Hashtags are everywhere! Ever since the booming of social media, this punctuation mark seems to become a very popular thing these days, especially for social media users like Twitter and Instagram. For businesses, hashtags are important because they can improve social media traffic significantly. In Twitter, tweets with Hashtags averagely generated two times more engagement than tweets without hashtags.
So, how do we optimize hashtags for our benefits? it’s actually quite simple. But first thing’s first, what exactly is a hashtag in social media? In social media, hashtag is a tagging system that categorizes social media content. This categorizing function is the key of success in the use of hashtag to boost your social media content.
When you use a hashtag, anyone with an interest in your hashtag, including those that are outside of your network can be reached by your post. So this simple thing can actually expand your reach so widely.
Where To Use Hashtags And How To Use It Effectively
This is probably the most popular place where hashtags are used. As already mentioned above, tweets with hashtags get twice more engagement including clicks, retweets, favorites and replies than tweets without hashtags.
Statistically, having two hashtags in a post is considered the best to promote engagement. If you use more than two hashtags, your engagement might drop to just 17%. Tweets with only up to two hashtags get 21% higher engagement and 55% more likely to be retweeted.
This is another place where hashtags are extremely important. However, it works a little differently than twitter. In Instagram, posts with the highest interactions mostly have 11+ hashtags.
Posts with 11 hashtags get 79.5% interactions out of 1k followers, it’s a huge difference compared to posts with 1 hashtag that only get 29% interaction out of 1k followers.
It may not be as popular as Twitter and Instagram in terms of using hashtags, but probably because at first it wasn’t really effective. When Facebook first started using hashtags, the engagement is even worse than posts without hashtags. Back then, posts without hashtags got 1.30% median viral reach per fan, while posts with hashtags only got 0.80% median viral reach per fan.
But as time goes, it gets better and better. Now posts with 1-2 hashtags in Facebook get 593 average interactions. Unlike Instagram, the more hashtags you use in your Facebook posts, the less engagement you will get. Posts with more than 10 hashtags usually only get 188 average interactions.
Google+ is a bit different than the other social media sites above. When you post a content, Google+ is automatically giving hashtags to your post. However, you can still edit it or you can also add it on your own. In Google+ you can also add hashtags in your comments, so you would have more chance to be found.
The great thing about putting hashtags in your Google+ posts is that it can be found in Google search. Google has integrated hashtag in their search engine, so whenever you put a hashtag in Google search it will provide you with normal search results and relevant Google+ posts on the sidebar.
