Where should you use them?

For Twitter and Instagram

You should use them all the time. Those two platforms work around the concept of hashtags and that’s the way for you to reach out to your ideal audience and then bring them back to your social profile and eventually to your store. You’ll need to do a little bit of research and ask yourself what hashtags are your ideal customers using and start using them on your pictures and posts.

Facebook

I know this may surprise a few of you but Facebook isn’t actually a good platform to use hashtags. The algorithm and the way the Facebook search works have changed and it’s not recommended anymore to use hashtags on the platform. There was a study done by Buzz Sumo – they’ve analyzed over a billion posts from over 13 million brand pages and reported that posts that used hashtags didn’t perform quite as well as posts that didn’t use them. In other words, if you don’t use hashtags, you have a bigger chance of reaching a wider audience on Facebook.

Pinterest 

is not like a social media platform, it is more of a search engine. The way it works is that you write some keywords and get all those posts and pictures related to your search. Up until really recently, you would have heard me saying ‘don’t use hashtags on Pinterest’, because those posts weren’t going to rank well. They had a different way of ranking the images on the platform but recently Pinterest officially announced they reintroducing hashtags to the platform. Here’s a video on how to use hashtags on Pinterest.