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Hashtags are your helping hand to grow your business. From location-based hashtags, industry hashtags, custom business hashtags and of course, the daily hashtags, all can be used to improve your marketing content.

With hashtags becoming so popular across many social media channels, they were rightfully added to the Oxford dictionary in 2010. Now, with the millions of variations out there, we have created a succinct list featuring 50 of the best hashtags you need to make the most of.

Why Use Hashtags?

Hashtags are at the heart of categorizing content on social media. It makes your own content discoverable and helps you quickly find relevant content from your customers, competitors and well pretty much anyone.

The hashtags included in your social posts can easily be searched for to show streams of posts, people, and groups, all making use of the same hashtag.

You can then easily connect with social media users based on a common theme or interest to boost your engagement and build relationships with the right people.

Learn How To Hashtag

Knowing how and when to use hashtags is crucial to your social success. Here are some of the do’s and don’ts of hashtagging.

Do’s

Be specific when using hashtags. This will help you target a niche audience who will be most interested in your brand and your content. Pretend you are selling dog products. Instead of using the hashtags #petowners resulting in attracting owners of a range of animals – opt for #dogowner. This hashtag is specific to dog owners – your target audience.

Use different hashtags depending on your social channel. It’s true, hashtags have the same fundamental purpose of content tagging and discovery but the use of hashtags varies by network. Instagram tends to focus on the description of the content, whereas Twitter focuses on a topic of conversion or a group of people.

Link: For more social network specific tips to hashtagging, check out the Twitter guidelines and Hootsuite’s Instagram guidelines.

Create relevant, unbranded hashtags. Branded hashtags should be about your company and its values. Therefore, including your brand name doesn’t always work to your advantage.

A perfect example of how using a relevant, unbranded hashtag, can create success is to Destination British Columbia. They created the hashtag #exploreBC which was used to share scenic photos of Canada taken by their employees.

Their followers quickly took the idea of regular people featuring on the official Destination British Columbia account and so embraced the hashtag to share their own photos.

Now, the company has created a growing movement that supplies them with fantastic, follower-generated content to use on their social accounts. (They even feature the hashtag in their Instagram bio!)

Don’ts

Don’t overdo it – words should outweigh hashtags. Many social media users tend to go OTT with hashtags when they are being ironic or making a joke. If your content takes a serious tone, this is something you will definitely want to avoid.

Many Instagram users have caught onto the fact that they increase their reach and likes by overloading their posts with up to the maximum of 30 hashtags.

Although, even if this does boost your following, it’s often from the wrong people – spammers or those just wanting a follow back. Stick to specifics to avoid looking desperate. We suggest incorporating around 5 to 8 hashtags per post (assuming they’re all relevant!)

Be short and sweet and don’t get too clever. Creating long-tail hashtags like “#DogGroomingKit” may be great at targeting an extremely specific audience, unfortunately, this will not help brand awareness or mass engagement. As you can see below, this hashtag is only included in a slender 13 posts.

Explore your options. By removing three letters, “#DogGrooming”, you can find over 700,000 posts and hence, a lot more people to get your content in front of.

The Top Daily Hashtags

As many marketers will know, results don’t happen overnight. Instead, it’s the ongoing day-to-day duties that get you success. So, with that in mind, let’s take a look at the hashtags that are a daily trend.

Hashtags for Monday

• #MarketingMonday
• #MondayBlues
• #MondayMotivation
• #MondayRun
• #MusicMonday
• #MondayOutfit

Hashtags for Tuesday

• #TuesdayThoughts
• #TuesdayTransformation
• #TipTuesday
• #TravelTuesday
• #TuesdayTasting
• #TuesdayShoesday

Hashtags for Wednesday

• #WellnessWednesday
• #WednesdayWisdom
• #WednesdayWorkout
• #HumpDay
• #WomanCrushWednesday, #WCW
• #WayBackWednesday

Hashtags for Thursday

• #ThrowbackThursday, #TBT
• #ThursdayThoughts
• #ThankfulThursday
• #ThursdayHumour

Hashtags for Friday

• #Friyay
• #FridayFact
• #FridayFun
• #ThankGodItsFriday, #TGIF
• #FollowFriday, #FF
• #FeelGoodFriday

Tip: Don’t fall into that trap of thinking your customers are inactive during the weekends. The weekend could be the optimum time for engaging with your target audience. Use programmes such as Hootsuite to schedule posts keep your social presence active – even if you aren’t.

Hashtags for Saturday

• #SelfieSaturday
• #Caturday
• #ShoutoutSaturday
• #SaturdaySwag
• #SaturdayShenanigans
• #WeekendAway

Hashtags for Sunday

• #SundayFunday
• #SelfieSunday
• #SundayLunch
• #SundayBlues
• #SundaySesh
• #WeekendVibes

Daily hashtags are a great way to get people engaging with your day-to-day content. Though, as great as they are, they aren’t suitable for every business. Instead, using location-specific hashtags may be the key to your social success.

Location-Specific Hashtags

This type of hashtag is very dependent on where you, your customers or topic of discussion is located. Unfortunately, that means not all of these listed hashtags will fit your business perfectly. Don’t fret! Finding trending hashtags that are specific to your local area is pretty simple.

Twitter

Find location-specific hashtags on Twitter is #easy. When signing up for your Twitter account you are prompted to choose your location. If you decided to share this information, well you are already there.

Twitter automatically suggests hashtags for you based on the location you entered. This then gives you relevant trending hashtags on the left-hand side of your “Home” feed.

If you didn’t tell Twitter your location, these will be generated based on the user data they collect from you via cookies. This can be changed to suit your exact whereabouts by clicking on the same left-hand side widget, in your “Home” feed. Here you can enter the location you would like to target or choose from the suggested nearby locations to get your tailored trends.

Instagram

On Instagram, you can find hashtag suggestions using the “explore” section. On the mobile app, when you click on the tab titled “Tags” and search for a specific location, Instagram will display a list of the top hashtags including the keyword e.g. “London”.

As a bonus, they show you the number of posts that have included the specific hashtag giving you insights into the kind of figures you are looking at for brand awareness, engagement and so on.

On the desktop version of Instagram, you can find tailored hashtags through the same “explore” section. Here you can complete a search to find the top hashtags and number of posts that include them.

Custom Hashtags

Although it’s suggested to not get overly promotional when creating custom hashtags for your brand, it’s important that you don’t walk away from their use completely.

Particularly when you are running an event, specific campaign or are promoting a new product, custom hashtags can be a helpful branding tool. Using a unique brand hashtag can increase your brand authority and shine the spotlight on your business in a crowd of your competitors.

How to Make a Custom Hashtag

Firstly, you need to check that your “great idea” for a hashtag hasn’t already been used to promote another brand. Using an existing hashtag can deter traffic elsewhere regardless of how long ago it was used.

In fact, it can actually make it worse. You can look spammy and who’d disagree that this wouldn’t be super frustrating?

Links: Start by searching for hashtags using any of these trends tools: Right Tag for Twitter use, Trendsmap or Hashtagify.me.

Once you have found a suitable hashtag, create you content and get posting. Remember to make it specific to your brand but not overly promotional.

More readings

Final Thoughts

Many businesses still don’t utilize this powerful, little symbol. With our simple tips and relatively small list of daily hashtags, you can make a start. If you’re still a tad overwhelmed, remember, #KeepCalmAndCarryOn because we’ve set you up with 5 revised steps.

1. Do your research. Using the above tools, look into trending hashtags near your location, in your industry and those that are popular with your audience. Categorise them into groups.
2. Read the guidelines for each social channel you’re using and eliminate hashtags that won’t work.
3. Complete searches on the different channels and check out the content that is being posted. Ask yourself, “Would my content fit on here?”, “Do these users look like my target audience?”.
4. When you come to somewhat perfect match, it’s trial and error. Post your content using 5 to 8 hashtags per post. Keep them short and sweet and most importantly relevant. See which work best for you and the content to match it with.
5. Through your findings, make improvements and you’ll be well on your way to becoming a hashtag hero.

Go get hashtagging!