Whether you manage social channels for a corporate brand or your personal brand, it is important to use hashtags to promote your brand.

While there are a number of tactics to use for successful marketing campaigns (e.g. paid support, fully optimized channels, etc.), one of the top ways to achieve success is leveraging hashtags to promote your brand.

Hashtags are commonly used on social media to categorize content and make it easier for users to find content related to a specific topic.

By adding hashtags to your posts, you make your content accessible to a broader audience beyond your followers. Twitter, Facebook, Pinterest and Instagram posts benefit most from hashtags organically as opposed to paid.

Here are tips that can help you best leverage hashtags.

3 Ways to Use Hashtags to Promote Your Brand

1. Promotions

Hashtags prove very useful for contests, special offers, and promotions.  By creating a unique hashtag for your contest or promotion, you can easily track submissions, engagement, and reactions to your offer.

2. News

Breaking news, product launches, and general brand announcements also benefit from dedicated hashtags. By using a dedicated hashtag for news, you help people follow the conversation around your brand and make it simple to find out the latest updates.

3. Events

Using hashtags for your events is a great way to engage your followers and attendees. Event hashtags allow followers to experience the important moments of your event, even if they aren’t physically present.

How Many Hashtags?

Hashtags help extend your reach by attaching your brand’s content to larger conversations. You want to use hashtags strategically and purposefully to make sure your content doesn’t look like spam or blatant advertising.

Instagram content benefits well from multiple hashtags. Facebook and Twitter, not so much. When in doubt, a good rule of thumb is no more than 2 hashtags per post on Twitter and Facebook.

Using the Right Hashtags

You want to be sure you are using hashtags that are consistent with your brand and target demographic. If you are a brand like Starbucks, you want to consider hashtags that your target consumers are using and following like #coffeelove.

While it may seem tempting to load your posts with tons of trending hashtags,  there are some hashtags you want to steer clear of.

For example, Starbucks would not hashtag their coffee post #ootd (outfit of the day) because the hashtag wouldn’t be applicable given the image content and their brand goals.

Use hashtags that make sense for your brand and consumers that are engaging with your brand.

Knowing how to find the right hashtags for your brand is easy:

• Spend time on each social platform and take note of the hashtags consumers are using with your brand name
• Monitor trending hashtags in the past 30 days to see if any are relevant to your brand
• Research which hashtags competitors are using to promote themselves within your industry

Hashtag Etiquette: Do’s and Don’ts

Following proper hashtag etiquette plays a major role in ensuring that your hashtags are adopted. Here are a few do’s and don’ts:

• Make sure you use the pound sign (#) and not the “at” sign (@)
• Don’t add spaces between words within a hashtag
• Don’t make your hashtags too long (especially on Twitter where characters are limited)
• Capitalize the first letter of each word within hashtags to ensure readability  (ex. #FollowFriday)

Take time each week to listen. Monitor your hashtags. Review the buzz. See if your target demographic is using any new hashtags. Use the results to inform your strategy.

How have you utilized hashtags to promote your brand? Tell us which strategies worked for you!