Hashtags

- [Instructor] A hashtag allows people to follow topics that they are interested in. They can also use them to discover new content and discover new accounts to follow. So you can use hashtags as a way to make your content more discoverable to new audiences. And hashtags can help you to research the market and see what type of content is working. And that can allow you to gain extra exposure by allowing new people to discover you on social media. So it's not enough to just post content on social media, but you also want to be discoverable on social media as well. And that is how you can actually reach potentially new customers, potentially new followers, and grow your accounts on social media. So I'm using Instagram to demonstrate how you can do some hashtag research. Now, how you do hashtag research is going to be very similar depending on what platform you're using. So Instagram and LinkedIn, for example, you will research hashtags in the same way. But it's important to note that the hashtags that are popular in your niche on Instagram might be slightly different on another platform. So most social media platforms, if not all, have a search function and you can actually utilize that search function to find hashtags. And if you use these hashtags when posting your content, then this can help you to get discovered by new people and to grow your account. So, as you can see, the search function for Instagram is up here. And if I click on that, then I can actually type the hashtag symbol in there. And let's say I wanted to find hashtags related to cooking, I can type cooking in, and it will give me a dropdown menu of different hashtags that are popular and the amount of posts that have been posted using this particular hashtag. So this could give me potential ideas of hashtags that maybe I didn't even think about that are related to the post. Now, it's important that your hashtags are as related as possible to your posts because obviously people who are searching or looking within that hashtag, they want to find content that is related to what they're searching for. So this will help you to get more likes, to get more shares, and to get the best use out of those hashtags. So let's say for example, I found a hashtag and I thought that this was relevant and there wasn't too many posts here and I've thought that potentially I want to do a little bit more research into this, then I can click on this hashtag and it would take me to a page that kind of shows me all of the different posts that are utilizing this hashtag. So these are the top posts at the moment utilizing this hashtag. And this can give me some really good ideas in terms of what is working for these brands. So you have, in this category, you have the top posts and in this category you have the most recent posts. So what I normally try to do when it comes to social media, is I'm looking for anomalies. So I'm looking for maybe a post that has a lot of likes and potentially has a lot of comments as well, but it's not a verified account. As you can see here, this is a verified account with over a million followers. So it might be difficult to compete with this brand, even though I can look at what they've done and potentially try to emulate their strategy on Instagram. So if I click on to their Instagram page, for example, then I can actually take a look at how they post their content, I can take a look at some of their hashtags as well. So if I click on their post, you can see the hashtags that they are using. You can also see what type of posts they are kind of using, how they're taking their pictures, so on and so forth. And what they're seeing in their caption, this can also give you ideas of how to grow your particular brand if you're in the same niche. But what I tend to do is, like I said, look for anomalies. So maybe there's a top post and it's not by a brand that is a very big brand, so I'll look and I'll try and find one. All of these seem to be from big brands. So this is an account that's not a verified account. They've got 130,000 followers. So that might be a more realistic brand for me to try and emulate. And I can look at some of their hashtags and what they've kind of got under here. So these are the hashtags potentially that they have used to grow their account. So I would definitely be taking a look at some of these hashtags, and not necessarily just copying and using exactly the keywords that they've got in these hashtags, but I would be clicking onto these ones as well 'cause they're all clickable. So whichever ones are relevant to your brand, maybe kitchen hacks, I'd be clicking on that and seeing if you can, you know, the same thing, seeing if you could find any anomalies. So this is another really potentially a popular hashtag. And you can look at different brands. This is a video here and, you know, you've got this particular brand that doesn't have as many followers online. They've got 42,000, but they managed to get a post in the top posts for that particular hashtag. So, you know, again, you can look at, you can go back and look at the post kind of more in depth and see what hashtags they have used here, what style of video. As you can see, this person is kind of like cutting up the ingredients and really showing it in a way that is kind of captivating. So you can use that to your advantage and potentially create a similar video using similar hashtags and maybe having similar success. So that's what you want to do, not just on Instagram, but whatever other platform you are planning to grow on and to produce content on. You want to research hashtags. Use your hashtags as a way to research what other competitors are doing, what people are doing to grow their accounts online. See if you can emulate what other people are doing and kind of stick to what is working. You don't have to reinvent the wheel.