Hashtags are now relevant across all popular social media channels! The hashtagging practice that overwhelmed the Twitter lovers a while ago, led many of us laugh it out to see how they began to use the hashtags on LinkedIn too. But, what now? These hashtagging lovers have proven digital marketing strategists like me wrong. Indeed, it’s THE TREND now and like several leading sectors, Travel Industry is up for it too.
Each one of us, irrespective of what we do, wear the travellers’ shoes off and on. We travel for fun, for business and sometimes out of a necessity. Here, the greatest need that the industry players need to fulfil is provide easy access to booking and information. But, the responsibilities do not end there. They need to connect with the customers. Similar to how a customer remains in search of the most suitable service, a service provider too keeps searching for the ideal or at least needy customer. The travel hashtags have a significant role to play here.
Hashtags are the threads that connect conversations on social media. When there are millions of posts going up every second across different channels, how would a hotelier or a service provider in the travel industry ensure that it reaches the right audience. It’s the hashtags that connect them.
Being in the business, you need to learn to leverage travel hashtags. Right from identifying the popular ones to using them on the relevant channels, you need to get the game of hashtagging right to resonate well with your customers.
Know General hashtags
#Travel
#Holidays #Trip #Traveling #Travelgram #Travelling #Travelingram #Traveler
#Travels #Travelphotography #Instatravel #Instatraveling #Travelph
#Travelpic #Travelblogger #Traveller #Traveltheworld #Travelblog #Travelbug
#Travelpics
#Travelphoto
#Traveldiaries #Traveladdict #Travelstoke #TravelLife
The above mentioned are some common hashtags for you to know. But these are good only to start with when you want to maintain an initial list of some relevant ones. These have to be customized for different channels.
Identifying Hashtags for Different Channels
Every social media channel is different. Hashtags vary with variation in the audience and the trends. You need to understand that hashtags are sometimes paid too. So, they will always vary for channels. Your strategist has to identify these by searching through the channels and imbibing them within your content tactfully to improve your visibility.
Branding your Hashtag
If you are a company of 2000+ employees, it is a great idea to have a hashtag under your brand name. And each of these employees must keep posting across Twitter, Instagram or even Facebook regularly without missing out on using your brand hashtag. This will help you build an identity. When a reader searches your name with a hashtag, they will be able to see all your posts on that specific channel with a single click. This works pretty much similarly when you wish to popularize an event where you can create event-based hashtags.
Destination Hashtags
Since hospitality has a lot to do with destination identification for a traveller, as a hotelier, you have an edge for traffic spiking. The destination hashtags more or less remain the same as the names remain consistent. So, you can pick the most popular destination hashtags of your location and include them within your content.
Third-Party Hashtags
If you understand social media curation strategy, you must have been crediting the third-party content sources for writing good content. You can encourage them to use your travel hashtags in their posts to improve your visibility.
You need to be mindful of using only relevant hashtags in a post and keep the overall hashtag density moderate. When you key in a number of hashtags in a single post, you may end up losing out on a potential reader who finds your content irrelevant. You can solve this by capping the number of hashtags you use on each channel. Ideally, three hashtags are good enough for Twitter, for instance, On the other hand, you can use more than five hashtags on Instagram for the same post. You need to also test it out and measure a bit to understand what is working for you and what not. So, let’s get it rolling!
