With limited time in the arts, organic social media can quickly fall to the bottom of our to-do list. When we do have the time and mind space to publish creative content, it’s important to consider all elements which will push our content further and directly target our key audiences. Hashtags are a powerful tool and our team have decided to put together a quick blog tutorial on how to amplify your campaigns in the arts through hashtags on social platforms.
Last week we looked at the power of text as a visual for audiences. Something that we quickly learned was that a simple tweak to content can completely enhance your audiences’ engagement with your content. This led us to think ‘What else?’. What other small details can increase the CTR on our campaigns, or lead to higher website page visits. This week, we’re taking a look at hashtags and what they offer the arts when we tag our posts. For our blog tutorial, we’ve broken our research down into the four main social platforms for arts organisations; Linkedin, Twitter, Facebook, and Instagram.
Hashtags were formally introduced to Linkedin users in 2018. Hootsuite offers us a great start for hastag considerations on Linkedin as we’re familiarising ourselves with exploring this tagging trend on a new platform.
Unlike other social platforms, content for Linkedin should not be driven through hashtags. Hashtags on Linkedin are still important, but they need to accompany well-written posts. In this case, let’s think of hashtags like the cherry on top of our dessert. The body of ice-cream and chocolate are really what we’re after but the cherry is a nice element on top. Linkedin users are more inspired to connect with well-written and insightful content as opposed to searching for trending links.
Linkedin is a great platform to grow and develop your brand in a professional manner. Ultimately through adding in relevant and strategic hashtags, you could be surprised who will pick up your content.
On Linkedin, our team like to use two to three hashtags but no more. We make a split of our hashtags between brand awareness and popular tags. For example, we want the Ticketsolve community to find our new whitepapers and blogs, but we also want to share our resources with the wider arts community. Let’s, for example, our blog last week on Making the Most of Visual Text on Your Marketing Campaigns. For this post, our team want the Ticketsolve Community to find our new blogs easily so we used our brand hashtag #Ticketsolveblog. As well as that we also wanted to share our ideas with the wider arts community we also used #ArtsMarketingCampaigns and #TheGuardian as we started our conversation from an article their team had published on subtitles.
Delving into tagging on Facebook has been a really interesting exercise. A ‘one size fits all’ approach for hashtagging on Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram won’t offer you the best outcomes from tagging your content. Facebook themselves have actually explored the process of tagging on their platform and have put together some of the best practices for using hashtags on Facebook.
Our favorite top Facebook tips are;
Keep it Simple - Facebook users don’t segment their content as much as on Twitter.
Avoid Punctuation - resist the urge to use that comma #grammerpolice
Avoid Spaces - otherwise you’ll lose half of your hashtag #my mistake
Incorporate hashtags into your sentence - this is definitely an #easywin for Facebook!
Hubspot estimates that 95 million photos are posted to Instagram every day - Wowee !! With all that traffic, tagging and segmenting your content to hit more specific targets is a must.
Hashtags on Instagram can be very specific, which is great for our audiences but also an important consideration. For example, searching for #Theatre on Instagram is going to bring up thousands of posts, many of which might not be relatable to our audiences. We need to think deeper. Even adding #Musicaltheatre to our posts will ensure our content goes farther and wider.
An interesting article on Later.com teaches us a valuable lesson for hashtagging on Instagram. When we hashtag on Instagram we think about categorising our posts but we also need to think about how they help our audiences search for us and find our content.
When is comes to Twitter, hashtags are not a step we should ever consider forgetting (or getting lazy about). When our team search on twitter, we only use hashtags and more than likely, it’s the same for your organisation. This means our audience members are using hashtags to search and filter through content on Twitter. It’s our golden ticket to reaching their feed on this platform.
Twitter states that using a relevant hashtag on your tweet can increase engagement by almost 100% (X2) for individuals and 50% (1.5x) for brands. Now that we know this, it's time to use Smart Hashtagging #Hashtags4theWin