If you are seeking to boost the marketing of your cycling company, then one of the things that you will always need to focus on is social media. These days, social media really is considered an essential tool in digital marketing, and if you are not making full use of it then you can’t expect your marketing to be as powerful as it needs to be. In furthering a cycling business, you are probably going to focus more on the visually-based Instagram, rather than Twitter or Facebook. One of the major considerations that you are always going to have to consider when marketing through Instagram is the use of hashtags. Choosing the best hashtags for your posts is a challenge, and something that has a bit of a learning curve, so let’s take a look at what you might want to consider.
What Makes For A Successful Hashtag?
First off, it’s useful to actually have a clear idea of what it is that shows your hashtag is successful. This will basically mean that it appears high up on the list when people search for that specific trend, but the most successful posts will also appear in the Explore tab more generally. So how do you get your hashtag to feature as prominently as possible? There are a few factors that have to be taken into consideration.
For a hashtag to be successful, it has to be used very often. That means that you need to make sure it is one that people can grasp and copy in a moment. If it is too long and unwieldy, or otherwise hard to understand, then you are going to struggle to make sense of it, and people won’t share it around anywhere near as often. The more successful hashtags are also those which are attached to the more successful posts, and it’s always worth bearing in mind that a hashtag is only one part of the whole when it comes to trying to get better engagement. When you share it is also going to have an effect, including time of day and day of the week. Finally, having a stronger and larger starting audience of course makes it easier for a hashtag to become successful.
All well and good, but what can you actually practically do to make sure that you are using worthwhile hashtags which are going to get lots of engagement?
Avoid Irrelevant Hashtags
You might feel – and this is a common early mistake – that the best way to get ahead with hashtags is to use as many of them as possible. The thinking here is that the more lists you appear in, the better. But overall it’s actually a pretty bad idea to use irrelevant hashtags all the time. If the hashtags you are using do not relate directly to your cycling company and what you are trying to promote, then avoid them. It is best to stick to those which are actually going to serve you well, and forget the rest.
Check Your Competitors’ Hashtags
One easy way to start thinking about hashtags is to look at which ones your competitors are using. These are likely to mostly be the kinds that you should be using too, although there might be some there that you would rather avoid, as they could be brand-specific. But doing this research will certainly bring out a few that you can use yourself, and it will mean that you are placing your brand exactly where it needs to be for people to appreciate your business as a competitor.
Look For Influential, Relevant Hashtags
It’s also worth looking at the hashtags that highly influential people are using, and trying to find a way to use those yourself. If you can get to the bottom of which ones are generally most popular across the board, and you can find some clever way to make them appropriate for your cycling business, then you will find that this is going to be an extremely effective way of using hashtags on your Instagram posts.
Check Your Own Successful Posts
If you have already been posting with hashtags for a while, you can always check your own old posts for any trending hashtags which seem to have done particularly well. This is a great way to ensure that you can really get to the bottom of what is likely to be effective for your specific audience, not just across Instagram generally, and that will mean that you can post much more succinctly and with better hashtags in the future. Looking back regularly at your own posts is absolutely going to be a great idea.
Use Social Media Listening Tools
If you really want to improve the way you are doing things, you can consider getting a social media listening tool to really help things along. With something like Hootsuite on your side, you can easily discover which hashtags are likely to be the most popular and effective, and you can do so without having to go anywhere else. In essence, it is a powerful way of making use of search functions, and that is absolutely something that makes choosing the right hashtags a lot easier indeed. This is the kind of tool that you should be using if you are going to take your Instagram posts as seriously as you need to promote your cycling business.
Monitor Your Posts
One important thing to do as well is to make sure that you are monitoring all of your posts after the fact. This will ensure that you know what works and what doesn’t, and that you can therefore continue to hone in and tailor your posts and your hashtags as finely as possible. Select a post and click on View Insights, and from there you can see all of the data on that post – number of visits, website clickthroughs, emails, and so on.
Consider all of the above, and you should be using better hashtags in no time at all.