4 Ways to Research Hashtags to Improve Your Social Engagement and Branding

What is a good hashtag to use?  Where can you go to see a listing of hashtags?  Are you using hashtags in your social updates?  If so, how are you using them to build social brand engagement?

This week, Social Media Examiner shared blog 4 Ways to Improve Engagement with Hashtags.   They did a good job of some quick pointers for sure.   Some folks are still in the dark about hashtags and how to use them for their practices so the Social Media Examiner blog should be helpful.  One of the tips was to choose hashtags carefully; along those lines, whenever I am teaching about social media, I always include reference sites practitioners can use to help research hashtags.    Because you want to choose hashtags that match your brand and avoid any hashtag hijacking.  Also, it helps if the hashtag you are using is relevant to your topic.  So in this blog post, I’m sharing the 4 ways we research hashtags for engagement and branding.

Step 1:  Once you have a list of words or if you need ideas of words, I like using hashtags.org   to research my hashtag and also if I am looking for ideas of hashtags to use.  They have modified their site and now offer a place to add a definition of your hashtag and tracking services!   I like utilizing this site for research because they pull background information on Hashtags from Twitter, Google+, Facebook, and other social networks.

Step 2:  Speaking of writing a definition, have you ever seen a hashtag and wondered what the heck does that mean?  This is where TagDef.com  comes in handy!  This site allows you to enter the hashtag and you can view in 7 languages or review the international versions in general the various definitions for the hashtag, how, where, and when it was used.  When it comes to creating new hashtags, especially for a product name, it is good to check multiple sites to see what it means in other countries too if you are a global business.

Step 3:  Ever wonder what hashtags are popular in your local area?  Or perhaps you have a workshop or event coming up in a particular region and would like to see if a trending hashtag could be used to support your event for that region?  Well, this is where I like to use Trendsmap.com   Trends map has data exclusively from twitter, however, you can enter a particular city or perhaps a region or even the world to see which hashtags are trending for the last seven days for that specific area.

Step 4:  I always, always, always, enter the hashtag onto the social media platform that I plan to use it to see what kind of updates contain that hashtag (if  any) as part of the last bit of research prior to launching a campaign.

These steps and the blog post mentioned above are for adding hashtags to your social campaigns. They are meant to be used when you are specifically looking to increase engagement and attract new clients and incorporating brand awareness.  I also wrote a very detailed article about hashtags and how to use them and the 8 Do’s and 7 Don’ts for Hashtags in DC Practice Insights.

 

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