How to use hashtags to increase your reach on social media

You’ve probably put a lot of effort into social media marketing. But how do you get your posts to stand out from the crowd?

With stunning 95 million posts on the day only on Instagram, your best chance is that your content works well on all your social media platforms, using hashtags.

This guide will help you better understand the role of hashtags in social media, how to choose the right hashtags for your brand, and how to use hashtags on the most popular social media platforms. Without delay, let’s get started!

What is a hashtag?

You’ve probably heard of the hashtag (#). Baby Boomers, Generations X and millennials may know the hashtag as a “pound sign” on phones.

Well, hashtags have found a new feature in the 21st century. You can now tag social media content with hashtags. This allows other users to see a collection of related content when they click the hashtag. Simply place a # sign in front of the words you want to use.

For example, if you are a shoe retailer, you can tag #skateshoes or #formalshoes when you post a picture of these types of shoes.

Why use hashtags?

Hashtags improve the user experience and help brands expand their reach. For example, they get tweets with hashtags twice the engagement like tweets without.

Hashtags started on Twitter and are now found on almost all social media platforms. In fact, using hashtags as part of your universal social media strategy can help protect you easily 21% more engagement.

Hashtags are a convenient way to organize content on social media. They help potential customers and users find what they are looking for.

Hashtags are customized and unique for each business. It is important that we adhere to this philosophy. The shoe company would not want to mislead customers and users by posting a tweet about selling shoes with the hashtag #veterinarymedicine.

Some people mistakenly believe that sending spam to each of their posts with popular but completely unrelated hashtags will help improve their reach.

This might be true in the short term, but in the end, if your hashtags aren’t at least tangentially related to the topic of your post or other content, you may end up alienating and confusing your audience.

So the best hashtags to use are the ones that relate to your industry, product, and target audience.

You can also use hashtags to highlight your company’s beliefs and values ​​in a concise way. Some brands opt for this in their social media profiles.

To find good hashtags, take a look at what other companies in your industry are using. On many platforms, the autocomplete hashtag automatically creates related hashtags when you enter even just the beginning of a word or phrase.

For example, when you create a post, enter #shoes and many platforms will automatically create related hashtags.

You can also use ours Social media tracker to see which hashtags are best for your competitors. This will save a huge amount of time in choosing the best hashtags for your exact industry.

Each platform has slightly different best practices when it comes to hashtags. There are also some consistent hashtag rules on most platforms:

• Hashtags must be one word
• Numbers are allowed
• Spaces are not allowed
• Special characters are not allowed

Let’s take a look at how you can use them to improve reach on the most common social media sites.

Instagram

While you can have 30 hashtags on every Instagram post, this isn’t necessarily the best use of your time or hashtag feature.

A good rule of thumb is no more than a dozen hashtags per post. There are some ways to use hashtags on Instagram.

You can insert a hashtage in the profile description (see below).

To do this, simply click the “Edit Profile” button.

Another place to set up hashtags is in the post itself (see below). All you have to do is use the # symbol in the caption, followed by the tag you want to link to.

Finally, you can add them to comment on the posts you create. If a user views your Instagram from the desktop, they will see this comment. However, if the user is on a mobile device, this comment will only be hidden and accessible if someone clicks “Show all comments”.

One way to approach this strategy is to use our poster on social media to plan ahead for a comment to appear when you post. This way, you can schedule all the hashtags of your comments at the same time as you create your posts. This feature only works on Instagram for now, but stay tuned!

Facebook

Although Facebook has the ability to add hashtags, they are not nearly as popular as on other platforms.

In fact, there is a debate about whether hashtags do a lot on Facebook. Some experts and business owners say that; others say it didn’t have much of an impact.

With this in mind, use your time wisely by limiting the hashtag on Facebook to just one to two per post.

Twitter

Twitter is the ancestor of hashtags and perhaps the most popular place to use them. However, using hashtags on advertising tweets can be tricky and can have the opposite intended effect (meaning: you may not be encouraging the kind of collaboration you would like).

For this reason, best practice advice is to use hashtags in tweets that start a conversation. It’s better for organic reach and encourages users to collaborate with you on social media.

For the simplest approach, you can use a hashtag in a sentence or at the end of one.

Twitter recommends that you use no more than two hashtags to tweet for the best levels of engagement.

LinkedIn

LinkedIn makes it easy to use hashtags. Once you’ve created a LinkedIn update, you can add your hashtags directly to your content or click “Add hashtags” at the bottom of the post (see below for a desktop example).

There is no limit to how many hashtags you can use; however LinkedIn recommends no more than three per publication.

Remember that LinkedIn is a network for professionals, so make sure your hashtags reflect the nature of the platform and do not contain inappropriate language.

Tik Tok

TikTok, which allows users to post videos up to ten minutes long, has experienced tremendous growth in its user base over the past few years. Like other social platforms, TikTok uses hashtags to organize content and make it easier to discover.

TikTok is somewhat unique in that users tend to mix very popular hashtags with multiple niche hashtags or brand labels that are likely to appeal to a smaller but more invested audience. An example of this would be Nike, which uses #FYP (Page for You, which is a resource curated by TikTok) and #JustDoIt.

There are some ways to get great hashtags on TikTok. First, check out what your competition is doing. Check out their most popular videos (i.e. which videos have the most likes and views) and see which hashtags they used for that specific content.

Another way you can get a hashtag is by checking what your followers are using. If Nike wanted to draw shoes into its TikTok resource, it would be wise to look at their follower list and browse some user profiles. These users are likely to create their own content with niche and popular shoe-related tags.

Alternatively, create or follow an existing, popular hashtag challenge. Hashtag challenges are, as the name suggests, challenges or actions related to the hashtag. Some users create hashtag challenges around dancing, makeup, or pranks. In fact, the possibilities are virtually endless.

Finally, you can use the search bar to search for popular topics discussed in TikTok. TikTok also offers some of the most popular suggested searches that you can browse and find more hashtag ideas.

One of the great ways to get successful hashtags is to look at what your competitors are using. Semrush A collection of social media tools allows you to view the most successful hashtags of your competition so you can start targeting them yourself.

Once you know which hashtage you want to use, it is Semrush poster you can schedule your posts on social media with the correct hashtags. This way, you don’t have to manage multiple posts on multiple platforms yourself.

Start being creative with your messages. Finding niche hashtags that speak directly to your audience about their problems or issues can get users excited about your brand before they can find your competition.