Finding the Best Hashtags for Your Social Media Campaigns (Twitter and Instagram)

In order to get it right with your Twitter and Instagram campaigns, you need to follow the right plan for creating hashtags.

This section outlines 4 easy steps to help you create effective hashtags for your Twitter and Instagram campaigns.

Step One - Defining Your Audience

The first thing that you need sorting out is the kind of people you want to attract through your social media campaigns. We're talking about your target audience who may have an interest in your message, brand, or the product you're offering.

One of the best ways to define your audience is to use a social listening tool like Sprout Social to help you find out hashtags that resonate with your audience. It's also great for helping you track and monitor the performance of your social media campaigns.

The objective of defining your audience is to know what kind of hashtags they are likely to engage with. And once you're able to resolve this, you have set up your business for a successful social campaign on Twitter and Instagram.

Step Two - Knowing Your Competitors

After you have defined your audience, you'll need to know those that are competing with you for their attention. You'll also need to find out what it is they're doing that is making them successful with their social media campaigns.

You can begin by searching online for those brands that are in the same niche or industry as your company.

Once you have been able to shortlist the competitors, you can now take actions that will enable you to capture as much information about them as possible.

You can join their platforms with a personal or completely different account to find out how they manage their accounts. This will give you access to different hashtags that they are using and how followers respond to them.

By scanning their post, you will be able to find out hashtag ideas that you can use for your own campaigns.

Finally, a good tool such as Hootsuite can be used to run competitive analysis which will help you understand competitors' strengths, weaknesses, and strategies.

Step Three - Researching Trends

Trends drive social interaction, and in order to have successful campaigns, you should keep up with current trends. That's why it's important that you research trends to find out related hashtags that you could include in your posts.

You can do this research manually, though this will take you quite some time to get it done. Or you could use social media tools that will help you check trending topics and hashtags on Twitter.

Some of the social tools that will prove quite helpful are Trendsmap, RiteTag, and Hashtagify.me.

Step Four - Tracking, Monitoring, and Analyzing Performance

After each of your campaigns, you should take out time to find out how each hashtag performed. This will help you measure the extent of your success and also pinpoint different areas that you need to improve upon.

The Instagram Business Account offers you some helpful insights that you could use to analyze the performance of your campaigns. Also, the Twitter business profile gives you marketing tools that will enable you to take full advantage of the social media network.

These tools will give you access to the right data, let you understand areas where you need to improve and maximize your marketing efforts.