406 – This small change can increase your followers like crazy: Tom talks Hashtags

Episode 406 - Hashtags
[00:00:09] 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 it's Tom here with Episode four hundred and six of Screw the Commute podcast. We talk about hashtags today and we introduce you to using hashtags more effectively. Maybe you're using them right now, but I think this episode is going to give you some ways to increase your reach by using them in ways that please the platforms that you're on a little bit more. And I've also got a really good resource, I'll tell you about later, if you really want to be a hashtag pro. All right. Hope you didn't miss Episode four or five, Reiko Scott, she's a millennial E.R. doctor, and she teamed up with her dad to write the groundbreaking book, Fanocracy.

[00:01:10] I've been following her dad for many years. He wrote the book The New Rules of Marketing and PR, and he teamed up with her to write this new book called Fanocracy. She's also going to tell you about pulling a live cockroach out of somebody's ear about that.

[00:01:31] So how would you like to hear your own voice here on screw the commute? Well, if the show has helped you out at all in your business or given the ideas to help you start a business, we want to hear about it. Visit, screwthecommute.com look for a little blue sidebar that says send voicemail, click on it, talk into your phone or computer and put your website on there so you get a big shout out on a future episode of Screw the Commute. Now, make sure I'm still laughing about the concrete, make sure you pick up a copy of our Free Automation eBook, this is you will thank me for a million years, OK? All right. Just I'm not going to tell all the details. It's going to be a fairly short episode today. Go get it at screwthecommute.com/automatefree. And you are welcome about that. And pick up a copy of our podcast that while you're over there at screwthecommute.com/app and get the free book at screwthecommute.com/automatefree. I've been telling you of a been knocking it into your brain for 23 years, if you're not on this podcast, hasn't been around that long, but that's to learn how to sell from home. Well, my school was a perfect way to do it. I have a mentor program that I'll tell you about later. But the school is something that's you know, we've got students making money within a couple months of starting the school where when you're in a four year college, you go four years, you're not making any money. You're out of the workforce, which is losing you hundreds of thousands of dollars. And you're you're not learning any usable skills other than how to protest. All right. So so check out my school at IMTCVA.org, and it's a distance learning school. If you can speak English and you're anywhere you can hear this well, you can be in that school and get those skills and not waste the next four years of your life or your kids lives learning how to protest.

[00:03:32] All right. Let's get to the main event. Let's talk about hashtags. Boy, you can use these things just about everywhere now, including Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, YouTube, which marked my video I showed you on a previous episode, LinkedIn and Pinterest, and probably a bunch of other places, too.

[00:03:54] So let's talk about why you should use them. Well, it helps you target. An audience and helps them find you. See, at least on Instagram and LinkedIn, people can actually follow hashtags, not follow people. And what that means is they see stuff that falls under that particular hashtag, even if they aren't following a person that's using that hashtag. Well, what's that mean to you? Well, let's say you were using brownies as a hashtag on one of your Instagram posts or someone who follows the hashtag brownies. May have never heard of you, never heard of the way you make brownies, doesn't follow you. You don't exist on Earth to them. Other than the fact then, if. They are looking for brownies or they have they are following a hashtag with brownies excuse me, your post about brownies can show up in in their feed when they look for stuff.

[00:05:04] So this means they can start following you never heard of you at all because they're interested in your topic. So that's one reason why you would use hashtags. And of course, if more of those people see you, that's going to. And first of all, all of this is predicated on the fact that you do quality posts. OK, so if you're doing quality posts about brownies and this person trips on you, they said, oh, wow, I love this site about brownies, I'm going to follow them. So that increases your followers. And if you make really good posts, that's going to increase your engagement. They're going to like your pictures and share stuff and make comments, say, which is what you want, because the more of that engagement you get. The more people most I can't think of any of these that don't do this, the more engagement you get, the more people, even your followers only see a percentage of your stuff. If they don't engage, say so. The more engagements you get, it shows your stuff to more people. And on some of the platforms, it can put you into like the general group of people and raise you up higher when somebody is following the hashtag. Now, you can also have branded hashtags now if you're just a beginner and don't have much of a brand or following or email list, it might not do you much good in the short run.

[00:06:34] But you can make you can make up a hashtag on anything. It's just that nobody is going to be searching for it. So, like in my case, I could make up a #screwthecommute and probably email it to my big email list and get some traction going. I mean, that's not millions and millions of people, but it could you know, it could grow as because screw the commute's pretty obvious what that means. All right. So so I could maybe do that. But that's one way that you can have your brand out there and it doesn't hurt you to do it. It's just how much it'll help you if you're just brand new is you know, is probably not much. Another thing hashtags can do is tie you to showing your support for social issues so you can jump on the bandwagon of other highly popular. Hashtags and you still might not come up high in the rankings, but the people that do see you. We'll see that you support that particular movement, and if they do, too, then they're going to like you better. So that's something you can do.

[00:07:46] Ok, so let's get into some specifics about hashtags. First of all, they always start with the pound sign. Which on a keyboard is above the number three key on your laptop or desktop, and I don't know where it is on your cell phone, but they're not going to work.

[00:08:07] If you don't if you put any spaces in there, you can't put a camera period or any kind of symbols in there. Now, you can use numbers. However, you can't use numbers by themselves. They always need to have text involved and you want to use relevant and specific hashtags. If you use hashtags that don't have anything to do with your post, well, that's just spam.

[00:08:33] And you're going to alienate anybody that does find you when they come to your post and they see that it's nothing about what they were looking for.

[00:08:42] You just a spammer, basically. Now, if it's too obscure of a hashtag and probably nobody will find it because nobody searching for those things. And if it's too popular, well, I'm going to talk about that later. I'll try not to make the hashtag too long where it's too hard to remember or or type it in the best ones are relatively short and easy to remember. And then the other thing is you got to make sure your account is public, because if you use a hashtag on a private account, only your. Your followers will see it. It's not going to help you attract new people, say so, make sure your accounts public. And then limit the amount of hashtags that you use. I mean, a lot of them, you can use up to 30, but you kind of start looking spammy when you do that. I'm going to talk more about that later. But and also why the biggest, most popular hashtags may be kind of worthless to you if you're just starting out. So how do you find these hashtags? Well, one thing you should monitor and, you know, check out all of your competitors and other people that are very popular on whatever platform you're using. And look what they do, see what hashtags they're using and how many they're using. And you can use hashtag tools, too, like we use hashtagify.me. There are there's lots of tools out there. I'm not promoting this one over any other ones, but but that's ones we happen to use. And one thing you can do, kind of like the David Meerman Scott, Reiko Scott's dad, who wrote a book and coined the term newsjacking, which is now in it's actually in the dictionary now. But newsjacking is kind of goes hand in hand with what we call trends.

[00:10:47] So trending hashtags like newsjacking and in other words, it's easier to get in radio and TV and get interviews. If you're talking about something that's already in the news.

[00:10:59] That's what newsjacking is, well, making post about things that are trending and getting, you know, more and more traction in the social media platforms can help you be found safe because you're, you know, are they sometimes fade away, too.

[00:11:15] But for the short run, it could get you more followers and a lot more engagement. Those are trending hashtags and one of the cool ones is called RiteTag. It's like, look at your caption and you can even put the photo up that you're going to use in your thing. And it'll generate trending hashtag suggestions based on what your content is. It's pretty cool. I personally haven't used that one, but a lot of people rave about that. I know where do you put these hashtags? Well, there's some controversy about this. I'm talking about Instagram right now, but I've seen some of the biggest accounts on Instagram. Put them in the first comment instead of the post caption. That's what I happened to do. Because you want to keep the caption, you know, clean as clean as possible and not look spammy, but if you have just a couple of hashtags, you can push them down way to the bottom. You know, you have to know how to do that with either getting an app that will put spaces in your caption or you put a period. And you know, you can you can there's tricks to to put spaces in captions and so you can put a few at the bottom. But I happen to put it in the first comment to just keep the caption nice and clean now. And YouTube, you can put up to 15. Well, by the way, on Instagram you can put up to 30, but you hardly ever see that, you know, you really want to pick the one a combination of big popular ones and less popular ones like said. I'll get into that in a minute. But but. Hardly ever do you put all 30 spaces in there now and YouTube, you can put up to 15 in your video description.

[00:13:03] But only the first three are going to show up above the title of your video, so make sure if you're putting them in your description, the first three are the most important ones you want to use. That's on YouTube.

[00:13:14] And I've mentioned this a couple of times. It's not good to use the most popular ones. If you're not that popular on the other platforms, you can just fire, you know, look at what other popular people and competitors are doing and do what they're doing and how many hashtags you want to use. Well, what are we going to tell you now is what's considered optimum. But the range can be much bigger on Facebook, one or two, Twitter, one or two, Instagram. Like I said, you can go up to 30, but, you know, anywhere from five to 10 or 12 or so as is optimum. Some people say only one or two say so. You just have to test. It's not something that there's an exact number on these YouTube up to 15, but two or three above your title is good linked in one or two Pinterest by anywhere from two to five. And I said these are very general rules of thumb because you have to test and see what's working best with your stuff on that platform with your audience.

[00:14:24] All right, now I'm finally going to get to the shouldn't you use the most popular ones. Well, no, you shouldn't if you aren't that popular yet. Actually, you should use a mix of highly popular hashtags and less popular ones. Well, why? See, because the most popular hashtags, I mean, literally could have 500 million posts.

[00:14:47] And the most popular people are going to be at the top of the results when someone searches for that hashtag. And you'll probably have millions of people in front of you. In other words, your post is going to be buried and it's never going to be seen. So here's a little rule of thumb, if if you're starting out and if you have less than a thousand followers. And I'm mostly talking about Instagram here, but the same idea kind of applies everywhere. If you have less than a thousand followers, use hashtags with five thousand two hundred and fifty thousand posts on like Instagram. You see right there how many posts for each hashtag that you you check out. It'll even give you other suggestions. So that gives you a greater chance to be seen because there's not millions of people in front of you. I actually use hashtags even way smaller than 5000 to try to get some traction on new accounts, because let's say if there's one hundred posts or less. Yeah, you don't have as many people, but somebody is liable to see you. All right. Well, if you're 500 million hashtag, nobody's ever going to see that again until you get millions of followers.

[00:16:07] So don't try to shoot for the moon. But it doesn't hurt to throw a popular one in as part of your hashtag. So you get the ball, the low hanging fruit, and then you take like a lottery ticket that maybe you'll get seen by some of those millions.

[00:16:24] That's OK.

[00:16:25] So get familiar with hashtags and start using them regularly and just by themselves. They're going to increase your followers over time without you spending any money. And I'm all for paid ads. And, you know, we have plenty of information on that. And I'm going to do that, too.

[00:16:42] But there's no sense in spending money and ignoring the free stuff that could really help you. And that's what hashtags are.

[00:16:52] Now, I've got a couple in-depth articles in the show, notes from you from HootSuite blog on how to use hashtags and then specifically Instagram hashtags, very in-depth articles. So if you really want to be a hashtag pro, you can check those out. And if you want to be a pro overall on Internet marketing, check out my mentor program. Hey, it gets you a a free scholarship to my school, which you can gift to somebody else. It's the most valuable, most successful, most unique program ever on the field of Internet marketing for small business and digital marketing. So check it out at greatInternetmarketingtraining.com. Give me a call. Be glad to talk about your future online. And maybe you've got a young person in your life or more than one that you don't want to see them suffering under deep debt and and having no skills for years from now. So we can talk about a scholarship for them also to the school.

[00:17:56] And then also they won't come home and live in your basement because they'll have their own money. All right. We'll catch y'all on the next episode. See ya later.

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