Hashtags are still relevant for pulling in your target audience and helping people find the types of content that you’re putting out into the world. This is especially true on LinkedIn with the hashtag follow setting you can choose and the alerts you get when something is happening on one of the hashtags that you follow!
Why don’t people use them consistently and strategically?
In my experience with our clients at Breezy, people usually don’t have the time to search, type them out, figure out which hashtags they should use, etc on each post. Or they do a hashtag dump, which once again, isn’t using these in a strategic way.
Hashtags are still relevant. On Instagram, one hashtag alone garners 12.6% more engagement than posts without one. They are still an important way to pull in the audience you’re trying to target and as well as making you more easily found via discovery pages and being suggested by algorithms on various platforms.
It can be time-consuming, but by researching, creating, and varying your hashtags AHEAD of time, you’ll be much more efficient at using them and more importantly, more strategic in the way you utilize them.
How?
1. Start with hashtag research. This is something you’ll want to do every 6-12 months (or maybe even more frequently depending on your industry) in order to stay up to date and on which hashtags are doing well and to discover new ones.
2. Create batches of hashtags that have a specific focus. Like: one of your services, a specific audience, or persona you’re wanting to target or a product that you offer.
3. Now vary each batch that you’ve created. You’ll probably have a few different batches, a standard batch of hashtags, 1-2 towards specific audiences, and another few for your products or services. Now, don’t use the EXACT same batch every time. Create 2-3 versions of each batch to change it up and reach more or different people in the process.
4. Store these batches in place that is really simple to copy and paste from. Now, whenever you have content ready that is targeting one of your services, all you have to do is copy and paste one of your service batches of hashtags and you’re ready to go!
Content creation can be efficient and strategic with the right tools like hashtag batching!
