How do you stand out in the online crowd? With so many content published in so many platforms it is very easy to get lost and unfortunately to get your piece of content lost between the millions of words written on social media about the same topic as yours.

So how do you stand out? How do you make sure your organic content will be seen?

There are many ways to fight this challenge. One of them is through hashtags if used correctly!

Basically, highlighting a word or phrase in your post with a hashtag means that it could be indexed by the social media you published in and can be discovered by people even if they are not following you or connected to you. An easy way to increase exposure and you audience base organically.

So how can you make the most out of your hashtags? Use them correctly:

1. Length – don’t use a long tail hashtag that includes too many words. Nobody likes to read a sentence with 12 hashtags…. Keep it short with 2 3 hashtags in a post. Some social media channels will even have restrictions such as twitter that limits to two per twit.
2. Use them in the right context to highlight your product, a key content phrase, or a popular trend.
3. Mix them up – you need to mix in the same post a high-volume hashtag, for example the phrase– “big data” with a more specific hashtag such as the phrase – “BI dashboards”. Using only popular high-volume phrases used by millions of people will not make yours stand out. Mix the high volume with the unique once for increased chance to be seen!
4. Check out the popularity of the hashtags you want to use with hashtagify ! Run a quick test and get all the stats about the word or phrase you want to highlight, it is almost a must when you are trying out new hashtags to know how popular or not they are.
5. Create your own unique hashtags just for your brand – this is great for campaigns and contests! It raises awareness for a specific campaign and initiatives and will get people to reuse your unique hashtag in their posts.
6. Adjust your hashtags to the specific social media channels –
   1. Twitter – use up to 2 hashtags per twit and incorporate them inside the content or and the end. Twitter hashtags are more topic and content related
   2. Instagram – use up to 10 hashtags and incorporate them at the end of your post. Instagram hashtags are more trends related.
   3. Facebook – no specific limits but research has shown that moving from 2 to 3 hashtags drops down significantly the amount of engagements. Use your Facebook hashtags to create a conversation around a specific topic.
   4. LinkedIn – hashtags are back and are searchable! Meaning your post can pop up when searching for keywords as your hashtags. Use 5-6 hashtags max per post and make them relevant to your industry and content!