Five Hashtags Every Small Business Owner Should Use on Social Media

Every local business should strive to have an active social media presence, but do you know which specific hashtags will grow your business?

There are countless ways to find customers and get them to engage with your business, but hashtag marketing is easily one of the most effective

A lot of times, tasks like social media management and daily audience engagement can be put on the back-burner in favor of less-time intensive marketing strategies. That’s just the nature of running a small business.

On the other hand, however, this makes it difficult to win over customers who research their major purchases online. These folks expect to see — even demand — that you have a social media following with daily engagement. Because, in one way or another, that shows you’re trustworthy. And trustworthy brands make sales.

Since consumer loyalty is such a huge component to your brand’s longevity, it’s even more important for business owners to reach buyers at the right time in order to increase the chance they’ll become life-long customers.

Perhaps most importantly, consistent loyalty tends to snowball and bring you more customers over time.

Visit retail Dive’s Consumer Survey series where they highlight the buying habits of 2017 shoppers.

There’s technically no shortcut to winning over customer loyalty and engagement, but for busy entrepreneurs and merchants, these five hashtags can be a great starting point:

Hashtag 1: #MondayMemories

Nostalgia is a powerful emotion. Whether you’re running a mom and pop operation or multi-city enterprise, this hashtag helps encourage your followers to publicly share the best experiences they have with your brand.

To promote engagement, either directly ask customers to share their favorite memories in your store or a favorite memory associated with one of your products. Be sure to retweet, like, share — and respond to their comments to get the word out there.

Hashtag 2: #TuesdayTrivia

Everyone loves new information and often, small business owners have unique knowledge of their industry or product vertical. Why not use this popular hashtag as a way to quickly validate your brand’s expertise while simultaneously giving customers a reason to think about your business?

For example, a local tire shop could use hashtag like #TuesdayTrivia to share important facts on seasonal tire maintenance.

By using threads on Twitter and Instagram, the shop can follow up each trivia post with a mention of their shop’s ongoing promotion for new & used tires. Now, followers who have just learned about the value of snow tires know they have a direct resource to purchase them from.

Each Tuesday Nickelodeon’s animation team uses the popularity of the tag to post BTS trivia & details about the creative process behind beloved cartoons

Hashtag 3: #MakeItHappen

Despite what many customers may think, running a successful business venture doesn’t just happen by magic.

There is so much time and grunt work that goes into being an entrepreneur, (like employee healthcare, filing taxes, and managing vendor relationships for example). These are things most of the general public isn’t privvy to it.

Hashtags like #MakeItHappen are a great way to showcase the aspirational side of the running a business, such as sharing a rewarding customer interaction, highlighting employee progress over time or reaching your projections after a particularly stressful sales cycle.

Showing people that your business is improving as it grows is directly related to establishing trust with your desired customers.

Hashtag 4: #ShopLocal

Social media management is a lot more than sharing posts and retweeting positive comments (although that is something you should definitely do!) For business owners that want to use social media as an effective customer service tool, it’s important to let your followers know that you are open for business.

These Georgia-based coffee entrepreneurs gained nearly 100 organic likes per hour with this stunning granola bowl post highlighting the locally sourced ingredients, where they encouraged readers to support local business

Using the #ShopLocal tag lets customers know that even though they are engaging with your brand online, they can always purchase from or patronize your business in real life as well. Additionally, this helps validate that you have an active physical presence as well as a digital one. This ensures that they can attach a face to the brand.

Hashtag 5: #SmallBusiness

The definition of a small business is, admittedly, a broad one. Many different types of business owners will fit under this umbrella without really identifying as such.

For the most part, many social media hashtags related to running a small business are all about #entrepreneur, #hardwork, #businessowner, and while they all could work — nothing quite spells out the value of patronizing a local like the #smallbusiness tag on Instagram and Facebook.

Use #SmallBusiness to show your followers how committed your brand is to customer service, problem-solving, and innovation

With an average volume of about 2.4 million daily posts, the #smallbusiness tag is as popular as it is effective. Thanks in large part to consumers becoming more economically savvy, many social media users are searching for local small businesses to shop at. And due to social media’s geo-fencing capabilities, this tag helps them find one’s nearest to them.

Aligning your small business with this tag can increase the amount of traffic your business receives from word of mouth and online marketing.

If these five popular social media hashtags are too generic for your small business, or you just want more control over your online reputation, sign up for complete ownership of your most popular hashtags here.