Now that Twitter and Instagram have been around for several years, I’m sure most people are familiar with the concept of Hashtag. For those of you who do not know what it is, according to Wikipedia a hashtag is “a type of label or metadata tag used on social network and microblogging services which makes it easier for users to find messages with a specific theme or content”.
Nevertheless as the two images above clearly illustrate, some people just seem to overuse it. To tell you the truth, I have used multiple hashtags in a single post hoping that would lead to more leads and traffic. Now let’s learn together how many hashtag we should be using in one post so we don’t look needy/desperate and simultaneously get higher engagement from our audience.
Twitter’s own research into hashtags concludes that there is significant advantage to using hashtags since individuals can see a 100% increase in engagement while brands can see a 50% increase by effectively using hashtags.
That said, Buddy Media found out that one of two hashtags per post appear to be the max. As a matter of fact, when you use more than 2 hashtags, your engagement actually drops by 17%!
Since Hashtags were introduced to Facebook in 2013, there are some people out there who do not know that this function is available on this social media platform at all.
Though posts without hashtags outperform those with hashtags on Facebook back in 2013, the research conducted recently concludes that posts with 1 or 2 hashtags averaged the highest interaction of 593.
Now what about Instagram? Well the data comes from a set of users with 1,000 or fewer followers shows us that interaction is in fact the highest on Instagram posts with 11+ #hashtags! So even if your post looks like the below image, you are doing nothing wrong:)
Hashtag for Twitter/Instagram vs Facebook
- On Twitter, hashtags allow you to see all tweets about a particular topic. Instagram also allow users to include hashtags as a filter to find information on specific topics.
- Twitter and Instagram users are much more likely to be interested in finding content around a certain topic which increases the value of hashtags.
- Facebook uses their rules and algorithms to determine what is seen from a click on a hashtag. Facebook is said to take into account factors such as how popular a post is, how closely you’re related to the page that posted it, and how often you interact with the poster before showing you what is seen from a click on a hashtag.
Make sure to keep what’s discussed in this post when you use #hashtag in your posts!
Read article on hashtag for multiple social media platforms here:
https://blog.bufferapp.com/a-scientific-guide-to-hashtags-which-ones-work-when-and-how-many
Read article on hashtag for Facebook here:
https://www.postplanner.com/how-to-use-hashtags-on-facebook/
Read article on the differences in hashtag searches here:
http://www.marketergizmo.com/a-beginners-guide-to-hashtag-use-on-facebook/