Unleash the power of hashtags: turbocharge online contests

Promoting your online contest across social media sites is an essential part of marketing your online contest, and marketing your online contest is essential to ensure it performs well and can deliver on the objectives it has been created with the intention of serving. But where do you start? You create your online contest and share it on Instagram, and the copy’s pretty snappy and you included some cool images and emojis… and? Is that it? Well, I suppose if you already have a massive following, it’ll do okay, and if it gets shares, cool, but you’ve missed a huge trick to really get the most bang for your buck out of your online contest.

You’ve forgotten about hashtags. You remember those things, the hash symbols prefacing a word or series of words that categorise or describe the topic, link, or post that a person or business has chosen to put out into the world.

Hashtags are something everyone on the internet understands to some degree: they help make content that entities are posting on social media more visible and more searchable, but there’s so much more to them. Hashtags are meta-data tags that enable user-generated content (such as a social media post) to be cross-referenced by topic or theme, and using the best hashtags could be the key to maximising the visibility of your online contests and turbocharging their reach.

What are hashtags?

As mentioned, a hashtag is a meta-data tag that allows users to basically organise their own posts and find their targeted audience. The hash symbol (or number sign) has been used in IT and programming language throughout the 20th century for similar purposes, and in 2007, a blogger named Chris Merssina suggested using the hash sign to group messages and trends together on Twitter.

While not immediately embraced officially by Twitter, hashtags were quickly adopted across the social networking platform to group together content pertaining to California’s 2007 season of wildfires. By the end of the 2010s, hashtags had spread across all the major social media platforms, including Facebook, Instagram, Youtube, and Reddit – Twitter even introduced a 30-hashtag limit on posts to discourage and prevent users from abusing the power of hashtags.

Indexing the internet

The hashtag essentially makes it easy for users without specialist knowledge of search protocols to find relevant messages and content. In the simplest possible terms, hashtags allow for the self indexing of the internet by its users. They’ve even been referred to as the “veins” or “wormholes” of the internet.

Obviously, there’s a correlation in intent here. The hashtag is there to make things more visible by a relevant audience, and the aim of an online contest for a business, while it could vary in specifics, will have a marketing or promotional angle. Therefore, if you’re creating an online contest that will be shared across social media, you should spend time finding the best hashtags to maximise its visibility to as much of your target audience as you possibly can.

Make hashtags a part of your online contest

So it’s a no-brainer that we’re going to use hashtags as part of the social media promotion of your online contest. This much is established. The question now is, how are we going to choose the best hashtags to promote your contest?

This can seem a little difficult at first, but like most things related to social media, it’s easy when you know how. Remember, hashtags used in the right way are a means for people without specialist knowledge to make their content visible to appropriate audiences. You’re not going to need to read a book or digest any complex coding knowledge to become fluent in hashtag-ese.

The broad strokes of mastering hashtags

As a general rule, the longer the hashtag, the more engagement it’s likely to receive, as it’ll appeal to a more specific audience. Let’s say, for example, that you’re an eCommerce retailer selling specialist running shoes. At the simplest level, you’re selling shoes, or trainers, or even sneakers. The hashtags #sneakers, #trainers, and #shoes are going to apply far beyond your target audience. Shoes could apply to dress shoes like leather brogues, which is a long way off your desired audience. Trainers and sneakers could apply to fashion shoes, or collectable basketball footwear, or even weightlifting shoes or footwear for other sports. Such a broad hashtag could result in either spam entries to your contest, or no entries at all, because they’re just not targeted enough.

A hashtag like #runningshoes, by contrast, is going to be far more easily found by the sort of audience you’re looking for. Pair that with, say, your branded hashtag if you’re giving away a particular pair of shoes, and suddenly you’re zeroing in far more effectively with your audience.

Encourage contest users to use your branded hashtags and giveaway hashtags

A branded hashtag is a great marketing tool when used in conjunction with more general hashtags. They can go a long way to raising awareness about your brand and your product. For example:

• #BrandxGiveaway
• #BrandxContest
• #BrandxCompetition

Even combining generic competition-themed hashtags, paired with your more audience-specific hashtags, can contribute to maximising your online contest’s reach.

• #Competition
• #Contest
• #ContestAlert
• #Giveaway
• #InstaGiveaway

Expand your reach

When entering hashtags into your posts, on many platforms, you’ll be able to see how many posts are using the same ones, so you can judge whether or not the hashtag is too broad for your purposes, or too niche. Failing that, entering a hashtag into a search bar will often deliver the same desired information.

Ultimately, these are just the broad strokes of how to use and understand hashtags for promoting the online contests you create. Every audience is different, and so too is every social media platform, so it will take some experimentation to determine a policy that will deliver the best results for promoting your online competition.

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