Why Hashtags Are So Important
Think of hashtags as keywords for social search engines. When someone is searching Facebook, Twitter, or Google+ for a specific topic, the social media posts with those keyword-rich hashtags will show up first. To prove how important hashtags are, take a look at the image below provided by HubSpot:
As shown above, you’ll get around 15% more retweets (or shares) just by adding hashtags to your tweets! Pretty sweet, right? What about Facebook, Google+ and LinkedIn? Including hashtags has also been shown to increase the visibility and reach of your social media updates.
That means your content will be in front of new eyeballs daily, which will ultimately attract new viewers to your blog posts and website.
Use Hashtags That Make Sense
While a tag does not need to be a summary of your entire blog post, it does need to make sense. Take, for example, this tweet mentioning our blog post on increasing your engagement with your social media followers.Your hashtags should be applied to keywords that are relevant to your business and target audience. Think of hashtags as helping your audience find topic matches. Alternatively, you might want to use them to start a conversation around a topic.5 ways to get more #socialmedia followers https://t.co/345HPDVXvd #socialmediatips
— getSOS (@getSOS) July 3, 2017
How Many Tags Should You Use?
Notice how we didn’t go overboard with tags in the above tweet? Research suggests using only 1 or 2 hashtags per social media post for the best engagement. Any more than two and your engagement actually drops! Too many hashtags can look spammy to your followers (not to mention ugly and hard to read). Take a look at this image we pulled from Instagram to see what we mean:
This person went from dogs to different colors, to parties, and more. Now, we’re not saying this person didn’t have a colorful sunset beach party with dogs, but their message would have been a lot easier to reach if it contained only a couple of hashtags.
Where To Find Hashtags To Use
Now that you realize just how important it is to use hashtags in your posts, it’s time to implement what you’ve learned. But… what happens if you can’t think of any relevant tags at the moment? Or you want to be sure that people are actually searching for information on the hashtag you are planning to use. Never fear! The BlogWorks team researched some of the best hashtag analytic tools!Sprout Social
Coming up with your own tags can be a lot of work. More often than not, the tags you’re thinking about using have been used previously! Thanks to Sprout Social’s Trends Report, you’ll be able to see what tags have been used in the past, as well as what’s popular now.
Hashtagify
Want to know what tags are trending in your niche this very moment? With Hashtagify, you can search any keyword to find the best tags out there right now. Not only do they give you the best tag, they also populate seven related tags to the most popular one. What a great deal – 8 for 1!
RiteTag
With this hashtag search tool, you can enter any keyword and RiteTag will give you a list of hashtags that contain the phrase. Along with potential hashtags to use, you’ll get helpful data like how many times the hashtag is Tweeted per hour, how often Tweets containing the hashtag are getting Retweeted and more.
Not to mention they’ll clue you in on whether or not people are following the tag you entered. This is an amazing tool that does practically everything for you! Except adding the tag into your post, of course!