Not all Hashtags are Created Equal

Not all hashtags are created equal

A lot of people are under the impression that just because they reverse engineered their competitors’ hashtags on twitter that they’ve got it made. I can understand why people think this way. It is definitely so much easier if things worked out this way. Can you imagine just looking for your competitors, finding their tweets, paying attention to their hashtags and copying and pasting the same tags to your stuff?

It would be great be great if things actually worked that way. Unfortunately, things that look so simple on paper are actually quite complicated when the time comes for you to implement them.

Hashtags is one of these things. You have to understand that hashtags help stuff get found om Twitter, Instagram , Facebook even on Google's Browser . It’s kind of like a categorization tool.

For example, if you post a tweet about Donald Trump, it helps tremendously if you put: #Biden , #Presidentoftheunitedstates, #Unitedstates and other similar hashtags. These hashtags provide context. They enable people to search for content with context in mind.

With that said, there are also trending hashtags. These are hashtags that are basically popular for a few hours and then they fizzle out. However, for the few hours that they are popular, a lot of people search for them. A lot of people click through and it’s quite possible to get a tremendous amount of traffic using trending hashtags. For example #shutitdown ,it trends for 24 hours while the congress debate and were talking about Trillon of Debts inflicted by Government on the Country's treasury .24 hours later, it simmers off

The problem is that trending hashtags may not be niche specific. This is a serious problem.

Why?

If you use these trending hashtags to promote content that you know is not related to the hashtag, you’re essentially spamming.

This is called Hashtag Spamming. What you’re doing is you are trying to piggyback on the hashtag that trending and trying to exploit the huge amount of attention a particular hashtag is getting in order to get a lot of traffic to your content.

This is not exactly a new idea. People have been doing this for quite some time. In fact, a lot of people have developed coping mechanisms to avoid this kind of thing. They don’t want to waste their time clicking on the wrong link that takes them to something that’s completely unrelated to the hashtag they’re following.

The name of the game is to play it safe

So, what is the secret to success when it comes to hashtags? Well, first of all, you should not play the trending hashtag game. Seriously. If you are really concerned about the quality of the brand you’re building online, you really cannot afford to screw around with Hashtag Jacking.

That’s what you’re really doing. You are jacking the hashtag for your interests. You’re basically just trying to drum up traffic by jacking a hashtag.

Instead, you should focus on really targeted hashtags. These really cut to the bone of your niche. They are very specific. Now, the great thing about this type of hashtag strategy is you fine-tune your content focus.

You make it clear to people on Twitter that you are genuinely interested in one particular type of content and it doesn’t really matter if the hashtag gets a lot of traffic or not. You’re just focused on specificity.

Believe it or not, if you do this, you end up doing your brand a big favor. Not only is it easier for people who are truly interested in your niche to find you, but they start regarding your brand as credible and trustworthy.

Why? You’re not playing games.

You’re not distracting people. You’re not playing a bait and switch game. Instead, you look very transparent.

The more you establish a “what you see is what you get” image, the more people will trust you and the more clicks you get on your links. Again, this doesn’t happen overnight, but a little bit of trust can definitely go a long way.

One of the most interesting and confusing concepts in social media marketing involves the idea of reach.

How do you define this? How do this benefit businesses? How does this help you make more money online?

Let’s get real here. The main reason why you’re even doing social media marketing in the first place is you want to make money.

That is the bottom line. It’s all about the profit motive. There’s no shame in that game. It’s perfectly okay to admit this. Unfortunately, a lot of people are so excited about social media marketing, that they basically get confused about reach and sooner or later they equate it with traffic. Bad move.

This is very different from traffic. It has the potential of turning into traffic, but reach, by itself, is not traffic. Let’s get that clear. Let’s do away with any confusions. The longer you remain confused between the two concepts, the longer you will be unable to turn Twitter reach into cold hard cash.

Reach really is about influence. This means that a lot of people see your stuff on their feed. They may not click through, but they see your stuff. The less they engage with your stuff, the less reach you get. It’s as simple as that. If it turns out that people really couldn’t care less about the stuff that you are posting, then your update will show on less and less Twitter feeds.

However, when somebody follows you and they constantly engage with your stuff, your stuff may show up front and center. That’s how reach works. The more visible you become, the higher the chance that they may, somehow, some way, at some time in future, click through. That’s what reach is. It doesn’t automatically translate to instant traffic right here, right now. It doesn’t work that way.

Instead, it is an important metric in terms of visibility. It’s potential traffic. There is a chance that people would click through, but the fact that you are showing in their feed is a victory in of itself. Why? Twitter, just like Facebook, doesn’t always show updates of pages or accounts you follow. In fact, depending on how tight the algorithm is, Facebook would only show your content to a tiny fraction of the people who want to see your stuff.

The same applies to Twitter. This is why it’s really important to maximize your reach. Again, this doesn’t necessarily translate to traffic, but this is a very important foundational step. Screw this up and you might as well be invisible on Twitter. You might as well not be on Twitter at all. That’s how bad things can be.

Look at your stats to see when most of your Twitter traffic comes

The first thing in maximizing your reach is to figure out when most people engage with your content. One of the most important forms of engagement, of course, is when people click through. You should see a pattern emerge here. This doesn’t happen overnight. You probably need to let your Twitter account run for quite some time, but after a while you should be able to connect the dots.

It should be abundantly clear to you that within a certain block of time, you get most of your engagement on Twitter. Identify this time frame and publish most of your content within that time range.

Set your auto-publishing to meet your target time frame

It’s going to be really inconvenient and downright uncomfortable for you to change your sleeping patterns just so you can tweet when most people are more likely to engage with your stuff. Thankfully, you don’t have to do this. You just have to set up some sort of Tweet Publishing software like Hootsuite. Set it up to publish within your target time frame.

That’s the way to do it. After you’ve done this, pay attention to your results. If it turns out that a lot more people are engaging with your content, then your reach is expanding. Also, you should experiment with different types of headlines. If your headlines are very boring or they don’t really appeal to people’s intelligence or imagination, you may want to keep tweaking them until you get better engagement.

By and large, you would do better on Twitter by focusing on timing and headlines. As you get more and more success doing this technique, other techniques and tweaks should become apparent to you.