After Twitter, the social media giant Facebook has adopted Hashtags. Most people, especially business owners, are particularly excited as well as confused about the proper usage of this new Facebook feature. You too can easily get carried away, and #start #overusing #or #misusing #hashtags. So to make sure that you do not get carried away like this here is an end to end guide for the proper usage of Facebook hashtags.

What are hashtags and how they work?

In simple words, adding hashtag before a word or phrase (without spaces) makes it clickable in your status. Consider the status, “It’s one of my #writingQuirks.” Now if you click on #writingQuirks, Facebook will show you all the posts that used the hashtag #writingQuirks and therefore you will have all the related posts to browse through. It’s worth noting that post marked as private won’t show up in the search results. You can also bookmark hashtags to keep an eye on interesting topics.

Why should you use hashtags for marketing?

There are literally billions of posts on Facebook daily. So how to you plan to get your target customer’s attention when you can’t even reach them? With so much competition, even a slight change in your content strategy can give you a huge edge over others.

How can hashtags benefit your business?

1. Get new audience: When you add a hashtag to your posts, you make your post visible to all users who are searching for that subject even when they aren’t directly connected to your page. Now you have a completely new audience that you can target easily. In addition they are interested in your topic as they have searched for it.

Moreover, you can search for topics relevant to your business and provide your expert suggestions in conversations or as comments. This is easy marketing to gain more customers. Hashtags can lower the effort required to search for new audience that can be potential leads.

2. Promote your brand effectively: Creating unique hashtags for your Facebook page can help you amplify your promotion process. Face the reality no one would want to share a long post solely promoting your product. You can break down your product information into several smaller easy to share posts marked with the same hashtag. This ensures that your information is shared in larger numbers and is still filed under a common tag.

3. Think cross platform: The most fascinating feature of Facebook hashtags is that it feeds you results not only from Facebook but from Twitter, Instagram, Google+, Pinterest and LinkedIn as well. So you can market your ideas across several social media platforms, still all your posts will be linked together. So even if you post an update on Google+, you can get responses from Facebook or Twitter. Isn’t it amazing?

#HashtagTips

• Use short hashtags #MyBlog.
• Avoid long and complicated hashtags like #seotipsforyourbusiness.
• Capitalize the first alphabet of every word so that it #CanBeReadEasily.
• Make sure that you create and share Facebook URL’s of hashtags.
• Create custom hashtags for your business and use them regularly in your posts.
• Create new hashtag for every product or event.
• You can use hashtags #within your sentences too.
• Limit hashtag usage to one or two in your posts.
• Do not use spammy hashtags, only use those which are relevant to your post.
• To sum it all, hashtags, if used correctly, can be really profitable to your marketing strategy. So make use of this cross platform feature to market your brand and see the difference.