#Brands #need #to #stop #being #so #hashtagheavy.
Simply put, your Facebook posts are way less engaging when you overuse the hashtag. Sure, hashtags can be a great tool for brands to utilize across a wide range of social platforms-but when it comes to Facebook, less is more.
Socialbakers crunched some data from over 200,000 brand posts on Facebook on found that the moment brands start to load up on hashtags in their post, the fewer interactions they receive.
“Be careful about how many hashtags you use in your brand’s posts. Just as using too many hashtags is generally considered bad form on personal profiles, it applies doubly for brands. As we said before in our report on Instagram, abusing hashtags is bad practice, and a major red flag for users, regardless of network. We looked at branded Facebook posts from last month, and our findings support that consensus,” says the social analytics company.
Just how much does your brand’s post suffer from over-hashtagging?
Well, the average number of interactions with posts containing 1 or 2 hashtags was 593. When a post had 3 to 5 hashtags, the interactions dropped to 416. Posts crowded with 6 to 10 hashtags only received 307 interactions on average.
And posts bogged down with ten or more hashtags only got 188 average interactions. It’s a smooth slope down for brands who over-hashtag.
You have to make those hashtags count. Make sure they’re capitalizing on a trending topic, so your post has a greater chance of getting caught in Facebook’s trending stories net.
Of course, getting users to interact with your posts requires the user actually seeing your post. Once a certainty, it’s now incredibly hard for brands to organically reach their followers with content. And the super bad news is that it’s probably going to get worse.
Image via Flickr Creative Commons, Davis Staedtler