Transcript

Hashtags are used just about everywhere. They make regular appearances and our social media posts, they travel across platforms and they can even carry the message of an entire marketing campaign for really savvy brands. But how to hashtags work on different social media platforms and how does this affect the way that we use them for business? These are some really interesting questions that I will try to answer inside this video.

Hey, it's Chia from Brand 24 and today I want to talk about hashtags. Specifically, the different ways that hashtags are used across various social media platforms like Twitter, Instagram, and Facebook. So let's start with hashtags on Twitter, and Twitter is essentially the birthplace of hashtags and it all started with this tweet. How do you feel about using the pound sign for groups as in hashtag barcamp? This was the first time that a hashtag was used on Twitter and the message sums up how Twitter hashtags are still being used today to group together individual tweets that talk about a common topic. Basically hashtags on Twitter let us find conversations about stuff that we are interested in so we can join in and voice our opinions or share an experience. Brands can really easily use Twitter hashtags to engage in conversations around a certain topic or create a new hashtag to promote an event like hashtag "social media marketing world 2018". If you use a preexisting hashtag, just make sure you take five minutes to see what it's about so that you don't find yourself in hot water like DiGiorno pizza did when they turned the "why I stayed" hashtag featuring stories from domestic abuse survivors into a joke about saying for pizza. Now, what about hashtags on Instagram? Instagram is all about images and each hashtag contains a visual feed of all the posts that share the same tag, whether it's displayed in the image caption or down below in the comment section. So people tend to go a little crazy with Instagram hashtags, which is what prompted instead to put a limit of 30 hashtags on each post. So what this liberal use of hashtags on the platform, it tells us is that they play a key role on Insta. Actually Instagram is almost powered by hashtags making their role in business kind of multipurpose here. But no matter what you're doing, whether you are holding a contest or giveaway or working on a digital campaign, you want to maximize the social media reach for your posts and make sure that as many people as possible see it.

So the best way to do that is by using trending hashtags. Since these are the hashtags that people are actively using, it guarantees that the IG posts you spent so much time creating won't go unnoticed. Now, how about hashtags on Facebook? So Facebook hashtags work in a different way than they do on Instagram and Twitter. This is because Facebook itself is much more focused on people including those with private profiles. So most people, they don't really use hashtags on Facebook unless it's to express some kind of emotion like "Irr, I've been trying to open this jar for the past 20 minutes, no luck", hashtag frustrated. And they don't really search for hashtags there either. Facebook is where you go to look for people or friends and sometimes groups or brands that you like. But that doesn't mean that hashtags don't have a place on Facebook. On the contrary, this means that hashtags on Facebook have a much more specific use, especially in business.

So a lot of brands, they actually forego using any Facebook hashtag since, as we mentioned, people don't really use them to discover content or join in on conversations. But all this changes when brands want to connect a series of Facebook posts. In this case, Facebook hashtags become super helpful. So beauty brand Ipsy is a really good example of this. They created a series of short videos on Facebook where they tested different products that could be found in their beauty subscription service. So even though each video featured a different product that could range from, you know, foot peels to eyeliner tape, they were all connected by the hashtag crash test beauties. So anybody who watched one of the videos could just click on the hashtag and be taken to what is essentially a playlist of all the videos in that series. Helping viewers discover even more Facebook content from Ypsi.

I imagine that this would also work really well for fitness brands and just invent your own hashtag like "Get fit with Arnold" or something a lot more clever and create content that shows people the best exercises for different muscle groups and the connected all with your own hashtag to show them workouts for total body fitness. So this was just a really quick look at how hashtags work on different platforms, whether it's to engage in conversation on Twitter, uh, discover new content on Instagram or create a series of posts on Facebook. Of course, they're also used on other social media platforms like YouTube, LinkedIn, Reddit, and more, all in different capacities. But the number one tip that I have for you guys today is that if you use hashtags for business on any platform, remember to track them. See how many times are used, where they're used, when they're used and who is using them.

I'll try to cover how you can track all of this in another video and that is all we have time for today. If you have any questions, feel free to ask away in the comment section or just let me know what else you want to learn about. And if you found this video helpful, remember to like share and hit that subscribe button to find out when the next video comes out, which will contain even more tips on how to do all things in social media and digital marketing. Thank you for watching. I hope you learned something useful and I will see you next time. Bye.