Nearly every social networking site now supports hashtags. A great way to promote your business is to run a hashtag competition across the various social media accounts you have. Hashtags are used to drive a conversation about a particular topic. It will bring traffic and increase the engagement on your accounts.

Some of the social media sites that support hashtags are:

• Twitter
• Facebook
• Instagram
• Pinterest
• Google+
• You Tube
• Tumblr
• Flickr

We have compiled some helpful tips to ensure that any hashtag competition you run is successful.

1. Setting Objectives. You need to establish what success means to you so set your objectives at the beginning of the campaign so you can effectively measure success at the end e.g. reach 10,000 people across all platforms.
2. Choose your hashtag carefully. Make sure it is specific to your competition. Do not use a common word. You want to be able to measure your interactions on the various platforms.
3. Make sure your audience know about the competition. If you run a campaign and don’t promote it enough nobody will use the hashtag when they are posting.
4. It is vital that you use the hashtag and promote it on all the the hashtag-compatible social media sites. Try to maximise your engagement.
5. Give your audience an incentive. Create a competition where the applicants have to use a specific hashtag to enter, or one of a number of hashtags. Then reward them for doing so with prizes, discounts or vouchers.
6. Measure your success. Set up a Tagboard or a Talkwalker monitoring account to establish the reach of your hashtag across all social media platforms.