Welcome to Marketing Monday, where I give you tips and tricks for being your own content marketer. This week’s post is all about why you should do your research before using hashtags.
I’ve talked on this blog before about the value of discussing your mistakes in your content marketing. I gave the example of how I ended up with my very first ever stitches by being stupid with an immersion blender. This time I’m here to talk to you about a mistake I recently made when it comes to hashtags.
Hashtags
As I’ve mentioned before, the proper use of hashtags can be a great way to organically build your following on social media. It’s more than doubled my followers on both Twitter and Instagram, with similar results for my clients. I mentioned that finding hashtags is easy because both Twitter and Instagram suggest popular hashtags for you as soon as you start to type something in.
Well, another way to get followers is by doing a search of some of the hashtags you use. For example, as a content marketer, I sometimes search “#contentmarketing” on social media to see what comes up. If there are accounts I’m not familiar with that seem to be doing cool things, I’ll follow them and like and/or comment on a few of their posts, which will help get their attention and then maybe they’ll decide to follow me back. It’s a great way to gain online visibility and establish yourself as an authority in your field.
Content Marketer vs. Content Creator
I discovered a problem when I recently did this with the hashtags “contentcreator” and “contentcreation.” They had both come up as suggestions whenever I started to put in “content” and I thought, “Yeah, I’m a content creator,” so I used it.
Until I did a search of content creators on Twitter and realized it had nothing to do with content marketing. Instead, they tend to be making more creative content for pay: video game graphics, fashion design, film, YouTube videos, etc.
Most of them are fine, they’re just not talking about what I’m talking about. Quite a few of them appear to be amateurs and they are not accounts with which I would want to be associated – and using the same hashtag they’re using will associate you with them, even if you have nothing else in common.
Conclusion
So next time you start promoting your latest blog post on social media, don’t be like me and choose any old hashtag the site suggests for you. Do your homework and look at what other people using that hashtag are talking about. Are their topics relevant to what you want to talk about? Are these the kinds of people with whom you’d like to be associated? If yes, consider reaching out to them for a content partnership. If not, choose another hashtag.
Thanks for reading! If you like what you see here, you can sign up for my newsletter at the top of this page to make sure you never miss an update. If you still have questions about content marketing (or content creation!) let’s chat.
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