Building Your Brand’s Hashtag Cloud

Are hashtags a focal point of your social media strategy? Specific platforms place higher discoverability on hashtags than others. Knowing how and when to use hashtags will help take your business to the next step. 

The platforms that focus the most on hashtags are Twitter and Instagram. You can use them to broaden your reach and help others discover your brand. Using hashtags on Facebook and LinkedIn is useful for increasing brand awareness and highlighting key points. Use them sparingly, and either in the first comment or one or two in the description. 

You can use hashtags for two primary purposes – branding and increasing discoverability.

Branded Hashtags:

Create a branded hashtag that captures the mission and core values of your brand. People should see your hashtag and instantly recognize that it’s your business. Whether that’s your business name or a phrase, it doesn’t matter. If you can get other people to use this hashtag when posting about your products or services, it will help reinforce your brand. 

Using Hashtag Tools: 

There are many tools to help you discover popular hashtags and relevant content. 

Hashtags can go both ways – start following hashtags to discover posts that are relevant to your industry! You can use tags as inspiration, or to keep an eye on your competition. A few good resources for hashtag monitoring are covered here in The 10 Best Hashtag Tools To Transform Your Content Marketing article. Whatever tool you use, just be sure that they are relevant to your content and that you don’t overdo it. 

Best practices: 

mix up your tags based on relevance, the ratio between popular medium and unique. You shouldn’t use the same hashtags for every post; they will not be effective as a blanket coverage. If you’re posting more than two or three hashtags, put them in the first comment instead of the description. Every post should have tailored hashtags that indicate the purpose and content of your post. Posting around 10-15 tags in the first comment will be a good start. 

Start using hashtags in your social strategy, keep a hashtag cloud to use consistent hashtags over time. Keep your tags in a word document or a spreadsheet so you can monitor and track your best-performing hashtags. In the future, you will use your hashtag cloud to refer to when you create your posts to optimize performance. 

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#Branding #Hashtags #Reach #SocialStrategy