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Why use a hashtag?
On Instagram, Twitter, Facebook, and LinkedIn, hashtags are essential. They help you spread your message to a wider audience, align your brand with a theme, encourage user-generated content, and best of all, boost engagement. Tweets with hashtags gain double the engagement as those without.
But for your brand to benefit from this engagement lift, you can’t just pull hashtags out of a hat. They have to be relevant, popular within your industry, and engaging your audience. This blog will show you how to find them.
Who owns a hashtag?
When it comes to brand engagement, there are two types of hashtags you can use -
Brand specific
These are hashtags, used by brands to gain campaign traction. They might be for a brand (#Nike, #Amazon) or campaign (#JustDoIt, #PrimeDay). You can try hijacking these hashtags for your own business benefit, but not as a long-term strategy.
Generic
These are the hashtags you can use to gain traction. They’re not brand focused, but generic terms that people use regularly as part of their posting habits.
They’re simple and wide-reaching, covering specific hobbies (#travel, #fitness), industries (#beauty, #fashion) or emotions (#love, #happy).
They’re also common. #photography was used 2.19 times per second last year across all social media networks.
This post from National Geographic was the most engaging post with #photography in the last 13 months. But that doesn’t mean they own that hashtag.
These hashtags have a huge reach. But they’re too broad. To make your content more engaging, you need to find your industry trending hashtags.
How to identify trending hashtags on Twitter
Twitter offers tailored trends for each user, with industry stories based on your location, and who you follow. You can personalize this for different locations too (useful if you’re targeting somewhere different to where you are).
The Trends for you feature on Twitter helps you find the conversations your consumers are engaging with.
Dig into these stories to find the hashtags that are engaging your audience.
But remember, these real-time trends only look at what is happening in your industry now, and won’t find you consistently popular hashtags. For that, you need to search further.
How to find Instagram hashtags
For Instagram posts, you need more detective work for your hashtag tracking.
Start by searching for your industry in the Instagram search bar, to find the most popular hashtag for your industry.
Instagram will display the current most popular posts for that hashtag, like so -
You can quickly find the current top trending posts for any hashtag on Instagram.
Look at each of these posts in depth to find the hashtags these Instagrammers use to gain engagement, then try them yourself.
Again, this tactic only finds you the hashtags that are trending now. Not the ones that engage your industry throughout the year.
How to find the hashtags that trend all year round
Out of all the hashtag tracking tools available, there’s one easy way to find the industry hashtags that consistently engage.
Quick Search.
It’s your social media search engine for fast brand and communication insights. And that includes finding trending hashtags.
Search for your specific industry, and Quick Search will find the most popular hashtags for that topic. Whether that’s from the last 24 hours (for hashtag-jacking) or over 13 months (to get a long-term overview of the most effective hashtags).
For the automotive industry, hashtags like #supercars, #carsofinstagram, and #carlifestyle were the most popular in the last 13 months.
You can click on any of the hashtags to see more related ones.
Clicking on #carswithoutlimits revealed #exoticcars and #itswhitenoise.
The trick with hashtag hacking is finding hashtags with a balance of reach and engagement. Using hashtags with huge engagement may seem a good idea, but hitting a more relevant audience will drive up your engagement.
This is where Quick Search comes into its own. You can compare the impact of hashtags alongside your brand name to see which is most impactful.
In this case, I compared the results for Chevrolet AND several of the hashtags found above. (See why AND is so important in my Boolean search operator blog post).
It’s clear that #carporn has the best reach. But #carswithoutlimits gains more engagement per mention when linked to Chevrolet.
This gives you a 13-month overview of your most impactful hashtags, but you can change your search duration to 7 days to find your most recent engaging hashtags. The methods above can also be replicated in Talkwalker’s Free Social Search to gain a quick 7-day insight.
Find your trending hashtags with Quick Search
The new way to find trending hashtags that your consumers use
But what about my hidden hashtag hack?
So far, you’ve seen what hashtags consumers use and actively engage when discussing a product.
But what about when they’re not talking about it? Just sharing pictures of it?
Using Quick Search, with proprietary image recognition technology, you can find images of brands without any written mentions of those brand. Simply put, hidden mentions.
Take Alpro for example -
With no mention of Alpro in the text, this post was only discovered through image recognition.
When you look at the related hashtags for the brand mentions, and the hashtags related to the detected images of Alpro, you get different results.
For written mentions of Alpro, #alpro, #vegan, and #healthyfood are most popular.
But for hashtags related to images of Alpro, you now have #weightloss, #fitness, #februdairy appearing in your results.
This method finds the hidden hashtags consumers use when sharing your brand. Pretty cool, huh?
Hack those hashtags
Hashtags are an essential part of engaging your audience. And now, you know exactly which ones to use to gain that traction.
To find the right hashtag for your brand, request a demo of Quick Search. Or to help you organize the hashtags you use day to day (with stats on the most engaging), download my free trending hashtag tracker below.
