How to Effectively Use Hashtags for Your E-commerce Business: The Dos and Don’ts

Hashtags have become a new way of marketing your product over social media platforms. It has the capacity to directly hit the target audience and create an impactful reputation. Hashtags and marketing go hand in hand, as they can be used to create witty, humorous, or highly engaging content for any business. 

The more the audience pays attention to your marketing tactics, the more likely they will become your customer. Hashtags let you discover a new segment of customers and vice versa. It gives you enough room to experiment in marketing in whichever way you want. 

Using hashtags in e-commerce or any type of business gives you insightful information about who you should target. Why and how? There are also certain occasions when you can extensively use hashtags to get more traction on your website. 

Are you still trying to figure out why to use hashtags? Keep reading to understand the basics of e-commerce hashtags and when to use them. 

What are Hashtags?

Hashtags consist of groups of words starting with a # symbol, such as #Blackfriday #Seasonsale, and many more. These hashtags are easily observed under social media handles such as Twitter, Instagram, Facebook, YouTube, and TikTok. But why do people use different hashtags? 

Talking about Instagram is estimated to have over 1 billion active users, and 63% of them log in daily. Not only this, but almost 90% of them follow at least one brand account!

Audiences present on these social media platforms follow hashtags. If you incorporate different hashtags under your caption, there is a high chance that the followers will notice your product. 

It doesn’t matter if they follow you or not. Using the most targeted hashtags brings you an abundance of traction that can be displayed through likes, views, comments, and shares. 

For instance, if you are using #springseason in your social media account and any random person has used the same hashtag under their content, their followers will also see your content. Despite not following your account, they could still see your content, increasing your brand’s visibility. 

The Benefits of Hashtags For E-commerce Businesses

Nowadays, many e-commerce entrepreneurs use hashtags for their businesses. 

Let’s look at the benefits of using e-commerce hashtags on your social media platforms:-

• It helps you highlight products and services and makes them more visible to the audience. More visibility causes enhanced engagement and improves your company’s likes, shares, followers, and comments.
  
  In fact, on Twitter, using 1 or 2 hashtags doubles the engagement in your account.
  
• Brands using hashtags in their posts are often perceived as new generation and drive more awareness. It is mostly used in memes, jokes, or other engaging content.
  
• It helps create buzz around the brand and opens the doors for interactions. Moreover, since the use of social media has become prevalent in recent years, companies that actively participate in social media activities blend effortlessly with the younger generation.
  
• People who know about your hashtags can easily learn about your company on social media. 

• Hashtags also keep your content organized and give you a bunch of different ideas to create the content around. 

What Hashtags Should You Be Using for E-Commerce?

Choosing a hashtag doesn’t come with a rigid rule. Companies can search for what types of hashtags would best suit their nature. Research more about the popular hashtags for e-commerce, and you’ll have a more organized idea of what type of hashtags can be used for your online activities. 

However, it is advised to mix popular hashtags with unpopular ones. Popular hashtags help you gain more content traction and build more followers. In contrast, unpopular hashtags help you hit the target audience and niche zones. 

How to do Hashtag Research

Here are a few steps that you can follow while researching hashtags:-

• Start with a core keyword: Discover the core objective of your content and understand what kind of buzzword you want to use or create. It relates to the product you’re selling or any random content that moves around your company’s genre.
  
• Generate more keywords around it: Next step is using your creative mind and building more hashtags around it. For instance, if you have an apparel brand, your hashtags could be– #fashionable, #seasonsale, #festiveseason, and more tags around similar lines.
  
• Understand each hashtag’s usage and popularity: Research more about a popular hashtag for e-commerce and use it along with the others. As mentioned, popular hashtags help you gain more followers and increase engagement with your content. Moreover, customers also get to know about your brand and discover it in-depth.
  
• Organize them into a spreadsheet: Categorize each content you want to post on a spreadsheet. Make a concise list of hashtags you want to use in the content and organize them strategically. The categories could be– fashion, beauty, lifestyle, health, games, humor, and whatnot.
  
• Structure the social media content strategy from your research: Once you’re done with your research, the last step is to structure your social media content strategy based on the research. Remove all the excess content if you have and include only the relevant ones with the potential to hit the target market. 

How to Effectively Use Hashtags for Your E-commerce Business: The Dos and Don’ts

After clearly understanding how hashtags can help your business grow, let’s look at how effectively you can use your hashtags. What you should and shouldn’t do with your social media content.

The Dos:

Use hashtags appropriately to promote your content and offerings

The relevance of hashtags becomes negligible when used n high frequency. Using too many tags under your social media posts would make your content cluttered, and the audience might perceive your company as spammy. 

Identify at least 2-4 relevant and most effective hashtags for your content. But how can you understand the relevance or popularity of hashtags?

Social media influencers, celebrities, YouTubers, and bloggers often use those hashtags that add meaning to their content. You can take inspiration from their hashtags and add the most relevant ones under your content. This way, you would use significant hashtags and indirectly promote your content under famous hashtags. 

Here are some of the social media platforms where using hashtags is frequent. 

Twitter

Although Twitter has some character limitations with its content, you must be precise and direct with your e-commerce hashtags. You can incorporate them either at the beginning, in the middle, or at the end of your content. 

However, if you feel your content is more meaningful and has barely any room for hashtags, you can avoid using them. Always give priority to the content you generate. Some of the most prominent examples of hashtag campaigns on Twitter are– 

#ShareACoke by Coca-Cola, #HereToCreate by Adidas, #PutACanOnIt by Red bull, and many more. 

Facebook

Facebook hashtags help you categorize specific categories and are also a part of group conversations. Hashtags trending on Facebook generally appear below the search bar. Moreover, relevant hashtags for e-commerce can be found in public and private groups. Since most of the accounts on Facebook are private, you can still use hashtags in your conversation and interact with the audience. 

Instagram

On Instagram, you can use up to 30 tags under your posts. However, you shouldn’t get carried away with the quantity. Use 2-3 essential and effective e-commerce hashtags under your posts to make you stand out even more. Keep the content engaging, and use specific tools to make your Instagram page more appealing. 

You can add the hashtags after adding a 1-2 liner caption. It can be added at the beginning; however, it might alter your content if the placement of hashtags needs to be corrected. 

YouTube

For the past few years, YouTube has become a strong social media platform for many target audiences. The content creation on YouTube is vast, and people have now started incorporating hashtags into their descriptions. 

The audience can click on those hashtags and immediately land on the videos with the same hashtags. As an e-commerce entrepreneur, you can incorporate hashtags in the description or title. 

Try articulating your hashtags, and always prefer quality over quantity. Crowding your content with too many hashtags could get you flagged. 

Keep track of the competition

Apart from considering what type of hashtags for e-commerce you’re using, keep an eye on what your competitors are using. Remember that the hashtags you use are not just promoting your brand. The main idea behind using hashtags is to generate some traffic on your channel so that people would get to know about your business better. 

There are certain digital tools you can use to enhance customer engagement. Moreover, hashtags alone can be a brilliant marketing tool if used correctly.

Leverage branded hashtags

Branded hashtag means when brands create specific hashtags and use those on their content in social media. Using branded hashtags magnifies a brand’s reach and gives effective results. According to Jumper Media, branded hashtags incorporate 70% of all the hashtags on Instagram. 

These are created in order to be more specific with your brand. Although branded hashtags in e-commerce could be challenging, they can give you outstanding results if done properly. 

The Don’ts:

Don’t use hashtags excessively

Too much of anything can negatively impact the overall. As mentioned, avoid using multiple hashtags in your content and believe in simplicity. The quantity of hashtags doesn’t matter much. What matters is how and what type of tags you can use.  

The hashtags also tell about the summary of your content, which shouldn’t be too long. Therefore, maintain a minimum number of hashtags that could be effective. Platforms like YouTube and Instagram permit up to 30 hashtags per post. But to make your content more effective, only 3-4 hashtags are enough.

Avoid using lengthy hashtags

The purpose of hashtags is to convey your content using straightforward terms, which implies using a word or two. Don’t make sentences out of your hashtags. For instance, hashtags like #howcanyouimproveyourmarketing would be lengthy and make readers ambiguous about what you are trying to tell them. 

When it comes to e-commerce hashtags, remember your brand’s sole purpose and give it a 1 or 2-word hashtag. 

Don’t hijack hashtags

Hijacking hashtags means using a hashtag that is meant for some other purpose. For instance, DiGiorno made it to the headlines using the hashtag #WhyIStayed, originally meant for domestic violence. Because the company didn’t check the tag before using it, it faced backlash, and on public demand, it was taken down by the firm. 

Business owners can take inspiration from this case and should read about the background before using any hashtags. 

Don’t add hashtags only at the end of a post

One of the best ways of using hashtags is to incorporate them between the caption and the content of your post. Don’t just include them at the end, as customers may ignore them. Including them within the content attracts customer attention and creates buzz. 

On Twitter, there is a limit in character use of only 140, making it one of the most appropriate platforms for using hashtags in between. It increases visibility and makes your content much better. 

Conclusion

Hashtag campaigns, captions, and witty content are all new ways of marketing your product. It makes you relate to the audience and helps you understand their thoughts. It also helps you create viral content and brings attention to the next level.

Therefore, companies should be well aware of the use of hashtags in their posts to get as much traction as possible. 

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