To many social media novices, the hashtag may seem meaningless with many people using random hashtags at the end of Instagram captions. However, once fully understood, they can be a powerful tool to help increase brand awareness on social media.

A hashtag is a ♯ symbol, which many people include in their social media activity (Heyd and Puschmann, 2016). The word or phrase which is hashtagged then goes into a pot of hashtags which others, who aren’t following the account can view the content. The hashtag is so well recognized that it was added to the oxford dictionary in 2010. However, different social media platforms vary in the way they use hashtags, for example, Instagram uses hashtags to describe the photo, whereas twitter hashtags are focused more on a topic of conversation to engage with the user (Ma et al, 2012).

Chris Messina, a former Google designer, first introduced Hashtags to Twitter in 2007, but now most social media sites use them (Paige, 2012). There is much debate as to how many times you should hashtag in one post. It has been suggested by Bourgeois, 2015 that for twitter a maximum of 2 hashtags is appropriate, whereas on Instagram the more hashtags the better, with the highest interactions on Instagram having more than 11 hashtags.

The hashtag is used to connect and engage with other social media users. There is a community built around a common theme (Yang et al, 2012). For example, if you search for ♯HauteCouture then 2,539,208 posts dedicated to haute couture appear under that hashtag (Instagram, 2017).

Why they’re important for the fashion industry?

If a profile is in the public domain, then using hashtags will draw more attention to the account. It allows anyone to view the image, broadening the amount of social media users the post will reach; whereas previously, content would be limited to followers (Giannaoulakis and Tsapatsoulis, 2016). Therefore hashtags can be an important form of advertising for smaller retail businesses such as ‘In The Style UK, who have built marketing campaigns solely through the use of social media and Instagram, using brand advocates to promote the products.

How to track effectiveness

When creating a social media strategy, it is important to understand the effectiveness of the campaign. Whether the purpose if to increase traffic, increase product awareness or customer interaction, you need to measure success. Adding relevant hashtags to an Instagram post enables you to connect specific posts to campaigns and then measure their effectiveness.

Campaign that went well…

Expedia

The first example of a business that used hash tagging on Instagram successfully to create a trend of their own is Expedia. Expedia, a travel company, used a spin off of the already popular “♯throwbackthursday” or ‘♯tbt” to create their own marketing campaign. Expedia encouraged users to tag their nostalgic ♯tbt posts with the hashtag “♯ThrowMeBack” . In return, Expedia would offer 10 winners the chance to revisit the place they had tagged and recreate the photo. A winner was chosen each week for 10 weeks.

The results of the campaign were:

Impressions – 5 million

Engagement – 300,000

Instagram growth over 10 week period – 96%

 

Calvin Klein

Calvin Klein is another example of how a brand can use hashtagging successfully. Calvin Klein created a marketing campaign for their new underwear line, which encouraged users to post photos of them wearing their Calvin Klein underwear baring their company logo and hashtagging ♯MyCalvins. The majority of users who posted photos with this hashtag were young and attractive. This campaign was therefore of strategic importance to Calvin Klein who recognized the type of person to post a photo on social media in their underwear was likely to be young and attractive. This shows how Calvin Klein understand their market and their online activity. They understood that an unpaid post by a friend was likely to be more powerful in promoting the brand than a paid celebrity endorsement.

The results of the campaign were:

Interactions – 23million

Number of new Instagram followers – 1.8 million

Global reach – 469 million

 

Campaign that didn’t go so well…

Susan Boyle

In 2012, Susan Boyle’s PR agency has a disaster when they used to hashtag ♯susanabumparty to promote her latest album. This hash tag should have read “susan-album-party”, instead many misinterpreted the hashtag as sus-anal-bum-party. The hashtag was later rearranged to read ♯SusanBoyleAlbumParty to prevent any further misunderstanding. Although embarrassing for Susan Boyle, she did go viral with the hashtag, which she may not have been the case without the misinterpretation. Susan Boyle was lucky that many found the misinterpretation funny, other companies have had disastrous hashtags which can be offensive to users or have been misunderstood.

 

Lessons learnt

• Hashtags can have a negative impact on companies if they are not researched and checked for appropriateness
• Should be a call to action for consumers to increase consumer engagement
• Make sure hashtags can’t be accidently made into a new hashtag with words other than those intended.
• Always check others aren’t already using the hashtag before tweeting about it.

 

References:

Bourgeois, A. and Bourgeois, A. (2017). How Effective Are Hashtags on Social Media? [INFOGRAPHIC]. [online] WeRSM – We are Social Media. Available at: http://wersm.com/how-effective-are-hashtags-on-social-media-infographic/ [Accessed 27 Feb. 2017].

Giannoulakis, S. and Tsapatsoulis, N. (2016). Defining and Identifying Stophashtags in Instagram. Advances in Intelligent Systems and Computing, 529.

Heyd, T. and Puschmann, C. (2016). Hashtagging and functional shift: Adaptation and appropriation of the #. Journal of Pragmatics.

Instagram.com. (2017). #hautecouture • Instagram photos and videos. [online] Available at: https://www.instagram.com/explore/tags/hautecouture/ [Accessed 27 Feb. 2017].

Ma, Z., Su, A. and Cong, G. (2012). Will This #Hashtag Be Popular Tomorrow?. School of Computer Engineering.

Page, R. (2012). The linguistics of self-branding and micro-celebrity in Twitter: The role of hashtags. Discourse & Communication, 6(2), pp.181-201.

Waldrum, H. (2012). #Susanalbumparty: Top five Twitter hashtag PR disasters. The Guardian. [online] Available at: https://www.theguardian.com/technology/shortcuts/2012/nov/22/twitter-susan-boyle-susanalbumparty [Accessed 27 Feb. 2017].

Yang, L., Sun, T., Zhang, M. and Mei, Q. (2012). We Know What @You #Tag: Does the Dual Role Affect Hashtag Adoption?. School of Information, the University of Michigan.