Tips To Find and Use Popular Hashtags to Boost Your Social Media Presence

Familiarity with hashtags is doing a favour to marketing your business. Why? Hashtags are powerful to increase the brand reach, inspire brand amplification and push the content to the audience's screens who are searching for it.
Rather, hashtags have become the easiest way to expand influence beyond the existing audience. The audiences search for the distinct keywords using the relevant hashtags, then they can come across your posts and updates. Once they form a deep liking, they are sure to follow your brand.

How Can You Find and Select The Right Hashtags For Your Brand?
For your hard work to pay off, here we have talked about how you can find and select the appropriate hashtag for increasing the reach of your brand’s social media posts –

1. Conduct Thorough Research On Your Niche.
Give it some time. To use hashtags effectively, first researching and analyzing the business as well as the area of expertise is very important. Likewise, you can identify the specific words and phrases that resonate with the target market.

2. Make Sure To Leverage The Social Media Platforms.
Time to utilize and explore the social media platforms and online tools! From the online tools, you shall gather social media insights regarding the trending and popular hashtags prevalent in your business. Social media networks, additionally come up with real-time suggestions while you are typing. Thus, these are indeed convenient resources for finding hashtags.
Primarily, the hashtags are used on Twitter, Instagram and YouTube and the increasingly being found on Facebook and LinkedIn. There is a homepage or explore page on each of these social platforms where the trending topics and hashtags can be seen:

• Instagram
In the search bar, type the keyword that recognizes the trending hashtags. Click on the results and choose the "Tags" option to filter them. A sorted list of popular hashtags related to the keyword will appear. To see the top posts and hashtags, check Instagram's "Explore" page.

• Twitter
Visit the "Explore" page and place the cursor in the search bar. Type the keyword in the search bar, that is related to your sought-after trending hashtag. A list of the most popular hashtags related to the keywords will come up. Even check the "Topics" section on the left sidebar to find your niche's trending topics and hashtags.

• Facebook
You will have to type the search term in Facebook's search bar, relating to the trending hashtag you are in search of. You shall find the list of most popular hashtags relating to your keywords in the drop-down menu.

• YouTube
To find the trending topics and hashtags based on your industry, you will have to check the “Explore” page. There is yet another option – Visit the YouTube Homepage and turn the "Trend Alerts" on. Enter the keywords to track and set the notification frequency for the number of views per hour to trigger notifications, along with the YouTube category and language. Then, save the alert.

• LinkedIn
On the desktop version of LinkedIn, you shall find "My Network" on top, while on smartphones, it is on the bottom. Go to the "My Network". To check the network-relevant trending hashtags, scroll to the bottom.

3. Make Use of The Hashtag Research Tools
You can use Hashtag analytics software such as Brand24, BrandMentions, BuzzSumo, Digimind and Hashtagify to discover the most popular and relevant hashtags of your niche. Mostly, these are premium tools, but you can find them with a free trial.
It could be each tool contains unique features and capabilities, but their functioning principle is similar: enter the targeted keyword, and for your use, the software will generate a list of related hashtags. You shall get insights into the popularity, engagement and reach. As a result, you can come across the trending hashtags most relevant to your audience base.
There are hashtag research tools from where you can get a list of related hashtags and use them to expand your reach and increase engagement. These keywords even track the hashtags' performance over time. This information is useful to adjust the hashtag strategy and improve SMM efforts.

4. Remember the Social Media Listening Tools
You can better discover the trending hashtags when you monitor and track the social media conversations and activities focussed on your brand and industry. Choose a budget-friendly social media listening tool that will also suit your needs. Select from these popular choices like Brandwatch, Sprout Social and Hootsuite Insights.
Use relevant industry or brand-relevant keywords, hashtags or phrases to create a search query. You might choose from your main keywords, product names, the existing hashtags and even your company or CEO's name. The tool will bring up the most relevant hashtags to use based on your entry.

5. Start Competitor Analysis
Begin analyzing your competitor’s profiles and note down their frequently used hashtags for optimizing your social media strategy. You can gain insights into the effectiveness and know which should be used in posts to earn maximum impact.

6. Utilize the Online Communities
Take time and identify your industry or niche-relevant online communities. These could be Facebook groups, forums, LinkedIn groups or subreddits. You should join the communities and begin to monitor the discussions. Check out the posts and comments containing hashtags. Note down the frequently used hashtags.

7. Create A Varied Hashtags
Using combined general and niche hashtags, you can better diversify the hashtag approach. There are specific hashtags that could be right for you when you are focusing on a particular group, but the general ones reach a larger audience base.

8. Be Acquainted With the Hashtag Popularity.
The more strategic you are with your hashtag selection, the better you can maximize the visibility of content. If you use too many popular hashtags, then there is a high chance your content visibility will be hindered. On its flipside, when you use obscure hashtags, you won't see any desired outcome.

How Should You Use the Hashtags In The Right Way?
Either you are right or you are wrong when you are using hashtags on social media. There is a lot more than having the correct format or selecting the relevant keywords. When you are just starting, it is important to use the hashtags in such a way that your content are promoted to the right audience base. It means hashtag choices should be aligned with the content as well as the target audience. When you add irrelevant terms or include excessive hashtags, it could become spammy and turn the audience off.

At the same time, your account should be set to public. People would not come across your content, despite using hashtags when your profile is set in private.

Even make sure you are not stringing together a lot of words in a single hashtag. People will find it tough to understand your opinion. Maybe the long-tail keywords are trendy but you cannot leave behind the terms people would possibly search for.

Keep in mind, that there should be no space in your hashtag. Adding even one space will prove the hashtag fatal.

Regardless of the social network you are using, make sure to keep up with these best practices and make maximum utilization of your hashtags.

How Should You Use Hashtags On Major Social Networks?

1. Best Practices For Using Hashtags On Instagram
• Use 5 – 10 relevant hashtags.
• Write a great caption and definitely include business hashtags.
• Audiences might scroll away through a post if hashtags are just included. Including hashtags in comments keeps the caption neat and yet reaches the target audience base.
• Even an Instagram profile bio should contain hashtags.
• Access analytics for every post in your business account.
• Change the hashtags if the used ones are not generating enough impressions.

2. Ideal Practices For Using Hashtags On Facebook
• Use 2 – 5 relevant hashtags.
• Write a perfect description or a caption and then include hashtags.
• Include hashtags in any part of a written Facebook post or the comments.
• Group content in private Facebook groups using hashtags.
• To track how many times your hashtag has been used by other company profiles on Facebook, use the URL “facebook.com/hashtag/__" (at the end, the keyword should be included). You shall get the data on how many times the same hashtag has been used, even from the private Facebook profiles. This is how you can track the interaction between the users and your hashtags.

3. Appropriate Ways To Use Hashtags on LinkedIn
• Use 5 – 6 relevant hashtags.
• Incorporate hashtags wisely in LinkedIn posts – maybe in between the posts or at the end.
• Now LinkedIn is a professional platform, so the hashtags should be professionally used.
• Invite or request people to check out your niche-related tips and tricks.

4. Best Ways of Using Hashtags on Twitter
• Use 1 – 2 relevant hashtags.
• Since there is a character limit, use hashtags anywhere in a tweet – either at the beginning for context, in the middle for highlighting a keyword, or at the end to conclude.
• Add hashtags in your Twitter bio, while retweeting in replies, or comments.

5. Proper Ways For Using Hashtags On YouTube
Hashtags are better for boosting discoverability on YouTube, hence these are good for video optimization along with a few keywords. These are a few practices as suggested by Google Support:

• Use the hashtags in the video description or the playlist title.
• Use upto 5 tags per video to get the best results.
• Using over 60 hashtags will cause YouTube to ignore each of them. Over-tagging might remove the video from the platform.
• The video will be removed from the YouTube platform if the hashtags are misleading, hateful speech, irrelevant, sexual harassment or vulgar.

Your journey to find the best hashtags for your brand will start when you get online. Exactly how do the target audiences think, you will have to think the same and choose a few hashtags to follow? Next, after analyzing the contents and other listed hashtags, notice the ones that seem to offer more engagement. Thus, list the ones likely to work out for your campaign. You could, soon, embark on the roadmap to turn into the next popular brand!