How to Scale Your Reach with Better #Hashtags

#socialmedia #dogowner #icecream #contentcreation

What do these hashtags all have in common? They can help to scale your reach and promote your brand. At Blended Sense we not only create consistently fabulous content for your brand but we also teach you how to get the most bang for your content creation buck. In this blog post you’re going to learn all about hashtags – what they are, why you need them, and how to pick the best hashtags to reach your target audience.

You’ve got great photos, video, and copy for your website and social media posts now that you’re working with Blended Sense and our Creative Intelligence that matches your small business with the perfect creative professional, and now you’re ready to take your social media marketing and branding to the next level.

What’s a Hashtag (#)?

Let’s start with what a hashtag is, and what it isn’t.

#  – This symbol used to be a banal pound sign, a lonely symbol languishing on our keyboards, until Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, YouTube, and other social media platforms drew it out of its dusty if unceremonious placement above the number 3.

A hashtag is a way to target an audience that is interested in what you have to say about a specific topic. It’s one of the few tools on social media that hasn’t been monetized, so you can hashtag your heart out and it doesn’t cost you a single, red cent. . . so there’s that.

Like keywords and key phrases that Google and other search engines use to help people find what they’re searching for, the #hashtag helps highlight a post or comment to facilitate a search for other people who are talking about the same topic.

The Art of Using the Right Hashtag (#)

Just like choosing the right keywords and phrases, it is a bit of an art to choose the perfect hashtag for your brand’s products and services.

If you’re targeting dow owners, #dog isn’t going to segment your market audience enough to get the people you really want to look at your post. If you are selling dog grooming that comes with a pedicure for poodles, then a better hashtag might be #prettypoodle. You get the idea. You want to be as specific as possible without losing potential customers because you’re too specific.

3 Types of Hashtags (#) to Use for Better Engagement

There are a few types of hashtags that you can start using to scale your social media reach with the digital assets we create for you at Blended Sense:

1. Content related hashtags. #ContentCreation, #DigitalContent #SocialMediaContent, #Video, #Photo, #Copy. These would all be considered content-relevant hashtags. We use them a lot at Blended Sense to talk about the things that our audience is concerned with.
   

2. Trending hashtags. The same way you can check out Google Trends to find topics that people are talking about, you can use hashtags to target your audience. There are different trending topics on every platform. For example, #love was recently trending on Instagram in the millions!  Some platforms like Twitter advertise what #hashtags are trending, however, on platforms like Insta, you’ll need to search for a hashtag you’re thinking of using to see how many posts are currently using that hashtag. When you do this you can also see popular hashtags that are using similar words.
   

3. Brand specific hashtags. #CreativeIntelligence, #ANewKindofProduction are examples of brand specific hashtags we use at Blended Sense. We’ve coined these phrases and use them to speak about our creative matching technology and the new kind of production we’re introducing to the world.
   

How to Use Hashtags Correctly

#CreativePeopleareSensitiveandBright. This would NOT be a good hashtag. It’s too long, and hard to read. Using the hashtags: #Creative #Sensitive #Bright, would be a better way to position a message about this topic.

Experiment with supre specific hashtags and more general hashtags to see how it affects your audience reach. For example: #Video or #VideoAustin would be general and more specific terms that will modify your audience engagement differently.

Don’t be afraid to look at what your competitors are doing with their hashtags, and borrow from any success you observe.

Ready for Some Content to Go with those #Hashtags?

Blended Sense delivers edited, tagged, organized photos, video, and copy assets to customers every month so they can get back to running their small business. Start your monthly content plan today.