How Using the New Facebook Hashtags Can Increase Your Audience

How Using the New Facebook Hashtags Can Increase Your Audience
DJ Miller
9/13/2013
Updated:
4/24/2016

When Twitter introduced hashtags to its users, many people wondered why Facebook, the dominating social media platform, hadn’t thought of the idea first. The question became even more perplexing as the years passed and Facebook never made hashtags a part of its system. Now the company has finally caught up. This could create a great opportunity for you to increase your audience and build your small business.

Know What People Are Saying

Hashtags make it easy for you to know what people are talking about. Before hashtags, you had to rely on people posting their opinions on your business’s Facebook page. That’s not much information.

Now that hashtags have become functional, you can click on them to find related conversations. This helps entrepreneurs in several ways.

First, it lets you focus on topics that your target audience cares about. Second, it helps you find out what people are saying about your brand. Third, it gives you the chance to see what people are saying about your competitors.

Introduce Hashtags to Your Ads

Facebook’s research shows that there are about 100 million Americans using Facebook while watching primetime television. Many television shows have already started flashing hashtags on screens to encourage watchers to share their comments.

According to Tech Tricks World, regularly posting comments is a sure fire way to gain exposure for your brand and connect with your audience. The problem with Facebook comments is that there was no real easy way to search for threads in order to provide the most efficient customer service. Twitter changed the game by introducing hashtags and bridging the gap between the brand and the consumer.

Now that hashtags work on Facebook, your business can start using them to grow. Include hashtags in your advertisements so your customers can communicate with each other. The more chatter you create, the bigger buzz your small business will get. There are certain content marketing firms that can help develop your buzz as well as help your business climb up the search engine rankings.

You can even watch the interest grow by keeping track of the hashtag and publishing your own comments.

Reach Your Audience With Important Messages

How do you let your customers know when your store releases a new product? How do you tell them about an upcoming sale or event?

Typically, businesses have had to do this with advertising. Advertising, of course, costs money.

Hashtags could reduce the importance of small-scale paid advertising that targets your current customers. Instead of paying for an ad, you can use a hashtag that gets everyone’s attention.

You save money while getting people interested in your business.

Unique Hashtags Can Improve Branding

A hashtag is more than a way to make information easier to share and find. It’s also a way for you to show your creative side. Coming up with inventive, unique hashtags isn’t easy. When you hit the right tone for your audience, though, you can add something special to your business’s brand.

If you ever watch Comedy Central, then you already know that shows like “Workaholics” use their own catchphrases as hashtags. That’s a great way to display your creative side while getting more people interested in the conversation.

How do you think hashtags can benefit businesses that use Facebook? Do you think it will work as well as it has on Twitter?

 

DJ Miller is a graduate student at the University of Tampa. He's an avid gadget geek and spends most of his time reading or writing. He is a huge fantasy sports fan and even runs his own advice site for Fantasy Help.