Social media is a great way to promote your business, but it requires a plan and some direction to be effective. You could be putting some great messages out there, but they are getting lost if people cannot find those messages when they search for your company. Ever since Facebook and every other social media platform caught up with Twitter and introduced hashtags, digital marketing experts have been using those hashtags to point potential customers in the right direction.
The hashtag, symbolized with a #, used to be more commonly known as the pound sign. Social media uses the symbol to group together words that are used as tags for certain types of posts. For example, if the ABC Company put #ABCCompany in every social media post, then all of their posts would turn up in a search for the company on any social media platform. The hashtag is a very powerful way to introduce a new potential customer to all of your marketing information at once.
Hashtags are used to create a mass conversation or group together posts that have a similar theme. If you put your company name into a hashtag and then end all of your social media posts with it, then whenever someone searches for your company on a social media platform they will see every post that has been tagged with a hashtag. This creates a tremendous return on all of your online marketing efforts and considerably boosts your rating on search engines.
You can put more than one hashtag on your posts, and the second hashtag can be used to help mark a conversation or set of promotional posts. For example, if ABC Company wanted to introduce its new Red Widget with a set of social media posts, then they would use the hashtags #ABCCompany and #ABCRedWidget in all posts pertaining to the Red Widget. Not only will this increase the number of times the Red Widget shows up in search results, it will draw more people into the conversation.
Let’s say ABC Company posted a promotional video as part of the Red Widget campaign that got a lot of attention. Because there were hashtags on the video, it becomes easier for people to find and it is also easier to share. This is just one of the ways that marketing materials eventually go viral. When a part of your digital marketing campaign goes viral, it can bring a huge return on your marketing investment and push your company into a higher marketing level.
It takes some experimenting to really learn how to use hashtags, which is why it is best to leave them to professional digital marketing experts. When hashtags are used properly, they can shine a spotlight on your company and your online marketing efforts. Over time, a collection of strong hashtags can significantly enhance the effectiveness of future marketing campaigns.
