The Pitfalls of Hashtags in Marketing & PR

Hashtags remain a powerful tool for promoting brands – but only if used carefully and strategically. Inappropriate use or overuse of hashtags can backfire and damage an organization’s marketing efforts, digital marketing pros warn.

Hashtags help social media users search for subjects and conversations.  Users can include tweets and other types of social media comments in conversations without taking up too many characters. Originally devised for Twitter, hashtags are now used by almost all social networks to varying degrees.

A Problem with Abuse

The problem is that spammers and overly aggressive marketers have abused them. Many people find multiple hashtags annoying.

“Using too many hashtags devalues the strength of the hashtag and makes each additional one more meaningless than the last,” advises Juntae DeLane, founder of the Digital Branding Institute. “It could lose your followers and permanently cheapen your brand’s social media reputation.”

Choose just one hashtag to represent your brand and strengthen consumer awareness, DeLane advises. Select one that is clear and easy to remember. Even though acronyms or multi-word phrases might be more specific and help eliminate false positives, complicated hashtags often don’t work well.

In selecting keywords for media monitoring, many PR and marketing pros include appropriate hashtags.

PR pros often include hashtags in tweets to increase reach and connect with journalists. Reporters frequently use hashtags to view discussions on a topic and gauge consumer sentiment when writing a story. Some also use hashtags to latch onto a popular trend. However, trend jacking or newsjacking hurt a brand’s reputation if perceived as exploitative or insensitive. Experts urge PR to tread cautiously and avoid hashtags involving wars, natural disasters, and celebrity deaths.

In addition, failing to understand the background and context of hashtags before adding them to posts can lead to a PR embarrassment.

Some Marketers Abandon Hashtags

Many marketers have abandoned hashtags recently, says Rachel Parker, founder and CEO of Resonance Content Marketing. They feel hashtags are no longer worth the effort and may even cause more harm than good, Parker writes in Business 2 Community. And as search has improved, it’s easier to find topics without hashtags.

Parker offers these recommendations for hashtags on different platforms.

Twitter. Limit hashtag use to events such as conferences, live broadcasts, and expert chats.

Facebook. Don’t bother. A Buzzsumo analysis of a billion Facebook posts revealed that posts without hashtags received more engagement than those with hashtags.

LinkedIn.  It’s too soon to know for sure.  LinkedIn dropped hashtags but restored them last year. Users have been slow to adopt them so far.

SnapChat. Forget it. The app doesn’t support hashtags.

Instagram. Use a lot of them. One study found the best number of hashtags on Instagram posts is nine. Because of Instagram’s visual nature, hashtags might be needed to help users find content.

Bottom Line: Although hashtags offer an invaluable PR and marketing tool, ineffective use of hashtags is common and can damage the brand. Experts urge PR and marketing to select hashtags carefully and use them judiciously. To follow the adage, less can be more.