Social media marketing should be a social experience. It’s a great opportunity to grow your brand, get your product noticed, and connect with your loyal fan base. Content is King, and utilizing popular and relevant hashtags can help every post you publish reach an even bigger audience. Hashtags are those pound (#) symbols listed in or after social media posts. Some find them annoying, I find them useful and fun!
A little history about the hashtag:
- Hashtags first became popular on Twitter, although they are used on many social media platforms today.
- Chris Messina is credited with the idea for using hashtags to group people together in 2007.
- You may also hear hashtags being called metadata tags.
- Hashtags can be used to expand your content reach, as well as group like-minded fans together.
- Hashtags help you target your intended market.
- Your content can be found more easily by using branded hashtags.
- Hashtags can help improve SEO while building your cannabis brand.
You can develop a hashtag strategy a few different ways:
Brand and Campaign Specific
Brand and Campaign Specific hashtags are those that you would use to establish and differentiate your brand or specific campaign that you might be running. Hashtags that you create for your own business could be your company name, your company tagline, an event name, or even a response hashtag. It’s a good idea to search Google first to ensure that your company hashtag is unique to your business or campaign; this ensures all your hash tagged posts are being grouped appropriately. It would defeat the purpose to utilize a hashtag that directs fans to another company or direction, so a little bit of research goes a long way. Keep your hashtags short, about 2-3 words, and remember that it’s not necessary to use a lot of different hashtags in every post. Again, content is everything, and it’s always better to have one engaging hashtag that people will use, as opposed to eight hashtags that no one will care about.
Hashtags help to connect a group of people who share similar ideas and feelings. This allows you to correspond directly with people you’d like to chat with, while connecting others with similar likes. If you’re responding to people using a specific hashtag, it can expand your reach even further.
Trending Topics
Trending topics are a surefire way to get more traction on hashtags that you use for your cannabis brand. You can find trending topics by searching Google or Twitter for something as simple as your desired keyword with the “#” symbol to find popular topics that people are already talking about. It’s important to remember that trending hashtags change often, so checking trends on a regular basis is necessary. While using trending hashtags, only use those that relate to your brand and/or your content. Spamming hashtags to try and gain a larger audience is frowned upon. You can also use Hashtags.org (free), or Trendsmap.com (monthly charge) for more drilled-down research and utilization.
Content Specific
Content hashtags simply relate to each post’s content, and can help improve the Search Engine Optimization (SEO) of your posts. Content hashtags help you to find updates seen by people searching for your hashtag. These might relate to your product, the cannabis lifestyle, an upcoming event, or your specific location. By engaging with people who are using similar hashtags (meaning liking, retweeting, and commenting), you can create Human-2-Human interaction and help strengthen your content hashtags.
The background piece of using hashtags effectively is to look at which posts and which hashtags are performing well on your pages. One hashtag will not work for every dispensary or cannabis product, and you may see different engagement with your hashtags on different posts. Using various campaigns and hashtags, then analyzing the results of each, will help you to determine which hashtags are worth repeating.
Send us your feedback and success stories on your social media platform of choice using #HappyHashtagging!
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