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An often forgotten, but immensely important part of social media content is the hashtag (what we old folks remember as the pound symbol) and if you keep reading, you will have the skills to use them to your advantage with your mortgage marketing efforts.
What are hashtags?
In short, hashtags are words and/or numbers that follow the "#" symbol in a social media caption. You have probably seen them at some point on your friend's brunch selfie or a family member's baby photo and wondered what, if any, was the point of them.
While hashtags are great for selfies and baby photos, they are also a beneficial tool for loan officers, such as yourself, to use to your advantage and take your mortgage marketing efforts to new heights. At the click of a button (or tap of the finger), users can see a wide array of posts about the topics that they care about most.
Social media hashtags are available on most of the biggest social platforms, so you can start using them today!
Why use them?
So now that you know what hashtags are, why use them? There are many advantages to using hashtags to help reach your marketing goals. For starters, hashtags help you reach a broader audience. When you use hashtags, users that are searching for or interested in the topic you post about can find your content more easily. This will not only lead to increased brand exposure for your mortgage services, but also more engagement on your posts.
Hashtags can help you gain reach new audiences, but can also help you retain the ones you already have through the creation of custom hashtags. Making custom hashtags can be fruitful in a number of scenarios, such as with a promotion or educational series, which we address further down.
Social media hashtags are a free way to enhance your competitor analysis and future planning of marketing content. Click on the hashtags that you use and more likely than not, you will find your competitors' posts. This allows you to see what strategies, keywords, etc. your competitors are using and how well they are performing.
How to use hashtags to your advantage
While using hashtags may seem pretty cut and dry, there are some steps you can take to get the most out of them.
The most important piece of advice that we can give about using hashtags is to make them relevant. Using hashtags that have no relation to your post will provide no benefit to you, and may even end up hurting your reach. However, utilizing relevant and keyword-rich hashtags can bear great results.
For example, let's say you are making a post targeted at first-time homebuyers. You'll want to include hashtags with keywords that relate to the post and your services, such as "FirstTimeHomebuyer" or "HomeLoans" or "DownPaymentAssistance".
Which leads to us to the next point, which is performing hashtag research. There are many hashtag research platforms available to help you optimize your hashtags. By conducting a quick search on one of these tools, you can see stats such as the popularity of a hashtag, how many posts use the hashtag, and even where the hashtag is trending. A good rule of thumb is to find the hashtags that aren't too popular, such as "Mortgages", but also not too niche to the point that it won't reach anyone. Most tools will also give you the option to see related hashtags that users are searching for.
At the end of the day, it's all about finding the hashtags that work best for your brand and your page, which is why we recommend testing different ones and seeing what performs the best.
You've done the research and are now ready to start using hashtags with your mortgage social media strategy, but you may be wondering how many to use? Too few may keep you from reaching more audiences, but too many could be seen as spam (which social media companies try to prevent), and that means your page may end up being hidden from users. While the recommended number of hashtags may vary between platforms, three to five in most cases is the optimal amount.
As stated previously, custom hashtags can be used to help retain and provide benefits to your current followers.
Create custom hashtags to categorize your content and help users find more of your posts relating to the same topic. For example, say you have a few posts that go over moving tips. Create your own unique (and relevant) hashtag that users can click to find more of those same posts in your feed.
You may also have a company slogan or phrase that you can use as a custom hashtag to help users better remember your brand. Get creative and see how you can use custom hashtags to your advantage.
Hashtags are a quick and easy way to boost your online presence and put yourself in front of new audiences that may want you as their loan officer for their next home purchase. Start using them today and see the positive impact it will have for your brand!
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