Let’s get into the hashtag conversation for a moment. You likely know what they are and maybe even use them with your personal profiles on social media. But how well are you using them for planning your event? Unfortunately, most people just guess or create hashtags on a whim to support whatever they’re posting at the time. But when you’re planning a New York event, you need to be far more strategic than that. In fact, there are best practices you should be leveraging to tap into the ever-growing power of a hashtag. Today, we’ll show you how.
Understanding the Basic Rules of Hashtags for Business
Before you start incorporating hashtags into your event planning Instagram posts, it’s best to get a few ground rules in as part of your strategy. Remember these basic pointers for hashtagging success:
- Remember to start with the “#” and don’t use spacing between words.
- Avoid the use or incorporation of punctuation or symbols.
- Your event planning accounts have to be public-facing for hashtags to work properly.
- Avoid super-lengthy strings of hashtags. Instead, keep them shorter and easy to visually consume.
- Keep your hashtags relevant to your posts or keywords.
- The magic number is somewhere between three and six hashtags. Using too many with each post will be too spammy.
Benefits of Using Them with Your Event Posts
There are incredible benefits to using hashtags for your event if you understand how to tap into them. For starters, a well-developed hashtag will increase engagement with your posts and, ultimately, your event. It’s a boost to your event’s awareness and will inspire guests to use your hashtag anytime they associate with that event.
Hashtags are great search tools for those who might be interested in finding or learning more about your event. They might not remember the event title, theme, or even the sponsoring company. But they’ll remember a catchy hashtag and know just where to find the information about your event.
Many event planners are using hashtags to add context to their posts, too. Maybe you share a few posts with brief statements about menus or event details. Your series of event hashtags can tie those brief statements back to your event narrative. And you can use hashtags to expand on the post and provide additional depth and details to tie it all together.
The Most Popular Hashtags of 2021 (So You Can Get Ahead in 2022)
Don’t forget that you can also jump in on already popular hashtags that are relevant to your event story. But before you create or include an existing hashtag, click on it yourself and make sure you’re aligning with similar posts, stories, or images that make sense for your event. HubSpot shared what it found to be some of the most successful hashtags of 2021. These will likely vary depending on the social channel you’re using. For example, on LinkedIn, the two most popular hashtags are #leadership and #productivity.
- #love (2.1B posts)
- #instagood (1.3B posts)
- #fashion (972M posts)
- #photooftheday (931M posts)
- #photography (769M posts)
- #beautiful (749M posts)
- #instagram (691M posts)
- #picoftheday (655M posts)
- #nature (639M posts)
- #happy (639M posts)
Creating a Winning Hashtag Strategy to Promote Events
Getting into the nitty-gritty about how to create your own winning hashtag event strategy, you’ll need to be mindful of a few things. Start by outlining a current snapshot of what influencers and competitors are using. Then create a list of goals you’d like your hashtag strategy to accomplish. You can create a fresh hashtag road map from there to inspire, engage, and attract your target audience.
Do some research on the existing hashtags out there and follow some of the popular trends you find within your industry or event space. You can also take this time to do some active social media listening, meaning you’ll want to read similar posts and follow responses to learn more about how and when your audience engages. Related hashtags to those you plan to use will also be helpful in tracking successes.
You can use hashtag tools to help you choose and define the right hashtags for your brand, like:
- Hashtgify.me
- RiteTag.com
As you explore better event promotion tools like hashtags, consider these suggestions and best practices. And if you’re still not sure how to proceed, it might be time to bring in the New York event planning experts. Let EMRG Media take the reins and eliminate the guesswork behind planning, promoting, and executing your next event!
