3 Reasons Why Businesses Should Use Hashtags

In case it wasn’t already obvious how deeply they’ve integrated into our online world, last year the American Dialect Society named “hashtag” its word of the year. If you spend a lot of time online — especially in the context of social media — then you’re probably well aware of the enormous popularity of hashtags and the quickness with which they came to prominence.

If not, here’s a quick crash course: Hashtags are a way that users on social media sites such as Facebook, Twitter, and Google+ can add searchable tags the content that they upload by prefacing it with hash symbol (#). Other users can then search for a specific hashtag, and receive query results including all content with that tag.

While private users have adopted the innovation with open arms, businesses have been somewhat slow to recognize the potential of hashtags. Here are 3 reasons your business should use hashtags:

Promotion

In recent survey by RadiumOne, about half of those who responded said that they would be more inclined to share a hashtag if they were offered an incentive like a discount for doing so. That’s a great development for businesses. Not only does it open an excellent avenue for viral marketing, but it allows you to easily keep tabs on the success of your promotion.

Targeting

By using a hashtag finder like Hashtag Scout, you can see what hashtags related to your business are trending, and include them in your posts to target potential customers. This is a great, simple way to create awareness of your product among precisely the people who would be interested in it, and also to get an idea of what people are saying about your product, as well as a variety of related topics.

Integration

Though they initially rose to popularity on Twitter, hashtags have since been adopted by most of the major players in social media. They can now be found in use on platforms like Instagram, Google+, and Facebook. The integration of hashtags in platforms will only continue to rise as more companies find them effective for tagging content, as well as an enhancing the user experience, allowing visitors to easily sort through related content on a topic of interest.

Hashtags can be enormously useful for your business if properly executed (more on that here), and the sooner you start experimenting with and implementing a strategy that includes them, the better off your business will be. Hashtags seem to only be growing in popularity, and with the development of tools like Hashtag Scout, using them to help promote your business is just too easy to overlook.