Once seen only as your phone’s pound sign, hashtags now have a powerful role on social media platforms.

If you attended our #ConnectMORE Social Media Seminar in May, you would have learned that using hashtags can expand your brand’s reach by bringing attention to your social media platforms through the use of innovative and creative hashtags. Hashtags are words or phrases that are preceded by the “#” symbol which act as links to related content. This helps string related content together on various social media platforms and provides social media users with a unique opportunity to receive a substantial amount of information by clicking on a hashtag. For this reason, utilizing hashtags can do wonders for your online presence, if used properly and in moderation.

For example our #ConnectMORE hashtag is used to reference CC Communications unique capability to provide online content for your website and social media platforms that is both engaging, conversational and relationship building.

On Instagram, posts with at least one hashtag receive nearly 13% more engagement than posts with none. Adding a hashtag to your tweet on Twitter or your post on Google+ is also statistically proven to give you twice the amount of engagement compared to posts that do not use hashtags!

Here are three ways you can you use #hashtags to promote your brand:

1) Be Specific

The more specific you are when using a hashtag, the better. It is always good to use a hashtag that is unique to your business. Find one or two existing hashtags that will help serve to explain your services and or product.

One prime example is Guinness: the brand uses very specific hashtags on Instagram to maximize their digital reach. To promote their new ale, the brand strategically “hashtagged” certain words that were relevant to their content. They leveraged the existing popularity of the #BeerandFood and #Dublin hashtags on Instagram to ensure that users who searched for those hashtags or utilized regularly would come across their branded content.

2) Be Unique

Come up with a snappy, easy-to-remember hashtag for special events, deals or promotions to facilitate easy sharing. Some of the most used hashtags are popular because they are easy to remember, or funny.

Destination British Columbia used the easy to remember hashtag #exploreBC when sharing photos of the province as an initiative to help promote tourism. The hashtag ended up being a way for tourists and residents to share their own photos of British Colombia. By clicking on the hashtag, social media users were able to browse photos others took in the area.

Lay’s Potato Chips encouraged people to pitch their best potato chip flavor ideas for their “Do Us a Flavor” contest. With the goal to engage users and collect ideas, consumers were invited to submit their flavor ideas on Twitter and Instagram along with the hashtag #DoUsAFlavor. By creating this unique hashtag, Lay’s was able to easily track contest entries and provide contestants with the opportunity to view other entries. 

During your FREE 30 minute consultation with us, CC Communications will show you more examples of unique hashtags and give you tips on generating your own brand-specific hashtag to increase engagement with your customers!

This brings us to our final tip:

3) Do Your Research

Take the time to discover the most popular hashtags on a specific subject for each social media network.

Before creating a hashtag specific to your business, be sure to do a search of the hashtag to make sure it is not already in use by another organization and that it does not have any alternative meanings that could obscure your brand’s message.

However, finding the most relevant and useful hashtags to promote your content can be tough – if you would like some help from the experts at CC Communications, drop us a line to find out more about our social media management services and our ability to create a unique hashtag for you!

Remember to be specific, be unique and do your research first! If you would like to learn more about social media and hashtags, join us at one of our Social Media seminars – sign up here to be the first to know when new seminars are announced.