top of page

The use of Hashtags in Social Media

Updated: May 10, 2021


Nowadays, the concept and use of hashtags is widely known, after the popularization of its use on Twitter in 2007, the word has become synonymous of social medias. It is used to categorize, promote solidarity campaigns or increase the reach of post and with that, this tool has also become a marketing synonym. It is imperative that those who work in this area make constant use of hashtags in their marketing strategies to reach new audiences, increase the number of followers and so on. In this post we will show you how to do this and how the incorporation of hashtags in our strategy has been helping UFRJ Nautilus.


What are Hashtags?


First, it is necessary to understand how Hashtags work. They are ways to connect social media content to a specific topic, event, theme or conversation. Because of this, they also make it easier to discover posts that are related to these topics. Making an analogy, hashtags are like folders in a file, where all posts from a social media are kept.


Why use them?


Now that we know how Hashtags work, let's see why it is important to use them on your social media.

  • Increase your engagement

Including hashtags in your posts makes you take part in a conversation happening on social medias and, most importantly, makes your posts visible in that conversation. This visibility can generate greater engagement through likes, comments and shares.

  • Branding

The use of hashtags can also contribute to the construction of a brand, by creating your own hashtags, your brand is instantly recognizable, and it is even possible to viralize any of them.

  • Supporting social causes

Furthermore, you can demonstrate social responsibility and support social causes

through hashtags. An example of this are #EachforEqual and #IWD2020, which were

used in many social medias on International Women's Day.

  • Contextualize your post

On Twitter there is not much space to write, with only 280 characters, it is often difficult to explain a situation and your view on it. On Instagram, the bigger your caption, the less chance that it will be read completely and the same goes for Facebook, Pinterest, LinkedIn and others. Less is more, therefore, using hashtags to contextualize what will be spoken is very important as it prevents you from using more words than you need and saves people’s time reading what you have written.

  • Help your target audience find you

On Instagram and LinkedIn users can follow hashtags too, this means that precious space in users’ feeds can be accessed even if your brand isn’t being followed. So, using some popular hashtags can make some users find you and thus gain new followers.


How to use hashtags?


First of all, make sure your account is public, otherwise no matter how many hashtags are placed in your post, they will only appear to people who already follow your account.

Do this!

  • Use relevant and specific hashtags in your area

  • The best hashtags tend to be small and easy to remember

  • Limit the number of hashtags that will be used


Do NOT do this!


hashtag_UFRJ Nautilus

Como a Nautilus planeja suas tags?


Aqui na equipe utilizamos as taumentar nosso alcance nas redes sociais. Separamos elas em 4 categorias:

  • High reach

  • Medium reach

  • Low reach

  • Own hashtags

Simply put, reach can be defined as the number of posts or followers of the hashtag. How does this affect their usability?


Basically the longer the hashtag reaches, the more people have a chance to view your post. So why do we use low and medium reach tags, you might be wondering... Well, the longer the hashtag reaches, the more people use it, which means that your post is more likely to be flooded by an infinity of more recent ones. The lifetime of a post in a long reach tag is in the order of seconds to minutes. On the other hand, posts that use medium and low reach tags can have a lifetime of days or even months!


Lastly, we have our own hashtags. These are hashtags created by the team, in which we centralize all our posts. So, if a user searches for “#GoNautilus” on any social media, they must find the team's posts.


How do we choose our hashtags?


As we said earlier, we researched the hashtags that are relevant to our environment, we checked the reach of each one in addition to creating our own tag. Thus, we can create a “bank” of hashtags to vary in each of our posts.


Of course, we are not restricted to our "bank" or a survey. Hashtags are seasonal phenomena, varying over time, so we always keep our tags up to date and consistent with the networks we use.


To choose a list of hashtags for a post, we mix the hashtags with different ranges and, in addition, always use our own tags.


How effective is the use of hashtags for Nautilus?


Here in the team we implemented the structured use of hashtags recently. Since then we have seen an increase of 10% to 20% in the reach of our posts and, with this, much more engagement of our audience.


We also managed to organize our posts and centralize them for easy access by us and our users, only advantages!


written by José Henrique Draeger e Rodrigo Borges.

0 comments

Recent Posts

See All

Comentários


bottom of page