Are hashtags still relevant?

In short, yes! But if you want to benefit from their full potential impact, you need to think carefully about how you use them.

Many people have talked down hashtags over the last couple of years, dismissing them for making posts look ‘messy’. But this is short-sighted.

Just look at Meta’s Threads launch last year. This new platform was initially rolled out without any hashtag functionality, only for the Meta team to add its own version of hashtags (simply called tags) a few months later.

Why? Because hashtags have an incredibly valuable role to play on social media.

As Chris Messina, the creator of the hashtag, explains: “The hashtag is one of the few superstructures that spans across all social media platforms.”

Hashtags group together similar conversations to help people find content that is relevant to them. Once a hashtag is used, it effectively becomes a clickable, searchable link.

As such they are a great way to expand the reach of your brand’s content via social media. Enabling you to draw in new followers interested in your industry, products and content, and helping to create niche audiences and communities around a shared interest or passion, they should be seen as an essential component of your marketing toolbox.

So much research and peer review is done via social media, you’d be mad not to make use of hashtags to organically and seamlessly tap into this traffic.

Hopefully you’re now convinced that you should be doing more with hashtags!

If so, here are some of our top tips on how you can elevate your brand’s hashtags strategy:

-        Quality over quantity. Too many hashtags can risk making posts feel inaccessible to readers and look like spam to the social media platform you’re using. Instead limit the number you use to less than 8 per post. Try adding a couple of key ones within the body text of your post to highlight and draw readers’ eyes to the key themes, but list the remainder at the bottom of your post.

-        Keep all hashtags relevant to the topic of your post and your business. There’s no point drawing users to your content if it’s not something they will be interested in - this is more likely to lead to negative feedback. If you’re keeping within our suggested cap of 8 hashtags per post, try to focus on a maximum of 4 that are relevant to your wider business and 4 that are more specific to the post topic.

-        Use each social media platform’s trend-specific page, or third-party hashtag research tools, to identify the most popular and trending hashtags relevant to your business as well as hashtags linked to national awareness days, holidays and events that your business could tap into.

-        Create your own branded hashtags to help with brand awareness and loyalty, and use these consistently across your posts to build familiarity with your audience.

-        Always check the conversations happening around particular hashtags before using them to avoid any unwanted negative associations. Click through on hashtags you’re interested in using and check the conversations being had there and by which profiles.

-        Analyse the hashtags your competitors are using and the conversations they are trying to feature in, and use this to inform your strategy. Are there key conversations and topic areas they are missing that you could take advantage of?

-        Check back in. Trends on social media never stand still, so to ensure your brand stays ahead make sure you keep a regular eye on the hashtags you are using to avoid missing opportunities to grow your exposure.

Ultimately, optimising your brand’s hashtag strategy needn’t be a time-consuming endeavour. Little and often is the best mantra to apply here. By regularly reviewing your hashtag use - ensuring you are using the optimal mix of popular, niche and brand-specific hashtags relevant to your business and industry - you will see quickly see the benefits in the form of increased brand exposure, followers and engagement.

It may initially feel like yet another digital marketing task to add to the ever-growing to-do list, but trust us, you’ll thank us later!

If you’re looking for further social media support, get in touch today!