You’ve likely seen some absurd hashtags in your time, perhaps most notoriously #susanalbumparty, a hashtag intended to celebrate Susan Boyle’s album release back in 2012. While it’s easy to get them laughably and ridiculously wrong, hashtags are an immensely helpful tool for filing different types of posts and increasing visibility and engagement, especially on platforms such as Instagram, Twitter, LinkedIn, and TikTok. One of the easiest ways to create more visibility for a post – and to avoid the above hashtag blunder – is to hijack onto a relevant trending hashtag.
Not sure what hashtags are trending? Not to worry – there are always international days of various things happening, such as #denimday or #worldnutelladay. See below what days are coming up in April:
While they may not seem immediately relevant to your business, there are still immense benefits that come with incorporating their corresponding hashtags into your posts. These include:
1. Increase invisibility and engagement
As mentioned above, hashtags work as a kind of filing system, so any post containing a certain hashtag is instantly searchable to anyone. This means anyone - not just followers of your social media page(s) – can find your post by searching the hashtag, expanding the number of potential viewers. Furthermore, hashtags are clickable and refer users to a grid or list of posts also using that hashtag, facilitating the chance for people interested in the hashtag to browse more posts using it. As such, your post is more likely to attract people interested in the hashtag and therefore more likely to be interested in your post, which converts well in terms of engagement, too.
Generally, it’s best to use a mixture of different sized hashtags. Some generic hashtags have millions and millions (or even over a billion) of posts attached to them such as #lol or #love, and so your posts risk getting buried by the avalanche of other posts if those are the only ones you use. Trending hashtags like #earthday only trend for a short space of time, meaning they tend to be medium-sized and aren’t oversaturated with posts from millions of people. Because of these hashtags’ ephemerality, social media algorithms tend to favour these short bursts of intense engagement with them, increasing these posts’ visibility. And for a diverse size of hashtags, you can even incorporate more niche ones by adding your location to the end, for instance #earthdayglasgow, which is more likely to garner visibility for your intended audience. If your audience is likely to be based at a different location (or multiple), then add those hashtags too to maximise the number of relevant and engaged users looking at your post. Visibility is most useful when it converts to engagement, and the more engagement your post receives, the more visible it becomes too (as algorithms favour high-engagement posts). Visibility feeds engagement and engagement feeds visibility, and trending hashtags can help you achieve this momentum.
2. Diversify your content
Wondering how to make your content relevant for #worldnutelladay? It might not suit your business or branding exactly, but finding a way to incorporate a post about it helps diversify your content, which makes for a more interesting and engaging page. Maybe the post could just be you and/or your team enjoying some Nutella pancakes, a personable and relatable post (who doesn’t like Nutella?!) which helps balance out other posts that are maybe a bit drier or more business-oriented.
Obviously, it’s best not to come across as contrived; if you or your team dislike Nutella (for reasons I can’t discern), then pretending to eat it on social media will come across as inauthentic. Luckily there are a plethora of different days each month, so choose the ones you care about most and the content ideas will spring from there.
3. Raise awareness
As you can see from the calendar, there are quite a few hashtags related to various diseases, social issues, historical events, and charitable causes. Pick a cause that’s important to you for whatever reason (e.g., you may have a story related to it) and take advantage of the day coming up to make a post about it and spread awareness. Through social media you can become a part of important conversations, which has the added benefit of garnering visibility and engagement with your page. Empathetic and humanising posts about what you or maybe a loved one has experienced are not only engaging to create on your end, but engaging for your audience, too.
Of course, you don’t have to share personal stories if you don’t want to, but the hashtag does allow you to communicate with a community of people who also care about the issue. If you don’t want to share stories, simply sharing information or helping to dispel myths are just as helpful and engaging.
4. Pre-assembled hashtags
The best part about using trending hashtags is that you don’t have to come up with them yourself! Generally, inventing hashtags is a bad idea anyways (even if it doesn’t accidentally spell out something rude), as there’s no guarantee that anyone else will think of that hashtag and search it or use it themselves. But certainly, anyone using social media for business knows that researching and assembling relevant hashtags is a regular task. Having pre-assembled hashtags to throw in takes some of the pressure off, and diversifies your hashtag use very easily. Just jump on the bandwagon and see where it takes you.
While some trending hashtags might be a little absurd for your taste, or for how you want to brand yourself, they are nonetheless a helpful tool for giving you ideas to create more personable, diverse, and fun content for your page, all-the-while granting momentum to your posts’ visibility and engagement. For access to the full calendar of international days, you can download it for free here from our website.
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