # and don’t use spaces, punctuation, or symbols. Avoid using special characters like !, @, &, $, etc.
• Use short hashtags. Don’t add too many words together- the best hashtags should be short, between 1-3 words, and easy to remember. Keep your hashtag focused on your goal. Use abbreviations and shorten words where you can.
• Include your brand name, so the hashtag will help to direct users to your product. You can either use your whole brand name or focus on your products and use a shortened version of the product, like in Coca-Cola’s hashtag #ShareaCoke.
• Use numbers to make your hashtag stand out. It is a good idea to include the year in your hashtag. Using a year in the hashtag makes it more noticeable. However, it becomes harder to reuse. Consider it before deciding on whether to include a number or not.
• Use relevant and specific hashtags. If you use too obscure or too general hashtags, social media users simply will not find them. For example, if you are a small company, specializing in a narrow product, the hashtag #fashion would be too general, so it’s better to use a more specific one.
• Check that your hashtag doesn’t have a double meaning. Many words and phrases can have multiple meanings which can confuse your message. For example, the hashtag #friends could refer to your friends or the popular TV show Friends.
• Check in the news for separate words in your hashtag. Make sure that any names or phrases you are considering using have not been found in recent news or major events, otherwise, your message will be lost between unrelated news messages.
• Don’t use too many hashtags. If your post has too many hashtags, it could look spammy.

How to Promote a Hashtag?

After you created your hashtag- promote it:

• Ask your friends and followers to use your hashtag. Ask friends and family members to use it in their personal posts. Write a blog post including the hashtag and link it to your social media posts.
• Promote your hashtag on multiple social media platforms. Use your hashtags on X, Facebook, and Instagram platforms. Publish multiple posts on each account to keep your hashtag at the top of the newsfeed.
• Advertise your hashtag in person. For example, if you have a physical store, display your hashtag on a sign in the window.
• Track the usage of your hashtag with an analytics tool. Search for your hashtag on different social media sites and respond to posts that use your hashtag to encourage even more engagement. Use analytics tools to track the performance and success of your hashtag.

How to Find the Best Hashtags for Your Posts?

You need to find hashtags that are specific to your product, brand, industry, and your audience. Once you find your hashtags- use them many times and on different social media platforms, people should recognize them.

Consider Postus’ recommendation on how to find the best hashtags:

Monitor social media influencers and your competitors

First, know your competitors and any relevant influencers within your product’s niche. Then, search, which hashtags they use most often and how many hashtags they use in each of their posts. This could help you how your competitors are engaging with your common target audience and what hashtags are the most popular.

Find out trending hashtags on social media

There is software on the internet that could help you to find the best hashtags. For example, you could use RiteTag to generate trending hashtags. Paste your post text to RiteTag app to get hashtag suggestions based on your content, and the app will suggest hashtags for you. Select multiple hashtags and later compare their performance. Save popular hashtags in Hashtag Sets to reuse them again in the future.

If you use social media management tools for generating and publishing posts, they could also automatically generate hashtags for you. Postus can help you to generate, schedule, and publish content as well as to generate relevant hashtags.

Use a social media listening tool

Social media listening tools let find the most popular hashtags for each social network you are using. From the list of the most popular hashtags, you can choose your hashtags.

Find related hashtags

Once you found good hashtags that are working for you, find related hashtags. Make a little more specific hashtag than the well-performing hashtags you’re already using, so these could help you connect with a more targeted audience.

On LinkedIn, you can find more hashtag recommendations after clicking on a particular hashtag. You can discover new hashtags and manage your hashtags by pressing the three dots sign at the top right of the web page.

Analyze your hashtag performance

Analyze which posts have been most popular, then look if they have common hashtags. If you find that your most popular posts always contain some common hashtags- include them in your future posts as well.

Frequently Asked Questions