Hashtags can be a fun attention grabber, but it can be easy to #OverHashtag.
You may not believe it, but before it was a dynamic communications tool and invaluable marketing method, the hashtag was just a simple pound sign, a remnant of a bygone era just taking up space on our telephone keypads.
Never as useful as the star button, which could be used to call someone back (who remembers having to dial *69 in those dark, pre-caller ID days?) the pound sign seemed destined to languish in obscurity until some genius at Twitter thought to dust it off and start using it to create searchable terms by adding a hashtag onto a word.
Now #hashtags are the hip way to communicate online. We’ve used them to create new holidays (#motivationalmonday, #throwbackthursday, etc.), root on our favorite sports teams (sorry to all of our Falcons friends who were all set to #RiseUp) and add entirely new words to the English language (such as yolo, or the word hashtag itself, which entered the Oxford English Dictionary in 2009) but for businesses, the hashtag represents an entirely new medium to carry on a conversation with customers.
So Who Did it Right?
Look at Red Bull as a great example of a company using a hashtag correctly. Their famed #PutACanOnIt campaign actually started when one of their customers posted a photo on Twitter of a Red Bull can shot in forced perspective over a Mini Cooper so as to make it look like one of the company’s fleet of custom-wrapped cars. The company was smart enough to create a hashtag around it and run with it, creating their own series of #PutACanOnIt shots, and soon customers were joining the fun, putting cans on anything from Little Tikes cars to camels.
Sometimes, though, a brand can get a lot of mileage out of a hashtag that just happens to be trending that day. KFC did an excellent job of capitalizing on #NationalFriedChickenDay when it started trending out of nowhere. And while Audi didn’t start the #IWantAnR8 hashtag (it was created by a Twitter user who, naturally, wanted a car), they parlayed it into a massively popular contest and ad campaign.
So what do these success stories all have in common? Red Bull launched the hashtag, but with inspiration from their customers. KFC and Audi capitalized on a hashtag that was launched outside the company.
In short, what they all have in common is that none of them were trying too hard, which is where most companies fail.
#TakeItDownANotch #SRSLY
Look, you can see a nice bump in engagement by littering your every social media post with #followforfollow #likeforlike #f4f #l4l #pleaselikeme #plm #prettypleasegivemeattention #ppgma but it’s not the kind of engagement that’s going to turn into paying customers. You’ll become very popular with other social media marketers, but very few of them will convert.
And while you shouldn’t overdo it, clearly there are huge gains to be made by using hashtags strategically to communicate with your customers and keep your company’s brand out there as part of the great conversation happening everyday online.
So the question becomes how much is too much when it comes to hashtagging? How do you strike that balance between being disengaged and being entirely too #engaged?
In short, how many hashtags should you use?
The answer is three. Or it’s none. It depends on what you’re using.
Is that It? You’re Not Going To Elaborate?
We should probably elaborate on that, so you don’t think we just made it up.
That number actually comes from social media analysts Locowise, who looked at three months of data on both Twitter and Instagram (August-October 2015, which is a century ago by online standards but the data still holds up).
When it came to Instagram, the company looked at, “more than 1,500 active Instagram accounts that posted 135,000+ posts in the three-month period and had 300+ million followers combined.”
What they found bore out that three hashtags is the magic number, with posts containing three hashtags seeing a 3.03 percent engagement rate (which measures overall interaction from shares to likes and comments). Surprisingly, posts that had no hashtags were the second most engaged, with a rate of 3.02 percent.
So you get a marginal boost in engagement by sticking three hashtags onto your posts vs. not worrying about it; and what’s more, the numbers dive sharply beyond three. At four hashtags, engagement drops to 2.72 percent and trends downward as you add more. (Worth noting: the study had to include the number of hashtags all the way up into the so-high-its-almost-sarcastic “21 and up” category. If you’re including that many hashtags, you’re starting to scare us).
Interestingly, despite the notable drop in engagement when using more than three hashtags, the study found that 49 percent of posts contained four or more.
There’s Something About Twitter
Twitter is a different animal, however. The 140-character limit on the platform that practically invented the hashtag necessitates a slight thriftiness of words, and entire days have been spent at marketing firms all over this great country crafting the perfect hashtag to drive engagement and fit in under the wire.
Which is why it’s such a surprise to see that they don’t help.
That’s right, according to the study, Tweets without a hashtag saw an engagement rate of 1.9 percent, declining to 1.84 on Tweets with one hashtag and dropping steadily from there.
And while Instagram users were piling on the hashtags despite the knock in engagement, Twitter users seem to have caught on. Of the 600,000 Tweets from 1,300 high-profile accounts included in the study, just 4.75 percent used three or more hashtags. None used more than four. And 55.8 percent didn’t use any at all.
So as with all things, it’s important to keep in mind who your audience is, why they interact with you and where you’re interacting with them. Inserting too many hashtags not only wastes your time, it can damage your brand.
If you want to stay #trendy without becoming #waytootrendyitsannoying, contact us for more information about reaching your customers the right way at (904) 638-7555, or fill out our contact form and we’ll be in touch soon.
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