How to Find Great Hashtags to Market Your Nonprofit
3 min to read ✭ In this post, you will learn how #hashtags have the ability to broaden your reach and expand your audience! We're diving into the importance of using hashtags and how to find great ones to market your nonprofit. Check it out!
Hashtags are supported by most, if not all, social platforms. They have the ability to show your organization’s posts to a wider audience, as whoever clicks a certain hashtag is then shown all content relating to it. For example, if your nonprofit wants to promote a fundraiser, you might take to Instagram to spread the word. Whatever hashtag you decide to include in the caption of your photo or video will allow your organization’s content to be seen by not only people who are following you directly, but also people who click on a hashtag – many of which may not be following you at all. Using hashtags may even generate more interest in your organization! People who were previously unfamiliar with your nonprofit are now potentially interested because the hashtag they searched is relevant to your content. This is why it’s important to not only use hashtags, but to use ones that pertain to your organization and its mission.
Hashtag Dos and Don’ts
While hashtagging your posts might seem like a mindless addition to your content, there should be some strategy involved within your process. Additionally, you will definitely benefit from adhering to some best practices and making sure that you are nor overdoing nor under-doing it when it comes to using hashtags.
Make Them Easy to Remember
If users are spelling your hashtag wrong or are misremembering what your actual hashtag is, then people won’t find your post. While your followers will still see most of what you post regardless, making hashtags difficult to remember may decrease your audience reach as less and less new people are able to see your posts. From a branding perspective, it’s important to use words or phrases that are catchy and can easily be picked up.
Know Your Platform
A platform like Instagram yields better to using many hashtags versus a platform like Twitter where one or two strong hashtags are sufficient. Understanding the status quo of how people use whichever platform you are on is vital to your social media strategy. Knowing when to do more and when to cut back is essential, because you definitely don’t want to come across spamming your followers with tons of hashtags. This also ties into the importance of using relevant hashtags on your organization’s social media and content posts. The better the hashtags you use, the less you’ll actually have to use. However, we’ll dive into that in the next section.
Communicate Your Hashtag Effectively
If you create a hashtag unique to your nonprofit organization, you can’t expect people to already be using the same hashtags you are using. Make sure to clearly communicate your hashtag effectively and share why someone would want to include it on their post. Again, this is more from a branding perspective, but it’s definitely an important practice to note. The more eyes that see it, the more your organization is on top-of-mind.
Do Your Research!
If you want to optimize your posts’ reach and increase its visibility, then it’s important to look into what hashtags are already being used. That is honestly a must. Similar to the reason why you want to communicate your hashtag effectively, you can’t just make something up and expect other people to happen to be using the same thing. Being intentional with your hashtag strategy is how you can maximize its effects. For starters, take a look into other causes or organizations who are rocking their social. What hashtags are they rocking? Take a note and go off that.
How to Actually Find Relevant Hashtags For Your Org
First, you should find trending hashtags in your niche. It’s pretty vital to your social media strategy to identify which topics are trending, both in general and in your nonprofit’s space. You can use the trends to your advantage. If tons of people are already searching or clicking those hashtags, that’s a really great way for you broaden your reach. However, making sure the trending hashtag is somewhat relevant to your voice and your organization is just as important. Definitely don’t just tag whatever is trending the most, but do look to see if you can use any to your advantage.
A great tool to help you identify relevant hashtags in the nonprofit space is hastagify.me. When you search specific terms, the search engine then identifies several related hashtags that are popular in relation to your search. For example, the most used hashtags relating to #Nonprofit are #philanthropy, #socialmedia, #nptech, #marketing, #hiring, #jobs, #fundraising, and #charity!
Another really cool resource is called Tagboard, which helps you to find relevant cross-platform hashtags. While some hashtags may only be pertinent to Twitter and others more popular on Instagram, Tagboard compiles conversations happening cross-platform. This is a fantastic way to find hashtags that are relevant across all platforms and not just one.
Additionally, finding relevant hashtags manually is really great too! As previously mentioned, doing your research is one of the best ways you will actually understand what conversation is happening throughout your nonprofit space. You can search a hashtag that you think might be relevant to your brand, and click on relevant and top-performing posts to see what other ones the different accounts are using. Looking into competitors and other similar causes in your space is a wonderful strategy as well.
Just test some different things out and you will see how much more viewership your posts will gain. Strategic hashtags are truly amazing and are something we implement in our social strategy every day!
