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Let’s Talk Hashtags
As online marketers, we regularly get asked about hashtags—where did they come from, why do we use them and how do we use them across different social media sites?
In this blog post, we hope to answer some of those questions.
First of All, Where Did Hashtags Come From?
Already in use on internet chat rooms where the use of a pound sign would categorize topics into groups, hashtags first gained traction on Twitter where they were used to search for content. It all started here, when techie Chris Messina proposed their use in August 2007:
Initially the idea was rejected, “[Twitter] told me flat out, ‘These things are for nerds. They’re never going to catch on,” Messina told The Wall Street Journal's Elana Zak in 2013.
However, Messina started using the # symbol and convinced some of his peers to do the same. During the Californian wildfires in October 2007, Messina managed to encourage others to label their tweets using the hashtag #sandiegofire. With the subject widely discussed and easily trackable on Twitter, they began to take off.
Fast forward to 2009 and Twitter fully embraced the hashtag, adding hyperlinks to the tags and integrating a search box into profile pages so users could discover even more content.
Eventually hashtags were adopted by Instagram, Facebook, Pinterest and well, just about anyone…
Why Do we Use Them?
In the simplest terms, hashtags are just like keywords and adding them to your posts will help you to share your content with a much wider audience.
They will also help you to research your target market, categorize your posts, publicize your campaigns and enable you to find relevant content and communicate with other brands and influencers.
Your online visibility will grow through the correct use of hashtags and and your follower count and number of likes will improve as a result.
How to Use Them
One of the most important parts of using hashtags the right way, is doing your research. Before you start using them to market your brand, try and find the hashtags that are popular and relevant to your industry and location. Make a list and refer back to it every time that you post.
For example, if you are a restaurant in New York City, search for popular hashtags that relate to food and drink in general and then food and drink found specifically in NYC. If you are a real estate business on Maui, find hashtags that are relevant to both real estate on Maui and Maui as a destination.
Whatever you do, don’t use hashtags that have no relevance to what you are posting such as tagging Nike in a post about your restaurant, just to get eyes on your content. Don’t make your hashtags too long (people will not read them and won’t be inclined to reuse them) and don’t use spaces or punctuation.
Also, remember that every social media platform is different and your hashtag strategy should be catered to the channel that you are using. For example, Instagram allows up to 30 hashtags per post. However, we wouldn't dream of using that many tags on Facebook.
In fact, we wouldn't recommend going above 20 tags on Instagram—the overuse of hashtags is not a good thing, it appears spammy and devalues the quality of the post. A gorgeous picture with somewhere between 15-20 tags is the best formula for us. Check out the leaders in your field, take a look at influencers and find what works for you.
When hashtagging on Facebook, you must take care not to over-tag or engagement will plummet. In our marketing, we try not to hashtag every single Facebook post and when we do, we keep it to a minimum of between one and three tags.
When it comes to Twitter, try and limit them to two per tweet. You only have 140 characters to work with in the first place and studies (courtesy of Quicksprout) have shown that tweets with 1-2 hashtags have 21 per cent more engagement!
That's it for today's blog and we haven't even touched on hashtags for Pinterest, YouTube, Tumblr and more (#sorry). Although we have only scraped the surface of hashtag use in this blog, we hope that it can help you in your social media marketing efforts. If you are still confused and would like our help, contact Cake Media today.
Thank you for reading and have a wonderful weekend!
Laura and Jenny
Facebook Ads for an Exciting New Client
The popularity of adult coloring books has surged in recent years and today, you can find them on the bestseller lists of almost every bookstore and online seller.
These coloring books—filled with beautifully intricate black and white illustrations—have provided a form of art therapy for many adults, offering a new way to relax, be creative and to meditate and practice mindfulness.
We are privileged to be working with Maui artist Matthew Smith, who has recently released his own adult coloring book, titled Color Me Buddha—Express Yourself to De-Stress Yourself.
The illustrations in Smith’s book are stunning and, as seen in Color Me Buddha:
“His motifs bring to life mythic struggles of man versus beast that will rouse your creative muse. The exquisite details Matt weaves into each of his creations reels you back to a place of solemn contemplation with images of animal strength and feminine grace, before finally drawing you toward the serenity of a tropical garden awaiting your personal touch of color. Let your creative energy flow to reach a place of harmony and meditation as you enter the world of Color Me Buddha.”
Here at Cake Media, we have been providing marketing support to Matt in the shape of Facebook Ads—developing optimized ad sets to raise awareness of his new book, pushing targeted users towards the Color Me Buddha Amazon page with a clear call to action and continuously watching the data and adjusting accordingly to ensure we get the best return on investment.
In addition to our skills with Facebook Ad campaigns, we offer a number of creative and marketing services, including; graphic design, content creation, SEO and social media management.
You may want us to help you from the ground up with every facet of your online marketing, or even just one aspect of getting your name out there, like our work for Matt with Facebook Ads. Whatever your needs, feel free to call us today!
Published by Beyond Words, you can view Color Me Buddha here!
Thank you for visiting. Laura and Jenny
Emojis, Engagement and the Release of iOS 10
Apple announced at a press conference marking the launch of the iPhone 7 this week that iOS 10 will officially be released on September 13, 2016.
So, not only are we in store for shiny new iPhones with wireless AirPod headphones, advanced camera options, water and dust resistance and more—we are also going to get a and a host of new features as part of Apple’s updated operating system. This includes new emojis.
Love them or hate them, emojis are here to stay and from a social media marketing point of view, they can be a valuable tool for increasing engagement and communicating with your online communities.
Emojis can speak to your audiences across language barriers, they also convey tone, which can often be misinterpreted online and via text. They can also make your brand appear friendlier, funnier, and up-to-date with younger followers.
Studies have even indicated that internet users respond to emojis because they resonate on an emotional level. We kid you not, neuroscientists have actually studied the effects of emoticons and emojis on the human brain and have found that we respond to these smiley faces in the same way that we would with a human face.
If you aren't already using emojis in your social media marketing campaigns, give them a try. You'll be amazed at the boost in engagement levels.
So, what are we getting with these new emojis? Diversity tops the list. As seen recently on Apple.com, “Apple is working closely with the Unicode Consortium to ensure that popular emoji characters reflect the diversity of people everywhere.”
We’ll see female police officers, firefighters and construction workers, dancing men with bunny ears, single parent families, female basketball players, the Rainbow Flag and much more, as seen on Emojipedia. The new-look emojis will also have a better, updated design, will be slightly larger and will also feature more animals, sports, facial expressions, food and drinks. Lovers of bacon, who don’t have the inclination to type out b-a-c-o-n, your emoji is almost here…
DID YOU KNOW?
The word "Emoji" has nothing to do with emotions, it means "picture character" in Japanese
Emojis are different to Emoticons, which look more like this :-( and :-)
July 17 is World Emoji Day
This emoji 😂 was chosen as the Oxford Dictionaries word of the year for 2015 (!!!)
Nearly half of all comments and captions on Instagram contain emoji characters
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That's it for today's blog. Thanks so much for visiting our site and have fun with those new emojis!
Laura and Jenny
SEO services for rodrigo moraes photography
We are thrilled to announce that Rodrigo Moraes Photography is Cake Media’s latest client.
Rodrigo Moraes is a Maui-based photographer, who specializes in shooting destination weddings and family portraits. We love his work, so needless to say we were delighted when he came to us looking for search engine optimization help for his website, www.rodrigomoraesphotography.com
For those of who who may not know, search engine optimization (SEO) is a way of using a number of creative and technical techniques to improve search engine rankings. The goal is to increase the visibility of a website and to bring in more traffic.
For any independent professional or online business, high rankings on search engines such as Google, Yahoo and Bing are crucial when it comes to hooking potential paying customers.
After a complete audit of Rodrigo’s site, we began by meeting with him several times to talk strategy and to find out more about his work and style of photography. We also delivered and discussed a tailor-made proposal, outlining our SEO plans for his business.
We found that Rodrigo's site was content rich in so many ways; plenty of beautiful photographs, great use of video, a blog, plus social follow buttons for Facebook, YouTube, Instagram and Twitter.
However, it was clear to us that there were areas in which Cake Media could add to and adjust the existing content to boost SEO.
Aside from providing services for the technical side of SEO (think meta tags, sitemaps, eliminating crawl errors, Google Adwords and so on), there’s nothing we love more than creating fresh written content.
We can’t stress the importance of good content enough. It encourages users to spend longer on your site, it can help them to find all the information they need without navigating away and—our ultimate goal—it will keep them coming back for more.
Any content on your site needs to be consistent, trustworthy and it should convey the personality of your brand. This is exactly why we wanted to spend time getting to know Rodrigo, so we could take on his “voice” when developing copy.
We aren’t about keyword stuffing, we’re all about creating well-formatted, reader-friendly content with the short and long-tail keywords carefully worked in. So far, we have already edited and rewritten sections of Rodrigo’s blog, we have penned a new About page, added in FAQs and Testimonials from previous clients, with lots more SEO strategy happening behind the scenes (we can’t tell you all our secrets).
We must warn you, SEO is not a fast process. It’s something that requires a great deal of patience and it’s easy to see why a lot of business owners may not have time to do things on their own.
That’s where we come in.
Please feel free to contact Cake Media with any questions and we’d be more than happy to help!
Thanks for visiting, Laura and Jenny
Stories: Instagram's Boldest Change Yet?
When we published our last blog post, discussing a huge year of change at Instagram, little did we know that one of the app's biggest releases was just hours away.
In case you haven't heard, Instagram began to roll out Stories last week. It's a new feature that lets users combine images and video, which are then turned into a reel or "story." These stories can be viewed for 24 hours and don't appear in grids or feeds.
It's not just similar to Snapchat, it's a pretty clear knock off of the clip-sharing platform, who introduced their own 10-second storytelling feature in 2013. As reported by TechCrunch's Josh Constine, Instagram CEO Kevin Systrom openly admitted that Snapchat "deserve all the credit."
How to use it? Once you update your app, you'll see a series of circular avatars at the top of your IG homepage. Clips from users that you follow will be ringed with a rainbow, tap their avatar and you'll be able to watch their story. Swipe right to go to the next story and, if you want to skip, swipe left. If you want to direct message another user while viewing their story, swipe up.
Here's some great information about how to post to Stories, thanks to 9to5Mac.com.
While the video and image quality is not as polished as what you see in your profile grid, the ability to add filters, text overlays, emojis and cool neon highlighters (for giving cats laser beam vision, of course...) are fantastic additions to IG's features. As is the fact that you can post all the stories you like and they won't spam other users' feeds.
It's an audacious move, one that reminds us of the Periscope launch that swiftly signaled the demise of Meerkat. Dare we say it, it may even spell the beginning of the end for Snapchat.
One thing is for certain, in this year of transformation, we get the feeling that Instagram are not done yet.