A hashtag is simply a word or phrase preceded by #sign. These hashtags were started being used in Twitter first and then spread to all the social media platforms such as Facebook, Google Plus and Instagram. Hashtags have become a famous and trending tool to drive huge traffic and engagement towards a social networking community. With the help of hashtags, you can easily categorize the posts and tweets that you publish. Moreover, they also allow users to easily search for topics they are interested in. So, you can easily identify the content that has been published on social media websites on a particular topic without getting involved in the tedious content searching process.
How Can You Use Hashtags Effectively?
Hashtags are trending phenomena in the social media industry. People nowadays are using hashtags in each of their posts and tweets. Starting from Twitter, the popularity of hashtags grew massively and people started using them on other social media platforms as well. The best part about these hashtags is, they are easily created and searchable making your content more popular among the crowd. Hashtags have become a marketing tool for online businesses, celebrities, organizations as well as the general public.
You can use hashtags simply anywhere in your post such as in the beginning, middle or at the end. These hashtags must be unique and should showcase your work effectively. If you will create your own hashtags you will attract more relevant users who will be joining your posts.
The more interested users in your conversation, the easier it will be for you to convert them into leads.
Importance Of Using Hashtags
Hashtags are an essential part of social media marketing. They can be effectively used to promote a new product or service or simply to stay updated on a current trend and topic. Here are a few reasons as to why these hashtags are important.
1. Expanding Your Content Reach:
Using Hashtags in your content while marketing will expand its reach to the outside world. For example, if you are using a hashtag called “DriveTraffic” in your content, people who will search for this particular hashtag will find your content in their search results. And if the hashtag is your own creation, chances are your content will come on the top of search results.
Therefore, hashtags are a great tool for promoting the reach of your content. They not only expand the reach of your content but also bring more leads to your business based on your content.
2. Grow your Brand:
Brand Awareness plays a very important role in growing your business. If you are a startup or starting a new business, you can make productive use of Hashtags to make people aware of your brand. It has two-fold benefits for your business. When users will search for your brand, they will find the hashtags that you have used and if they will search for the hashtags you have used, they will find your brand posts in the results.
Moreover, you can also create your own unique hashtags for a service or a product or anything else. You can ask your customers to use that particular hashtag when they purchase or post about your product. This way your brand can trend for that particular hashtag and this also helps in increasing your visibility resulting in more brand awareness.
3. Target Your Market:
Hashtags help a long way in market segmentation. Identifying the target market is one of the important steps in getting leads for your business. With the help of hashtags, you can target the potential customers to whom you want to sell your products or services. You can use relevant hashtags while creating a campaign as they will help you reach your target audience.
4. Improve Your SEO:
Other than promoting your brand as well as your content, hashtags are also very beneficial from the SEO point of view. Hashtags can add value to your Search Engine Optimization Campaign. Using hashtags properly on your website can drive huge traffic to your website.
Hashtags will improve your Google search engine results significantly as they can bring your content on top for a particular search. People nowadays find information by using particular hashtags and this can definitely boost a business’s SEO.
5. Stay Updated:
Last but not least, hashtags allow you to stay updated and in with the ongoing trend. Nowadays social media platforms allow you to follow certain hashtags as well and show posts related to that particular hashtag. This is a really amazing way of staying updated with the latest trends happening in the world. By staying updated, you can also know the trending hashtags and create your business campaign accordingly.
Hashtags On WordPress Community Website || WordPress Hashtags
As we all know, WordPress is one of the most popular Content Management System. You can create any type of website on WordPress and more importantly community-related websites. For those who already have an intranet website with WordPress must be knowing about the most popular plugin that allows creating incredible community websites. This plugin is BuddyPress. It is a free and highly flexible plugin that offers amazing features to create a social media website with WordPress. You can create your own community website just like Facebook.
BuddyPress plugin itself does not give a built-in feature to add WordPress hashtags to a community website. This makes the content of the community to stay within the profile of a user and not reach other users browsing your community. Moreover, no use of WordPress hashtags will also not bring your posts in search results. Therefore, it becomes equally important to add this feature to a BuddyPress community website. To overcome this limitation, Wbcom Designs brings to you BuddyPress Hashtags add-on for your BuddyPress community website.
About BuddyPress Hashtags || Adding WordPress Hashtags
BuddyPress Hashtags is a dedicated addon for BuddyPress and bbPress. This addon allows adding WordPress hashtags to any BuddyPress activity or bbPress topic. These hashtags turn into links and are used as search items based on topics.
Moreover, this plugin provides dedicated widgets for BuddyPress Activities and bbPress Forums. You can display these widgets at the desired sidebars. This widget will comprise of most used hashtags throughout the entire BuddyPress community.
You can also sort these hashtags and limit their number to be displayed.
BuddyPress Hashtag Settings:
The major settings that this WordPress hashtag plugin provides are:
Minimum hashtag Length: Allows you to set a minimum length of a particular hashtag used by a member.
Maximum Hashtag Length: Allows you to set a maximum length of a particular hashtag used by a member.
If not set, these values are 3 and 16 by default.
BuddyPress Hashtag Widget:
A separate widget called BuddyPress hashtag is also offered by this WordPress hashtag plugin. This widget allows you to show hashtags anywhere on your community.
You can change the title of this widget as well as set a limit to how many hashtags you want to show in the widget. Furthermore, you can also sort the hashtags by name or by size and decide how to display them.
You can check this video for a detailed tutorial of the plugin.
Are You Ready To Promote Your #BuddyPress Community?
Hashtags have become crucial tools to promote your community, drive traffic and increasing brand awareness of your business. Using hashtags correctly and in required quantity can bring huge traffic to your community. If you own a BuddyPress social networking website and are planning to add WordPress hashtags feature to increase user engagement, this plugin can be the best choice for you.
We hope now you know the importance of using hashtags on your WordPress website and for your business. If you have any suggestions for us please drop them in the comment section below!
#Staytuned for more 🙂
