681 – Add hashtags and grow your engagement: Tom talks Hashtags

Episode 681 - Hashtags
[00:00:08] Welcome to Screw the Commute. The entrepreneurial podcast dedicated to getting you out of the car and into the money, with your host, lifelong entrepreneur and multimillionaire, Tom Antion.

[00:00:24] Hey, everybody, is Tom here with episode 681 of Screw the Commute Podcast. Today, we're going to talk about hashtags. I've been using them a lot lately because of my work on TikTok. And you know, hashtags have only been around since around 2007, but they're one of the Internet things that has stood the test of time and are actually increasing in use. And if you're not using them, I mean, it's free to do, but it can really, really help you out. And I'll explain that today. I hope you didn't miss Episode 680. Kim Derrick Rozdeba and I had a little interesting episode on branding. So, you know, I rag on branding all the time. So he kind of put it in perspective on when and not to when use branding. That was episode 680. And of course, when you want to get to it back episode you go to screwthecommute.com, slash and then the episode number. That was 680. Hey the Christmas season and holiday seasons coming up, it'd be a great time for you to help out those in in need. We have our scholarship program for persons with disabilities who have a Patreon set up for it, which starts as little as $3 a month. So getting all this training for me, all the money from it is going to go to the scholarship fund.

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[00:02:22] All right let's get to the main training here. And by the way, we actually took all our training episodes and put it on one page at screwthecommute.com/training. There's over 300 episodes teaching you. I mean, it's a million bucks worth of free training. So check out screwthecommute.com/training. If you'd like to hone in on an education on internet, digital marketing, entrepreneurship, all kinds of stuff that I've lived for. Oh, jeez, I don't know. A lot of years. Okay. Today we're going to talk about hashtags and what is it? Well, it's a one word or string of words preceded by the the number sign that's called the hashtag sign now and thus us oldsters.

[00:03:10] All right. No, it is the pound sign. It has no spaces and no punctuation. And it's connected to a piece of content. Well, what's it for? Well, it identifies what a piece of material is about or who would be interested in that piece of material. It makes your social media posts more visible and increases engagement because basically it lumps and aggregates a bunch of content on a particular subject. So people can find and consume it easier. They don't have to sift through a bunch of stuff to find their exact interest, so they like that better. For instance, hashtag golf lovers would obviously be material of interest to people who love golf. I mean, it seems pretty simple, doesn't it? Well, it really is. But it can be extremely powerful to make sure your content is shown to the right group of people. Now on Tick tock, and in other places too, your hashtag is telling the algorithm who to show this content to. In other words, who would be interested in this piece of content I just put out? Here's an example. I'm an Internet and digital marketing mentor. Been there for 25 years doing that. Now, what you need to do is think of who would want to see a piece of content about this topic and would they be a valuable lead for me. See, I could put hashtag web designer, but in many cases I already know they think they know it all and and probably won't follow me and spend any money.

[00:04:57] So a better hashtag would be small hashtag. Small business owner. Remember, no spaces, no punctuation or hashtag mom, printer or hashtag. How to start a small business. See? And in other words, I want the person that can use my kind of help and is most likely to invest in themselves. Now I'm working with here's another example. I'm kind of working with a group of hashtags on TikTok with regard to home schooling, because I know my school is perfect for them. And I'm using hashtags like hashtag home schooling that had 886 million uses. Extremely large. I'm going to talk about the size of the hashtags, like how popular they are in a minute. Home schooling mom 36.3 million home schooling moms 7.6 million. These numbers are only on tick tock, by the way, folks. Home schooling. Mama had 2.8 million. Home school was 1.9 billion. Now, listen to this. You can use. Misspellings and not get any flak about it. Ham school. All right. Unless unless there's some school out there. I don't know about this. Specializes in pigs. All right. I don't know. Ham school had 15 million. Home school. Mom was 232.5 million. Now, a little. You know, you have to think a little bit past this, too. Hashtag money for college. Well, that at least puts that prospect that's typing that into higher education.

[00:06:48] And that's what my school provides. But it's a skill based school rather than the four year indoctrination schools that they're going to spend a fortune and have massive college debt and be competing for jobs at Starbucks. All right. So but anyway, that money for college hashtag means, I mean, who searches for such a thing unless they either have somebody that's going to looking for higher education or they themselves are looking for higher education? Now, you might say, Tom, I don't want to bring up a bunch of competitors by making it easy for someone to find a bunch of my competitors that are using my same hashtag. Well, you see, that's a two edged sword. See? Yes, your your customers and prospects may see your competitors. But remember, when your competitor uses the hashtag, their prospects can also see you. And if you don't use the hashtag, then you're basically left out of the topics group of cool kids and you're on your own. So it seems like a little protectionist stick to me and short sighted to me. You need to improve what you have to offer so that when you come up in a hashtag, your offer looks way better than the other guys. All right. Now, let's talk about the number of uses on a hashtag. Now, the figures that I were giving you change all the time. But I got them directly from Tick Tock. I just put in.

[00:08:22] I did a search on tick tock, clicked on hashtags and it shows me the hashtags and how many people are using the hashtags. So that one I said, was 1.9 billion. Well, what that means to you is if you're not well established in that niche and on that hashtag, you will virtually never be seen because there are too many competitors. Now I can't tell you how many is too many for you. You have to research and see what the range is in your field. For instance, I just looked up on TikTok, the hashtag carburetor. And the most I got was 73 million. That sounds like a really big thing, but it's nothing compared to 1.9 billion for home schooling, right? Now the misspelling of carburetor got 29 million. Everything else was really, really tiny in the thousands. Hundreds of thousands, which, like I said, with billions of people on the ticktalk, those are relatively small numbers. But what this pretty much says is you could rank much easier and be found way easier. If you work with carburetors. All right. So the numbers vary according to the popularity of the niche. This doesn't mean you have no chance of success in larger niches. It just means you have to work it harder and work your way up using the lesser known and searched hashtags. And in that way, you'll have a better chance to be found and more people get to know you. And as you grow, you can hit the higher hashtags.

[00:10:05] Now, hashtags work differently on different platforms. Youtube recently even got into the act with now my video guy Mark. We did episode 668. He's done several over the years with me, but we talked about hashtags on how they're used on YouTube. Now in the show notes, I'm going to link to a HubSpot article that breaks down how hashtags work on Twitter, Facebook and Instagram. And I think you're going to be surprised when you read this article if you're actually using hashtags but never really looked into into how they're used on these different platforms. You may be doing a totally worthless LP or even hurting yourself. So I'll have that article linked in the show notes and you can even use hashtags on printed materials and signs and you can say them on interviews. It's very common and accepted nowadays. If you say Hashtag so-and-so, you can even make up your own hashtags for events and so forth. Now you have to promote the hashtag because, you know, I might say hashtag bootcamp. Oh, that's my, you know, the longest running Internet, continuously running Internet and digital marketing seminar ever. But it's not like the whole world knows about it. It's not a household name camp. All right. They'll probably think it's porn or something or an exercise thing. Yeah, it kind of is. I guess you're exercising your brain to to sell online. But anyway, it's not well known, so I would have to promote that myself to get people to use it to keep all the stuff with regard to, let's say, an upcoming bootcamp in one place so it can spread around and people can can see it.

[00:11:52] But that's a much different thing than using hashtags that are already well established and you jumping in on the bandwagon. So you're really missing out if you aren't actively using hashtags that apply to your target audience. And I can assure you your competitors are all right. That's my story and I'm sticking to it. Hey, help us out with Patreon, screwthecommute.com/patreon all the money that comes in less. The patron fees will go to the scholarship program for persons with disabilities. We have three people in the program, two of which are blind. I mean just so inspirational to me. So please give us a hand with that screwthecommute.com/patreon and I will catch you on the next episode. Oh, wait a minute. Don't forget to follow me on TikTok. I'm really growing very rapidly, and that's a place where you can grow very rapidly. And I know there's everybody's saying a lot of bad things about it, but I'm going to use it to my advantage before they do something bad to me. How about that? All right. We'll get you on the next episode. I'm @DigitalMultimillionaire on TikTok. See you later.