How to use viral hashtags and engage followers

How to use viral hashtags and engage followers

how to use viral hashtags

Do you really know how to use hashtags on social media and what are the secrets to engaging your community? Let’s better discover a digital practice within everyone’s reach which, to be effective, requires the application of precise rules. Here’s how to fully exploit the potential of the gate on Facebook, Instagram, Linkedin and Twitter

Hashtag: overrated or underrated? Let’s learn everything there is to know about the correct and effective use of the hashtag on social networks and see how the hashtag is used in social media marketing campaigns.

What are hashtags and what are they for?

The birth date of the hashtag is August 23, 2007 , when the hashtag began to be used on Twitter, which became familiar to anyone who practices social platforms. The primary function, still maintained, is that of thematic aggregator, a tool that allows users to find trending topics or topics of interest to them, on which to find out and interact. A feature that could not fail to attract the attention of social media marketers and social account managers, who through the gate catalog the content of the posts on the various platforms and make it accessible to the public of their community.

In summary, here’s what hashtags on Linkedin and other social platforms are for:

Search : through specific hashtags you can find relevant and focused content.

Virality : hashtags maximize the community effect, thanks to their dual characteristic of cataloging content and making it easily available. Once received by the public, the tag of that topic, mainstream or niche, can be re-launched until it goes viral.

Engagement : Posts that include hashtags get double the engagement than those that don’t (source: Buddy Media in relation to Twitter).

3 rules for the perfect hashtag

Let’s try to structure a successful campaign on social networks, also thanks to the correct use of the tags preceded by a hash:

Correct spelling : it may seem trivial, but it is good to take a quick review on how to write a hashtag. The hash must precede the chosen word or phrase, without spaces, without punctuation and without special characters.

Unique and simple : if you are studying a promo campaign in a ‘crowded’ sector you can initially use successful hashtags for that subject, trying to insert even someone specially designed to avoid being ‘cannibalized’ by the mass. To work, without being overwhelmed by the noise of off-topic content, the hashtag must communicate all the nuances of the campaign in a timely manner. A good rule of thumb is to think easy: immediacy in understanding favors the user experience and guarantees your hashtag more chances of being remembered.

Media transversality : leaving aside cross-media is impossible nowadays and in this perspective hashtags can be the common thread for a promotional activity that acts on the public of different media. This is why hashtags must be one of the strengths of the marketing project, authentic protagonists of the success of the campaign in which you are planning to invest time and money.

How to use hashtags on social networks: #nontuttiuguali

But what is the best way to use effective hashtags on social media? First of all, you need to know that even if the hashtag remains the same, it does not necessarily mean that the result is the same: it depends on the value assigned to the hashtag by the platform and its internal function.

Hashtag on Facebook : Zuckerberg’s social network is the one that most differs for the functionality of the hashtag, which on this platform almost completely loses the connotation of virality. The search, in fact, shows results in order of importance, ‘fishing’ the hashtags only in the context of friends, acquaintances, company pages and groups followed. To find the feed of the specific hashtag this is the URL https://www.facebook.com/hashtag/examplehashtag, where every result associated with “ example hashtag ” will be listed .

Hashtag on Instagram : on the social of photos and stories, par excellence, the hashtag is structurally essential. The main feature in this case is consistency and the trick of using popular hashtags, but not relevant to the content, doesn’t work in the search for new followers. Conversely, engagement increases proportionally with the inclusion of vertical hashtags that intercept the niche of the public interested in following specific topics.

Hashtag on LinkedIn : the social network dedicated to the world of work enhances not only the use of the hashtag as an aggregator of sector content, eg #socialmedia #marketing, but also the use of hashtags customized with the name of the brand or product. The former appear in the reference feed, the latter allow you to build and strengthen your community around the brand and its hashtag.

Hashtag on Twitter : lastly the social ‘dad’ of hashtags, which still claims the primacy of fast information through its ‘chirps’. The trending topics on Twitter are a mirror of what is happening everywhere in real time. Searching for hashtags on this platform provides all the results related to that particular topic, creating conversations, engaging and, why not? Virality.