Hashtag Success

I just saw a post on LinkedIn mourning the death of the hashtag and in my humble opinion, I'd say that's a pretty dramatic response to the latest news!

Matt Navarra, a Social Media Specialist, recently posted the news on threads that from the 13th December you will no longer be able to follow hashtags on Instagram. Unless you're a devoted Instagram follower this probably wont mean very much to some businesses or consumers.

If you didn't know, hashtags have been used as a way of finding or creating communities to sort through the masses of content across platforms. Take for instant hobbies such as crochet or running. If you wanted to curate a feed on Instagram with your hobbies and interests, you could follow the hashtag #Crochet or #RunnersOfInstagram depending on what you like, and your feed would include not just the individuals you follow but also creators you don't follow yet but add the specified hashtags in their content. This way even brands that provide products to service those communities could use theses community led hashtags to draw new followers organically.

These days, Instagram has drawn on inspiration from TikTok that means if a user likes content, it will use AI and other algorithms to add similar content to the user's feed. So if you were really into ballroom dancing and you liked a post from your favourite Strictly Come Dancing professional, you will more than likely attract content from other creators with similar content to your feed. This is actually happening across all the social media platforms because using algorithms seem to be more effective than hashtags has been so far.

My theory is that hashtags were working too well and creators could avoid paying for their content to be seen. The new algorithms work somewhat well but creators that pay for their content to be seen may be further up the ranking of content to be seen than non paying creators.

Hashtags may have good success for you, and you may have tried it and found lots of followers coming your way via hashtags. That's great, but if they're not working, don't be disheartened. It may mean that you need to shift your content strategy in new direction.

But here's some of my top tips that I can give you:

1. Research your hashtags - follow those hashtags if that option is still available to you. Click on them and see what you see, is it content similar to yours? Figure out whether your content will stand out amongst the others in that community.

2. Ask yourself why you're using hashtags - is it because everyone else is? Are you trying to attract a certain community or follower? Really ask yourself if you need to use hashtags.

3. Use caps within your hashtag - If your audience is wide and diverse then it may include people with visual impairment that use screen readers that read your content out loud. To make your content inclusive, ensure that you use caps in your hashtags to separate the words somewhat, otherwise the screen readers will not read them properly. For example, years ago, Britain's Got Talent winner, Susan Boyle came out with a new album and used the hashtag #susanalbumparty. The team would have saved a lot of embarrassment if they had only added caps, #SusanAlbumParty.

4. And finally, don't use any other characters or spaces in your hashtag, they won't actually work! So as much as we'd love to have an apostrophe in a hashtag, I'm afraid it's just not possible!

There's no real right way or wrong way of doing anything on social media, so keep going if you must. However, using hashtags with intention can mean the difference between maintaining your current audience and growing your audience to reach new people!

If you'd like help figuring out how to use hashtags for your business, or adjusting your content strategy in line with the new developments on Instagram, click on the button below.

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