How To Use Hashtags
In order to get the most out of your social media it’s important to maximize the visibility of your online social profiles. An easy way to optimize your profile is by creating and using hashtags.
A hashtag is a sign (#) followed by a word or phrase, used on social media apps, in order to identify and categorize content on a specific topic.
In order to make the most of your profile, let’s go over some of the basics when it comes to using hashtags correctly and effectively!
The Basics
Hashtags start with the # symbol, but won’t work if you use spaces, symbols, punctuation, or emojis within them.
Hash-tagged content won’t be seen if your account is private. Make sure your social media profiles are public to maximize your visibility!
Create hashtags that are relevant and specific to the content you’re posting. This will make your content easy to find by the right people looking for the information you can help with.
Keep your hashtags concise and easy to remember. When hashtags are too long or complicated, they become hard to find and less likely to be viewed or used by other social users.
Always capitalize the first letter of each word within your hashtag. This improves readability and helps to make your hashtag more reader-friendly and organized. Example: #MortgageAgent #RealEstateAgent
How Can Hashtags Help?
When used properly, hashtags are a great way to grow your social following, visibility, engagement, and impact online. As someone with a growing business, hashtags are a great way to lead traffic and potential clients to your page and services. Let’s take an in-depth look at how hashtags can be used to help your business and online social profile!
Boost Engagement
When you incorporate hashtags into your social media presence, this means you’re taking an active approach to conversations happening on that specific platform. This ultimately increases the visibility of your posts, making them a part of that conversation!
Let’s say you use a hashtag to promote your mortgage services called #ratehikes. This is an important, relevant topic that many people want to discuss and learn more about when it comes to homeownership. Using this popular topic as a hashtag can lead to greater engagement on your post with greater likes, shares, comments, and even new followers.
Build Brand Awareness
An important part of growing your business is creating and building brand awareness. Branded hashtags are the perfect tool to help you promote your business while driving important conversations. A branded hashtag can be any personalised hashtag you create that is specific to your business. This could be as simple as turning your company name or a branded tagline into a hashtag. Branded hashtags are a great tool to differentiate your business from competitors and build a phrase or word that can easily be associated with your business.
Attract Your Target Audience
The same way you can use hashtags to build brand awareness for your business, you’ll also be able to use hashtags to strategically attract your target audience and potential customers for your business. In order to attract your desired audience, you’ll have to put yourself in their shoes and think about the topics they would be interested in online. These topics could be related to your industry or topics that are relevant to your customers’ daily lives and interests.
For example, you may want to create a range of industry and customer-specific topics to turn into hashtags. As a mortgage agent, putting yourself in the shoes of a first-time home buyer, you may include hashtags like #AffordableHomes #RentalProperties #RentalProblems #HomeBuyingTips #NewHome #FirstTimeHomeBuyers #HomeDecor #HomeDIY.
These hashtags are not only relevant to the mortgage industry but are topics that would interest someone in the position of buying their first home.
Add Context
Hashtags are a great way to add context to the subject matter of your posts, without writing a repetitive caption or taking away from a character limit on platforms like Twitter. Sometimes a longer caption isn’t as effective, impactful, or attention-grabbing to social users. Hashtags can help you contextualize what you’re talking about, without overdoing it. Sometimes less is simply more!
For example, you may have created a post about the services you offer as a mortgage agent. Instead of going into great detail about the services you offer in your caption, you can direct your audience to your website for a full rundown and use your hashtags to list all of your services. This may look something like: #refinance, #1stMortgage, #2cndMortgage, etc…
Next Steps to Take…
Now that you understand the basics and value in using hashtags on your social accounts, you’ll want to put these tools to use on your account with quality content.
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