Guest post by Apoorva Srikkanth / Viraltag

By now it’s an established fact: social media marketing is an important component of any marketing strategy. Over 95% of online adults are more likely to follow your brand via social networking, and close to 50% of the world’s population is on some kind of social media. What better platform to target your audience than a channel that gives you access to half the world’s population?

Step one is choosing the right platform for your business, based on where your target audience is most active. Once you’ve done that, you need to be constantly posting to engage with your customers, and create brand awareness. This is where tools like Viraltag kick in. They help you automate posting to your social media channels, so you can put your social media marketing needs on autopilot!

In this blog post we’re going to go over how you can use one feature to get discovered far and wide on social platforms like Instagram, Twitter and more - Using Hashtags. Hashtags let you tap into an audience that goes beyond your follower base. You can increase your brand’s visibility by participating in topics that are trending, and your content has a better chance of getting discovered when users follow that particular hashtag.

One tool that makes it super easy for you to optimize using hashtags is RiteTag. It gives you hashtag suggestions, based on real time hashtag engagement. Using this, while scheduling content to your social media channels with Viraltag, makes sure your post is tailored for maximum reach and engagement.

Let’s take a look at how that works:

1. Create a free 14-day trial account on Viraltag (No CC information required) and connect your social media profiles under the Accounts section.

   

2. Click on the + button to open the Scheduler, where you can compose your post.

   

3. Upload your image, and add in a caption to go along with it in the Description box.

   

4. Once you’ve installed the RiteTag browser extension (Chrome, Firefox or Safari) from the RiteTag homepage, you can get instant hashtag recommendations within Viraltag’s scheduling window. There are 2 ways to do this: Right clicking on the image: Click on ‘Get Hashtag recommendations’ in the drop down that shows up when you right click the image.

   

   An array of Hashtag Suggestions show up, color coded to show you what type of hashtags work well.

   Here’s what each color represents:

   

   Use this key to decide and select which hashtags you want to use, and click on Copy.

   

   Paste it onto the description box, and here’s what it looks like:

   

   Highlighting text: Highlighting a part of text and right clicking brings up the same drop-down window. Click on Get Hashtag Suggestions, and pick the ones you feel will work best:

   

5. Finally, once you’re happy with how your post looks, you can either click on ‘Schedule’ to schedule them to your social media channels at a particular date and time:

   

   Or click on the ‘Add to queue’ button to add it to your posting queue:

   

Have you tried using RiteTag within Viraltag yet? If not, give it a try and let us know what you think!

~ Apoorva Srikkanth

Apoorva is the Director of Marketing at Viraltag. She loves connecting with people and helping them determine how to best use social media to promote their brand. Feel free to reach out to her at apoorva@viraltag.com with any questions.