How to Incorporate Hashtags into your Social Media Post
Welcome to The Social Lab! This blog will not only help you navigate your personal social media, but also investigate marketing trends and examples of great social media work. Do you have something we should talk about? Make sure to send us an email or contact us on social media.
Today in The Social Lab, we are going to talk about how to integrate hashtags into your social media post. If you want to learn more about whether or not hashtags matter, you can read our previous post here.
First, lets look at twitter. In figure 1 you notice that we utilized a singular hashtag within the post itself. This is a great way to keep the flow of the wording, while still using a hashtag to potentially increase engagement. Why only 1 hashtag? The text for this post only contained one word that we thought was worth adding a hashtag to, which was horror. The other words within the text aren't popular enough to hashtag and receive results on. Some people may just say to hashtag everything, but this will result in your post looking "ugly", which will then come off as spam.
figure 1
Now let's look at figure 2. Here we added hashtags to the end of the post. While we could have added a hashtag to "ice cream" in the body of the text, we felt that adding it to the end would improve the aesthetic quality of the content itself. Reading the text is a lot easier when their are not hashtags involved. Also, we wanted to add a hashtag that wasn't in the body of the text to begin with. Therefore, we added # foodie at the end, to improve engagement.
figure 2
So what does this all mean? When using hashtags in your Twitter post, you need to be cognizant of the following things.
Is your post easy to read and follow?
Is your post engaging, even without hashtags?
Is your post nice to look at?
All three of these things matter more than adding hashtags for the sake of it. We have all been on Twitter and noticed those posts with numerous hashtags that made the content difficult to read. We promise that they will not be creating engaged followers with this method.
How about Instagram? The great thing about this platform is that you can add your hashtags as a comment on your original post. Notice in figure 3 our original post is simply, "Cheesecake rocks!!". We then immediately comment on the post with numerous hashtags.
Figure 3
When an individual sees this post, especially on their phone, they will only see the original text (figure 4), unless they click on comments. What this means is their is no reason to include hashtags in your original post, because you can simply add it into the comment section.
figure 4
Lastly, what about Facebook? Unlike many other social media platforms, hashtags are not as important on Facebook. Unless there is a trending event that is using a hashtag, we rarely incorporate them into our Facebook posts.
Do you agree with our strategy? How do you use hashtags in your social media posts? Comment below or email us right away!
The Socii Project team
