Today when almost all social media channels support hashtags, there are a lot of organizations running a successful campaign based on hashtags or feature one. There are brands that feature a hashtag often at the end of advertisements and so. There are TV shows also that display hashtags on rolling the credits when celebrities employ hashtags in order to promote themselves.
In most of the examples, hashtags bring conversions about particular topics or the products. Nevertheless, businesses can also use these for many other reasons. A hashtag can be simply used to market some new campaigns as well as products, run competitions and contests, ask their fans to offer input related to a new company development or to connect a brand to a famous item or a story.
The best thing about hashtag campaigns is this that these are too much economical and even totally free, many times. The more strategically you spend money on some hashtag campaign, greater are the rewards.
Major Aspects to take into account when launching a Hashtag Campaign
You must have definitely heard of Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, and Linkedin, etc. The list has got no end. You must be having fifty plus social media outlets to make a choice from, so you may get attracted towards setting up a profile on different social networks, however, it is important to think about below-listed factors before you start the hashtag campaign.
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Your Audience
The very first thing you need to be concerned about is your audience. Your target audience is one of the important considerations. You need to figure out the audience of a specific channel. For instance: if your business has got a business to business (B2B) model, Linkedin will be more suitable than Facebook. On the contrary, if your business sells its products straight away to the customers, your audience may be more active on Facebook, Instagram or Twitter.
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Your Resources
Who will be more responsible for managing the social media strategy or any plan. You must also look at the financial resources you can invest in your hashtag campaigns, which may depend on your marketing budget. Just keep in mind that social media accounts without any activity is even worse than having any presence at all. This is one of the factors that play a key role in your choice of a proper channel.
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Your Business Plan
Have you devised a detailed and comprehensive content plan for any hashtag campaign? Designing an account on a social media channel is an easy part. You cannot develop content without knowing the network that you may use. For example: post copy may be liable to work properly on Facebook, but this may not essentially translate into a quality or engaging content.
A Step to Step Guide to Begin your Hashtag Campaign
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Research your Competitors and Brand
You need to determine the recent position of your brand on different social media platforms. It includes making out how powerful Twitter and Instagram and other efficient mediums. Who is blogging and talking about your brand and what is its context? What kind of response you are receiving from your people. What are the keywords related to your brand? These are some of the important questions you need to answer before starting with your hashtag campaign.
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Measure the present influence of your Brand
You may use this information for after campaign analysis. This can be calculated by using some monitoring tool. This will offer some important information like contributors, reach, impressions, users and more.
Step1: Decide what are the relevant keywords your Brand Name is related to and make a List
Knowing these keywords may help you with related hashtags, copies, and concepts for the campaign.
It is as important as it is to monitor your competitors in your very own brand. This may permit you to gain a wide perspective of your industry while offering you guidance in building up your hashtag campaign. It is actually not a very great idea to run a campaign which may be similar to your competitors.
The research strategy is quite simple. You need to gauge their existing reach and follow on different social media outlets, scan their copies properly while checking their influencers. Checking on the strategy of your competitors will probably reveal some valuable information which may be used in your hashtag campaign.
Step 2: Determine your Company Goals
Your campaign team needs to determine the goals of the hashtag. You can simply be caught in driving innovation and creativity around your campaigns to such a point that its key metrics and KPIs may become vague. You just need to figure out the motive of your hashtag campaign which may be to raise awareness for some new product, increase the number of followers or to ask the consumers to download your app. Different metrics like a number of mentions; followers and RTs will certainly improve the results of a successful hashtag campaign. Nevertheless, it is important to define your goals as it is really crucial to devise an efficient and sound content strategy.
For instance: To measure awareness properly, metrics like volume, reach, exposure and amplification will be important. Likewise, for relevant, engagement metrics will be the number of replies, participants, retweets and so on.
Step 3: Create a Hashtag that Resonates With Your Audience
A great hashtag is an important element of any hashtag campaign. Without an efficient hashtag, there will not be any connection between the contest and the generated content. In short, hashtags help in developing both brands as well as the contest while serving it as a means of driving and sharing user participation.
However, designing a hashtag that echoes well with your audience can be tricky. Id your contest has got a particular timeframe, and you wish to come up with some hashtag which is unique and catchy, then it needs to be:
- Memorable
- Short
- Rare
- Relevant
- Universal
Reason 4: Carry Out the Campaign with your Influencers and Team
Just like fundraising campaign, it is important that you get your influencers and team on board. Get in touch with the marketing partners and influencers, mainly those having a massive following. And it is also important that you request them to post, tweet, post or even blog about the hashtag campaign. It could be really simple because offering them sample text or some other content can be easily copied and pasted.
Final Thought
Most of the social media analytics tools work in real-time. So it is better to set up some suitable and reliable tracking tools before starting off your campaign. This will make your access to relevant data a lot more easy during and afterward too. For instance: When it comes to Twitter it consumes a lot of time to access the tweets that may be more than a couple of days old or so. It may also be difficult to gather and achieve the tweets in real time. So, it is better that you set up the tools of your choice before beginning a campaign.