Should Facebook hashtags be part of your Facebook Marketing Strategy? Let's check out what this study by Social Bakers found.
(It seems that too many hashtags lowers engagement -- and won't help you get more likes.)
Posts with 1 or 2 hashtags averaged 593 interactions
Posts with 3 to 5 hashtags averaged 416 interactions
Posts with 6 to 10 hashtags averaged 307 interactions
Posts with more than 10 hashtags averaged 188 interactions
So going from 2 to 3 hashtags caused a significant drop in engagement! So, does this mean too many hashtags are bad for business? If so, how can you use hashtags to your best advantage in your Facebook marketing strategy and still get great results? You should use hashtags if they are used correctly. It's kind of pointless to add a lot of hashtags just for the sake of adding them if no one will remember or care about them. Use only 1 or 2 hashtags, and only when they make sense. Only if they are relevant, and are a way to filter relevant conversation around the topic. If I wanted to create conversation around social media marketing, I would start including a hashtag #socialmediamarketing, and then encourage conversation around this topic. Here's how it works. Facebook creates a unique URL for the hashtags that are used. People can be pointed to the conversation to encourage more people to use that same hashtag, which creates more relevant conversation. So please don't hashtag #everything, which would be an example of a pointless hashtag. Use hashtags wisely in the way they were designed to be used, to help create and continue and conversation around relevant topics.
Embrace hashtags but don’t go totally crazy with them. Hashtags are meant to:
Connect your content with other people's content who are talking about the same thing,
Help people who are looking for information about something.
So, if you write an post about how to use Facebook for Business, you would want to use the #FacebookTips hashtag so that more people will find your post.
This can actually extend your Facebook content past your own audience. This is one of the only ways to do this on Facebook without paying for advertising. I recommend using specific hashtags, and also creating your own as long as they are if relevant to your content and audience. Three or four relevant hashtags in your niche market could make all the difference in breaking through Facebook’s EdgeRank and finding your perfect audience.
If you currently use hashtags in Twitter or Instagram campaigns, start including them in your Facebook content as well. This makes it easier to integrate all your social media channels into one entity.