Public Relations & Social Marketing Insight

For many businesses, especially small ones, social media is a time-suck. Being active and creating relevant content has a way of unintentionally consuming precious time. Added to this, businesses can’t easily track or attribute social media activity to sales and profits. In fact, more often than not, social media incurs hidden costs.

So what’s a business to do?

Despite these drawbacks, your small business can leverage the power of social media to get prospects, customers, fans and the public engaged with your brand and content by being selective and targeted in your use of these platforms based on the different phases of the purchase process....

There have been valid business reasons to use hashtags for years. Twitter started it off. Pinterest added to it. Google+ mastered it in many ways. Instagram, Tumblr… the list of social sites on which hashtags are relevant is long. Facebook was the last major holdout. Now that they’ve joined the bandwagon, it’s go time.

Mastering the use of hashtags takes practice, testing, experimenting, and more practice. Thankfully, there are few things you can keep in mind that will make the journey much easier. Here are some basic techniques for using hashtags that should help you find your own strategy pretty easily…