Happy to see Diane Seidle’s lastest strategy article in Tableware Today below. Speaking of hashtags, Bridge created its own ‘$tag’ to similarly offer quick access to product info. Type a dollar symbol “$” before a SKU and the specific item will magically appear below your Chalk.
Tableware Today:
WHAT'S YOUR HASHTAG STRATEGY?
Just in case you’ve been living off the grid for a year or more, a hashtag is simply a word or phrase behind a pound sign. When you use a hashtag that word or phrase becomes clickable and your post becomes part of the content within that hashtag hub, making your content part of a much bigger club. Hashtags are one of the most common ways people search for things on Instagram. If you use the right targeted hashtags related to your store or product, adding them to your posts will increase your chances that your post, video, or story will be seen by the right audience.
With a well-crafted strategy, you can drive real conversions, from add-ing followers to closing sales through Instagram. Instagram posts that use nine or more hashtags get more interactions (likes and comments) than posts using a single hashtag. (More than 2.5 times the interaction, in fact.) Instagram allows you to have 30 hashtags per post; Instagram stories can have up to 11. So is there a secret sauce for hashtag success?
Jenn Herman, a leading Instagram expert and author of The Ultimate Beginner’s Guide to Instagram, devised a recipe for optimizing your success on Instagram. I’ve embellished the recipe with real hashtags selected for independent retailers selling tabletop and gifts. Use these suggestions as a starting point. Following each hashtag is the number of posts in that hashtag hub.
Select five to seven extremely popular hashtags. Extremely popular hashtags are those with anywhere between 100,000 and 500,000 posts. Using hashtags with more than 500,000 posts ensures your content will get buried with-in minutes of being posted. For example, #shoplocal has 21 million posts with that hashtag. #galentinesday has 340,000. Where would your content have a bet-ter chance of being seen? For tabletop, start with these content focused hashtags: #tablescapes, 148,000; #placesetting, 115,000; #finechina, 123,000.
Identify five to seven moderately popular hashtags. These have 10,000 to 100,000 posts associated with them: #bridalregistry, 23,000; #national-cheeseloversday, 15,400; #herend, 43,700; #setthetable, 54,600; #kitch-enessentials, 39,800; #weddingregistry, 75,100; #flatware, 66,700.
Choose three to five niche-specific hashtags. These hashtags likely have fewer than 10,000 posts associated with them and are hyper-targeted to your core business and the things your target audience is searching for: #weddingreg-istryideas, 194; #firstdinnerparty, 1,487; #dinnertabledecor, 3731; #winelovers-gift, 455.
Include one to three branded hashtags. These are the hashtags you use exclusively for your store: #GiftGearys, 774; #meetmeatthephonebooth, 96 (Port o’ Call in San Marino, CA); #cincinatti-weddings, 36.
How do you find the right hashtags? Think of two to three terms related to your store and type them one by one into Instagram’s search bar. From there autocomplete results will pop up, so write down a few that are relevant to your company. When brainstorming hashtags, try to answer the following: What are our customers interested in? What hashtags are the brands we sell using? What problems do our products solve for our customers? Where geographically, or virtually, can we be found?
You can also follow a hashtag. This is a great way to follow your industry, your competitors, and your target audience.
So where do you put the hashtags on Instagram? You can put them in one group at the end of photo caption or all in the first comment. It really doesn’t matter for search. I’ve seen companies include them in the text of the photo caption, such as this hypothetical example: This #MothersDay, how happy will your #Mom be to get the #DavidYur-man #WhispersILoveYouBracelet? Notice that I used a combo of upper and lower case characters. This was done to make each hashtag read better, but it won’t affect the search results. Hashtags that perform best are 21 characters in length.
A great Instagram hashtag strategy is to visit some of the hashtags that you’re using to interact with other users of the same hashtag. Like and comment on their Instagram posts. It’s a great way to get engaged followers.
When you create hashtags, type them into a productivity app, such as the Notes app on an iPhone. Instagram is a mobile-first platform, so it makes sense to have your hashtag lists where they can easily be copied and pasted. And doing them ahead ensures that you can avoid spelling mistakes. Taking the path to hashtag happiness might just mean a happier bottom line. #tabletopsuccess; #moresales; #happycustomers.