Social Media Opinion South Africa

The power of the hashtag for social impact marketing

There are many questions about the significance of #hashtags, especially in the fight against injustices and other social relates issues. Like why is it that instead of using hashtags online rather go outside and physically demonstrate? Here will look at the impact of hashtags in driving positive change.
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The current world of digital technology has changed many this as they are known. Today we have digital natives. These are young people who were born in a world of smartphone and digital communications. And they are the custodians of the hashtag movement. There no other way of engaging beside through online platforms. Thus, there is what is called #BlackTwitter. For the benefit of those who might not know, Black Twitter is an online community of Black people who usually use Twitter to discuss and debate issues across boards with peculiar attention to Black lives.

#Hashtags

I am sure by now you’ve realised that used the hashtag symbol several times, this is intentional to bring attention to the word that goes with that symbol. Over the years, have seen many hashtags trending number one on Twitter. So let’s break it down this way. Twitter was the first online platform to utilise #hashtag to unify content.

A hashtag is like a connector that brings together different opinions — tweets under one subject. Then, other online platforms followed after experiencing the power of the hashtag. Facebook is the biggest social media platform with over 2.3 billion active users in the world, but it is not that significant in terms of hashtag use. Even though they have allowed users to include a hashtag in their post to link the content with that of the other users of the same hashtag.

In the past week seen for the very first time a positive hashtag after the #BlackLiveMatter trending on Facebook. The #HelpMePromoteMybusinessChallenge trended for almost a week on Facebook, users were sharing information about the respective businesses. And this was a positive sight that Facebook has finally got it right. Even though users are ones pushing this hashtag, however, it shows that Facebook algorithms have become better than before.

Facebook

Facebook is big when comes to small business marketing and promotion and it has become the go-to social media platform for small business to connect with potential customers. This particular hashtag is one of the positive hashtags which needs to happen often so that more and small businesses can get exposed to a wider community.

The reason what Facebook is the perfect social media platform for a hashtag such as this one is that it’s not as cluttered and fast-paced as Twitter. Marketing on Twitter is highly like that hashtag can be bought for the number one spot. Using Facebook to build a community must be the objective of the marketing team from small businesses. Earned Media through hashtag is well better than paid media.

The history of marketing tells us that the most successful businesspeople utilise word-of-mouth to promote and market themselves and their businesses. Think about Richard Branson. He’s known for chic-in-tongue PR stunts. So when you look at hashtags from a marketing and promotion point of view its simple PR and word-of-mouth on a digital platform. And Facebook is a grand arena for reaching a wider audience through positive hashtags to market and promote your business.

These boil down to positively utilising social media platforms for marketing and promotion businesses without a big budget. Thus it pivotal to master this as a must-have skill to successfully launch and market in the current digital world as well as crafting positive hashtags that will have positive ROI.

About Rirhandzu Shingwenyana

Rirhandzu Shingwenyana is a marketing, advertising and communications professional with experience in account management, social media and digital marketing campaign management.
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