Used since 2007, hashtags are labels used to group posts under the same topics or themes on social media platforms. They are most commonly used on Twitter and Instagram. But they have gained popularity on most of the other big social media platforms like Facebook, LinkedIn and TikTok too.
Hashtags can help users and content creators to find trending topics in the industry or market of their interest. On Instagram and LinkedIn, content creators can share posts including popular hashtags that match the topic of their post. This will then show in the feeds of users who are following the same hashtags.
The number of hashtags is increasing every day, with new hashtags being created to express evolving trends. This is the same in the cyber security sector. There is a wide variance of hashtags, and their popularity keeps changing to reflect cyber trends.
How to use hashtags on social media?
There is no unique approach to using hashtags on social media posts. Hashtags can be integrated naturally within captions, or they can be dropped at the end of captions. They can even be the stand-alone caption that goes with still images, videos, or carousels.
The social media platforms on which the hashtags are being used can dictate how many hashtags to use. On Twitter it is recommended to use one or two. For LinkedIn and Facebook it is suggested to use no more than three hashtags. On Instagram, however, the discussion on how many hashtags to use is debatable. While some say that any more than five hashtags can be considered spam, others continue to recommend using the maximum number of hashtags allowed on this platform (30), to optimise the reach of various users, following all those different hashtags.
What is important to know, is that the hashtags used need to be relevant to the topic addressed in each social media post. Otherwise users will find the post irrelevant and will ignore posts coming from that account.
What are the most popular cybersecurity-related hashtags
While trends travel fast in cyber security, their respective hashtags follow suit. However, some more generic hashtags continue to be used across most posts on social media that communicate a cyber-related theme, hence, maintaining their popularity. For this reason, it’s important to stay on top of the latest trends in cyber security and conversations online. This will help your hashtag strategy evolve and stay relevant.
Are hashtags useful for cyber security companies’ social media marketing strategy?
Here at OggaDoon, we’re working with reputable, governmental and start-up cyber security companies. When it comes to social media marketing strategy, hashtags are key to making our clients visible to users that would not otherwise see their posts.
For our threat intelligence start-up client, we earned a 1,920% boost in profile visits on Twitter just by catching on and using trending hashtags. Here is an example of a tweet that got the company over 4,5K views for this tweet alone:
What can be observed in the example above is that, except for evergreen, generic hashtags like #cybersecurity, #hacking, and #cyberthreat, we used very contextual hashtags that were popular at that time (September 2021), related to the Afghan crisis and cyber threat coming from that region.
This is not an isolated example. But when it comes to the use of hashtags to increase visibility across social media, it speaks for itself. Want to know more about hashtags, how and when to use them, and how to increase your company’s social media visibility through the use of these digital labels? Get in touch.
