As a business owner, it’s useful to understand the best ways to get your audience pumped about a brand event. These steps will help get the word out about event content and your brand in general and, nowadays, event hashtags should be at the forefront.
Hashtags that make your event and products easily shareable on social media are key to spreading your event spending to a wider audience. Brands should particularly focus on creating viral hashtags with the widest possible reach, and the best brand acclaim imaginable.
Unfortunately, you can’t simply increase your marketing budget to ensure a hashtag that hits the big time. Instead, you need to revert to good old-fashioned hard work, and the following techniques for creating a hashtag that gets everyone talking about your #event.
# 1 – Keep Your Hashtag Concise and Relevant
If your hashtag is too long-winded, your audience probably won’t bother using it. Alternatively, if you pick an irrelevant hashtag or one that applies to a broad range of topics, your efforts are unlikely to reflect your brand or highlight your products.
Instead, it’s vital to ensure concise hashtags that are easy to use and are always relevant to your specific brand and messaging. Research is a great place to start here, as it’ll allow you to throw around a few hashtag ideas, and see what comes up if you type those suggestions into platforms like Instagram right now. If a hashtag that you’re considering comes up for a lot of other things, then it might be worth seeking a more relevant replacement.
Experts also recommend sticking to no more than 10-15 characters (that includes numbers!) to ensure sharp, usable hashtags at all times.
# 2 – Make Your Hashtag Actionable
Static hashtags don’t get shares, so you also want to make sure that your event tag is fully actionable to get your audience involved. This is going to create the buzz that you need to stay trending, and can also encourage non-attendees to get involved in spreading the message (which is definitely what you want!).
Luckily, there are some great examples of actionable hashtags done well, like Coca-Cola’s #shareacoke campaign, or Red Bull’s #putacanonit. As well as being entirely distinctive, these hashtags effectively gamify social media sharing, and that’s guaranteed to encourage people to take part.
Ultimately, your event hashtag should encourage your audience to either take a certain kind of picture (e.g. #putaconit) or snap themselves doing something specific with your products (e.g. #shareacoke). You could also position key hashtag podiums around your event itself that allow attendees to complete this action both on the day and once they get home.
# 3 – Create Some Pre-Event Buzz
Your hashtag will undeniably make the most sense at your event itself, but that doesn’t mean you need to keep this under wraps until then. Even if you want to retain some event secrecy, using a hashtag across your socials pre-event can be key for starting conversations. You could even use it to add to the event mystery, by posting blank boxes with a hashtag-based countdown, or something else that keeps attendees guessing, and therefore already sharing your intended hashtag.
You could even get creative, and run competitions for attendee passes to the people with the most creative hashtag uploads. Or, offer a free ticket draw to users who share your own hashtag posts, and tag their friends in the comments.
These relatively small preparations will make a huge difference in encouraging hashtag shares in advance. That’ll make it much easier to reach trending heights once your event kicks off.
# 4 – Display Hashtags Everywhere
By the end of your event, you want every single attendee (and probably some of their friends) to know about your chosen hashtag. As such, you need to make sure that you’re putting this memorable hashtag on full display in every possible position across your event.
It’s particularly important to ensure that you’re including a visible event hashtag on every bit of event-based branding you can think of. Event banners are a great example of this, as they’re iconic and can be easily seen by everyone. Equally, if you’re providing event merch, put your hashtags on that, too, and package it in options like these Box Genie custom mailer boxes that can display your hashtag in a prominent position.
Setting up social media photo sets around your event is another great way to increase hashtag visibility. This also ensures that attendees are sharing your hashtag while the event is still in progress, thus increasing the chances that your brand will be trending by the time that event kicks out.
# 5 – Join in the Conversation
Many brands make the mistake of assuming they can set up a hashtag and let it do its thing, but viral hashtags don’t happen on their own. Instead, you need to both monitor activity and join in the conversation.
You’ll especially want to comment on your favorite hashtag posts, as this will help with the coverage and algorithms necessary for hashtag growth. Equally, use your hashtag to generate free social uploads by sharing your favorite attendee posts and highlighting what you love about them. People may then automatically start posting using your hashtag in the hopes of appearing on your homepage/getting a message from you.
It’s also worth monitoring hashtag activity as soon as your event is over using software like Brand24. This will help to monitor how and where users are interacting with your hashtag the most and makes it easier to track hashtag growth and success overall. This oversight can also help you to fill performance gaps that might otherwise stop you from going viral.
Takeaway
Event hashtags are a lot of fun, but they also serve the very real purpose of ensuring the event-based ROI that you need to thrive. Viral hashtags are particularly vital for ensuring overall event success these days, and you can increase your chances of achieving one when you put these top tips to the test.
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