Why Your Brand Needs a Hashtag

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Why your brand needs a hashtag
We have all used a hashtag at some point in the last 12 years since they became hugely popular on Twitter as a means of categorizing information. However, with the massive surge in social media popularity and the rise of influencer culture, the hashtag has become an important part of a brand’s marketing strategy.  According to Twitter, by having a robust hashtag strategy, you can increase the engagement on your social posts by up to 50%. Hashtags are familiar to your audience and they immediately know what they are and how to use them and have become incredibly prevalent online. They are used to categorize, search for, and follow information. Your followers are constantly engaging with various hashtags, exploring new content, and sharing their own user-created content. 

Creating a Branded Hashtag

Whether your brand is newly launched or well established, creating a branded hashtag is important to your online visibility. During the early days of hashtag popularity, it was easy to hop on a hashtag bandwagon and get noticed. Nowadays, hashtags can become so saturated that your content will get lost amongst the thousands of accounts using those popular hashtags.  By creating a unique hashtag for your brand, you are creating a place to collect all your social media, you are allowing your audience to share information and news about your brand quickly and easily, and you are building a conversation. Branded events like Bastid’s BBQ use their hashtag #bastidsBBQ on all of their posts to gather information in one key location but it also allows followers to become familiar with it and use it for their content as well. This hashtag alone has over 1000 posts associated with it. Another example of this on a brand scale would be The Supreme Fire who utilize the hashtags #followthefire and #respecttheplant at events and across their branding as a whole which is a very effective way to incorporate a simple hashtag into the conversation with your audience. 

Branding and Experiential Marketing 

If you are considering an experiential marketing campaign, which you should be, a branded hashtag should be an integral part of your planning. A large part of the success of experiential marketing campaigns is the ability to create brand visibility and start, engage in and sustain a conversation with your audience.  Brand-specific or promotion-specific hashtags are great for bolstering the conversation online and creates a buzz. Additionally, you are able to gather the user-generated content that is posted with your specific hashtag and engage with it! This could be in the form or a contest or give away, don’t be afraid to get creative.  A branded hashtag is an aspect of your online marketing that can be interwoven into more traditional marketing elements, bringing the online, offline. The Reef Agency team can work with you to create a fulsome experiential marketing event that will capture the attention of your audience and grow your brand! Contact us today.