Hashtags in Digital Marketing:Origin, Evolution, Role, and Effective Usage
A hashtag is essentially a metadata tag created by prefacing a key word, or a phrase typed without spaces between the words, with the hash symbol (#).
Origins and Evolution
To understand what role a hashtag plays, lets delve back into its origins. The idea of using hashtags was first mooted by an American blogger way back in 2007, as a way to cross-reference blogs with intersectional themes of interest. This remains at the core of what a hashtag is used for.
The hashtag took on a life of its own on the microblogging platform – X, then known as Twitter. It then faced some initial resistance, before being serially adopted across digital publications, blogging and social media platforms of note, with astonishing rapidity and enthusiasm.
Role in Digital Marketing
As well-known and well-used a device as hashtags have evolved into, confusion persists – even among experienced marketing professionals. The role it performs, the advantages it offers, and how it can be most effectively used in digital marketing.
If you own or manage a brand that uses content marketing as an integral part of its marketing mix, using a hashtag doesn’t just boost the reach of the message you seek to disseminate, but also heightens audience engagement by triggering discussions around linked topics.
It functions as a sort of non-contextual but highly intuitive search term, enabling users to access all content around the theme the hashtag defines, across a wide range of contexts and perspectives. Much of this content would be directly relevant to the user. That some of it may only be latently linked or even entirely unrelated to the intended area of interest, must not be a deterrence.
Effective Use of Hashtags
As with most things to do with digital marketing, there are no hard and fast rules. But here are some broad guidelines that we at Tizgee have put together to help content marketers make the best use of hashtags, based on our years of experience in content marketing:
- Take care to avoid non-alphanumeric characters. Most will break the hyperlink.
- Since there are no spaces between words in a hashtag phrase, make sure you avoid spelling errors. It may turn your hashtag into one that makes sense in a completely unintended and undesired way.
- Use hashtags that are neither too common (your content will be grouped with thousands of pieces of disparate content) or too obscure (you will not find enough pieces of content to be grouped with)
- Use your imagination to turn potentially long-winded, unwieldy hashtags into short and snappy ones that have a ring to them, and are at least easy-to-remember, if not hard-to-forget.
- Resist the temptation to hashtag all oft-used and catchy words and phrases. Some platforms may provide hashtag suggestions. Do not follow them blindly.
- Stay focused on hashtags that strategically align with your category, resonate with your audience and align strategically with your brand and/or business objectives.
- Some platforms will recommend hashtags. Don’t follow them blindly. Don’t overload your content with hashtags. Thumb rule: use a maximum of 4-6 hashtags for social media posts. 12-15 for long form content.
- Make sure your blog and social media accounts are set to public so they are exposed to the maximum number of people.
Of course, you can choose to not bother with all these guidelines and just repose your trust in Tizgee to run your content marketing campaigns. Feel free to touch base here or call us at 703-662-5343.
