The Monday Morning Marketing podcast is brought to you byEsther of IPA group, bringing premiere online promotion to your business.
And Melanie of Stump Social Media training, who empowersbusiness owners to manage social media and marketing for themselves. Andwelcome back to another episode of the Monday morning marketing podcast. Today we're talking about hashtags. What are they and why should you use them?
Well, as I'm sure a lot of you already know, hashtags arediscoverable and they're also clickable. What they do is they turn topics andphrases into clickable links in posts on your profile, whether it's Instagramor indeed on Facebook.
Yeah. So hashtags started, I think they started initially onTwitter. So Twitter is a really long just stream of information and tweets. Sofor people to have a conversation, say you wanted to have a chat aboutsomething or complain about something or mention some world events that's goingon, people started using hashtags and they would put in, hashtag Monday mood orhashtag Friday feeling. Those are some of the common ones that a lot of peopleuse. Then other people could just see that that started to trend. Trendinghashtag is whenever lots and lots of people either in your country or aroundthe world are using it. Say it's a specific day of the year, Mother's Day,Valentine's Day, International Women's Day, all those things have their ownhashtags that people use and it becomes a trending topic. If you were to havean event... Now, we know Samantha Kelly, the tweeting goddess, does this at allher events. She creates a hashtag for it and usually gets it trending on thatday. And that then means that other people, like I said, either in your countryor around the world, can see that hashtag, interact with it and go, That looksinteresting.
I must go to that next time, or I must see what else they'retalking about. So it's a really good way of starting a conversation on placeslike Twitter as well.
Now, hashtags can be used in various places, althoughthey're traditionally seen in Twitter and in Instagram, but you can use them onGoogle business profile. You can use them on Facebook and TikTok and otherplaces. They all have a role in being found in search, but most frequentlythey'll be used in Twitter and in Instagram. Now, there's so many differentways that people have perceived using hashtags. At the moment, currently, atthe time of recording, Instagram would like you to use, ideally, less than all30. Now, you can have up to 30. Absolutely no problem doing that. But thenyou're hopping onto an awful lot of threads of search. So they'd prefer thatyou would really only stick with 15 ish. Now, ideally, you should spend yourtime doing three types of things with your hashtags. It's actually a fourth,but we'll leave that off onto the side. So the first thing you should do withyour hashtags is describe the picture or video or Reel that you are sharing.One of the first things you should be doing is describing with your hashtagswhat that is all about. The next lot of five ish hashtags should be basicallytargeting who your audience is.
Describe them, who they are, where you find them, whatindustry they're in, that's all, and any interests they may have. Then finally,the last five ish hashtags should really describe who you are and what you doand what value you offer, that thing. And then you stand a chance of beingfound in three different ways. But what's the last hashtag we should put up,Esther?
Our own business one.
Yes, it's our brand hashtag. Now, the majority of us willonly have a brand hashtag, but some of us may also have a community hashtag. SoJustin Bieber has Beliebers, Taylor Swift has Swifty's. So maybe you have acommunity and you could also use your community hashtag as well.
Melanie has stompies.
I do.
She has her community. So yes, just be careful with thecommunity or your business one. If you share a name with somebody else thatmight have already... It might be seen to be jumping onto their hashtag. So dobeware if anybody else is using that hashtag. When Melanie and I were coming upwith the conference that we had a few months ago at this point, we did ourresearch. We researched hashtags, we researched names, we researched to see ifanybody else was using the hashtag DMAT for decision makers and action takers,and they weren't. So we claimed it as our own and used it for that conferenceand have used it since in our merchandise, which you can buy on Etsy. See thenice little plug? It's smooth. So hashtags can be universal. They can be, likeMelanie says, ones that describe the video or radio or audio or reel orcarousel. They can be more general. Like I said before, Monday mood, ThrowbackThursday.
Lots of different ones. But do you know what? You'vereferenced all the ones that are very frequently and commonly known. But I'mover them.
Yeah, I was going to say that too. I use them verysparingly. Very sparingly.
They don't have to rhyme. They don't have to start with thesame letters. One of the most popular posts I've seen of one of my old clients,and it was a recommendation that I gave them was Curly Wednesday hairdresser.#curlywednesday. And she did great guns with that because it was different. Itstood out. And that became one of her brand hashtags.
Yeah. And I was going to say, if you are using one thatmillions of other people are using that day, your content can get lost in thesea of hashtags. So say you're using the one for Monday morning or Fridayfeeling, millions and millions of other posts are using that same one. So ifpeople are using that hashtag to search for information or search for posts,the likelihood is they're not going to see that. But then again, on the flipside, if you're only using one that is specific for your company, then peopleprobably aren't searching for it. So you have to find hashtags that arerelevant to start with. There's no point in throwing up a hashtag that hasnothing to do with either the image you're sharing, the room you're sharing,the business that you're in just because it's trending. There's a lot to besaid for doing a little bit of research, but we'll talk about that in the.
Future episode. I was going to touch on that just a littlebit because they do go together. #r esarch is actually really important. Now,anybody here, we're not big users of any of these platforms, but definitely oneof the first ones I would go to, just purely because I've gone to it before, is#ify. It's really advanced for Twitter and Instagram hashtag as a trackingtool. What it does is it allows you to find the best hashtags to reach youraudience, and it gives you suggestions and helps you get to know who yourinfluencers and your competitors are.
Yeah, that is really good tool. I've used it before. It's#ify. Me, #ify me. But you can get lost in the sea of information.
So the first place that I would send people to wouldactually just be Instagram itself.
And do the.
Research there. Because it'll bring up how many millions orthousands or hundreds of posts has used the hashtag that you're wanting to use.And you can see that information even through your Meta business suite. Now, asMelanie said, hashtags on Instagram should be around the 15 mark ish. But ifyou're sharing your post directly from Instagram straight onto Facebook with 15hashtags, that's a lot of hashtags for Facebook. There's that option of whenyou post on Instagram automatically sharing to Facebook if you're using yourphone, for example. But you can get around that by using your Meta businesssuite and personalising it for Instagram and adding the extra hashtags inInstagram and leaving Facebook either without hashtags or just with one or two.
I think it looks tidier, to be honest with you, when youdon't have all those hashtags.
On Facebook. Even LinkedIn. Even LinkedIn, we haven't talkedabout LinkedIn yet. But LinkedIn, the people who use LinkedIn, the movers andshakers on LinkedIn, tend to just go for two, maybe three at a push and theydon't like seeing lots and lots of hashtags. They're not necessary on LinkedIn.They're really not necessary on LinkedIn to go more than three.
No, agreed. In fact, when I was at social media marketingworld recently...
You'll be hearing more about that coming up soon in a futureepisode.
There was quite a few LinkedIn sessions. It was quite a fewInstagram sessions actually as well. And they suggested really no more thanthree. I know a lot of people who use a lot more hashtags for LinkedIn.
Yeah. It does turn into visual pollution.
I like that.
If you are spamming it with lots and lots of hashtags justto get the point across, it's one of two things. Either you've justautomatically shared it from Instagram and haven't bothered to modify it. Sothat just comes across as lazy, comes across as not really repurposing yourcontent, which we've talked about in previous episodes. It comes across as justnot understanding the platform that you're using and not understanding youraudience who's on the platform, more importantly. Because if your audience ison somewhere that you're not comfortable with or that you really don't use verymuch, you really need to get into their way of using that platform and intotheir way of thinking. And if they're mostly on LinkedIn and they don't like tosee hashtags, then don't use hashtags. Simple as.
Yeah.
All right.
Well.
Anything else to add before we wrap this hashtag up?
Very good. I think people get a little overwhelmed with thehashtags. I do see that there is a call to keep a core bulk of hashtags thatyou reuse on a regular basis. Unless you're using a third party platform ormaybe you're using Meta business suite, for some of you, you might find iteasier to just put down your core regular hashtags that describe your audience,your different avatars, and another bulk of hashtags that describe you. And Ipersonally put them in a word document. And that way you're using them on aregular basis. And then when you come... And I'm not suggesting you stick withthem indefinitely because they do need to move around. But I would put thoseinto a Word document, and I'd open that Word document up when I was going toschedule my post for Facebook or Twitter or whatever I'm going to bescheduling. And then I know I can just grab the same ones I know have beenaffected and that have actually worked.
Yeah. I was going to say to you that on Agorapulse that welove. There is a way to see of your hashtags in that and categorise them intobranding hashtags, special day hashtags.
Yeah, you can save them, can't you?
Yeah, you can save them in those little sections. And alsonow you can do that on your Meta business suite. So there are ways, if youdon't want to use Word document, to have them somewhere that, especially ifyou're sharing or not sharing, you're using your Meta business suite with yourcompany and with other people who work with you. And same with your Agorapulse.If you have a team there, they'll have access to those hashtags without havingto go back and ask you each and every time, Which hashtags do you use for thisone when it looks like this? So it just makes the whole scaling up processeasier too if you have them somewhere that everybody can use them. And on thatnote, guys, before I start coughing again, we will wrap up and we'll be backnext week with more Monday morning marketing. Until then.
Bye bye. Bye, guys. Have a great week.