Wedding Business Marketing: Social Media & The Power Hashtag

We've all seen hashtags on social media. The good, the bad, and well, the ugly.  While many use hashtags for fun to make a point in posts, they do actually have an important use when it comes to your wedding business and leveraging one of the most economical ways to market your business.  Simply throwing up the "#" sign on a phrase that you think is clever doesn't mean you are using it properly, and in fact, could be
adversely affecting and sabotaging your efforts. Hashtags were created to help drive traffic to a specific topic for those looking.  Smart wedding marketeers know that in driving traffic to a relevent topic, they are also driving potential customers to their brand.  Further, in our wedding and event industry, hashtags have also become a wonderful way to encourage event guests to promote your event or services without investing one dime. 
Here are some top considerations to turn average hashtagging into "power hashtagging":

Make sure your hashtag is simple and relevent to the subject. The intent of hashtags is to draw followers to your conversation and ultimately to your brand.  If your hashtag is not relevent to your subject, it may get marked as SPAM and not picked up at all.

Do not add hashtags to very word in your post.  It convolutes your post and makes it look too contrived.

Act on trends that are relevent to your business. For a rental company, it may be wedding trends but also color and design trends and much more.

Don't be afraid to get controversial.  (Healthy) conflict creates conversation and gets people engaged in your brand.  Ask followers what they think about the latest decor/design trend.  Is there a recent ethical issue?  Bringing it up professionally, generically, without mentioning names, but using key terms in your hashtagging and tying it to your industry and business is a great way to set your brand on fire with energy.

To capitalize or not to capitalize, that is the question.  For the most part, when people do searches, they are in a hurry and generally type search words and terms in all lowercase;  therefore, most hashtags should be lowercase.  However, consider this example of a rare exception:  one corporation tweeted "#nowthatcherisdead" and caused a storm of devasted "Cher" fans, when , in fact, the tweet was announcing the death of Britain's former Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher and should have read "#NowThatThatcherIsDead".  So paying careful attention to how your hashtag reads when all lowercase can make a big difference , not to mention save some face.

Finally, when we train and speak to wedding & hospitality professionals, one of the questions we are most often asked is if a brand new hashtag has to be created as opposed to using one that is already out there being used.  The answer is, sometimes, but not always. If people are already using a hashtag, and having conversations with that hashtag, then part of your work is already done. All your business needs to do is make sure that when it joins that conversation it is adding value.
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Engaging Inspiration offers sparkling training, marketing and social media solutions for the wedding & hospitality professional.