Why You Should Use Hashtags On Facebook // Increase Your Organic Reach on Facebook With Hashtags
You probably got a notification recently that said if you want to increase your engagement and reach for your posts, you should add hashtags. Does this mean that Facebook is actually caring about hashtags for their algorithm? Keep reading and find out! History of the Hashtag Now, hashtags are going to be a vital part of your content strategy going forward after you read this blog. Hashtags came to Facebook way back in 2013, and they really didn’t do much with them. They were kind of like, yeah, we’re okay with them, but it doesn’t do anything. Now, unlike other platforms like Twitter and Instagram and LinkedIn where hashtags are a vital part of your post’s success, Facebook has, for the most part, been like, whatever, but now they’re actually giving it the attention and weight that it deserves to increase the organic reach of your post. So this all started back in May of 2020 when Facebook decided to push #supportsmallbusiness. This was to allow users in local areas to support their local businesses to help keep them alive through the COVID pandemic crisis. Since then, they’ve encouraged Facebook pages to add hashtags to their posts so that they can boost engagement and reach. While it really isn’t clear what this has to do with the algorithm or how it works, Facebook has said add hashtags to your posts to give it the little bump in organic reach that it has, and let’s be honest, I think all of us will take any little bit of organic reach that we can when it comes to Facebook. How do they work?! So how do hashtags work on Facebook? Well, it’s just like everywhere else. You take one word or a series of words with no spaces and add that pound or number sign to the front of it. When you add it to your Facebook post, I encourage you to put it at the bottom and make sure not to do too many because that’s just tacky, and remember, your Facebook audience is just going to be getting used to you using hashtags again on this new platform. You have to remember, your viewers aren’t used to you using hashtags on Facebook and they’re probably not used to seeing them either. So use them very lightly and delicately when you’re adding them to your posts. Once you have made that hashtag for your post, it becomes a button that you can click and it will take you to other posts that you have that have your hashtag included. So let’s use puppies for example. If you add puppies to your post and you click on that puppies hashtag, you’re going to be taken to a hashtag list on Facebook that’s going to list all of the awesome hashtags that have puppies on it. Now, what’s really cool about this is that Facebook is giving weight to the immediate community that you have. This means that your friends and the pages that you follow and interact with most that are using #puppies are going to show up at the top, and then underneath it is going to be the second layer and that’s going to be people who are connected to the people that you are friends with, the post they have with #puppies in it. Then after that, it’s just kind of anyone that’s using it most recent or for posts that you probably would interact with more. Now, if you want to research what hashtags you should use, which ones are going to be most relevant, maybe you want to claim your hashtag for your business, you can go up to the Facebook search bar at the top and just type in the hashtag and see what comes up. This is going to be a great way for you to not only figure out what hashtags you should be using for your business, but it’s also going to allow for you to get really involved in your local community and see what are the hashtags that are happening around me and in my specific vertical or area? Helpful Tips Now, a tip for you to have more success and ease of use when it comes to hashtags on Facebook is you should create a list of hashtags that you can kind of use for different styles of posts. Now, a lot of us Instagram users are going to teach you that you should create groups of hashtags that you can copy and paste and use in your post. For example, I have a whole list of hashtags for social media, a whole list of hashtags for my podcast, and a whole list of hashtags for being a YouTuber. By having these groups, it’s easy for me to copy them and then paste them into my content calendar to schedule that out. The same thing can be done with Facebook. You should be creating three to five hashtags that you can use for different types of content you’re creating. Whether you’re doing behind the scenes or promoting a product or day in the life or whatever it is that you’re doing, create a bunch of different ones that you can keep referencing so that you can add them to your post. Now, you might be a little bit skeptical at this point, but I promise, you definitely want to be adding hashtags into your post. Facebook guru Mari Smith even revealed to us that Facebook is testing a button for browsing. With this feature, there is going to be a ‘see more posts with this hashtag’ button and you can click it and go see them, rather than just having that button in the post. Facebook is definitely giving hashtags attention and you need to make sure that your brand is a part of it. When it comes to etiquette, as I said earlier, make sure that you’re not doing too many hashtags and definitely don’t do something like
Get More Facebook Views & Organic Reach // Make Better Videos With These Tips
In this blog, we’re going to dive into how you can make better videos for Facebook. And we’re going to really focus on three main things. Formatting, algorithm, and my tips to help you find success. Formatting Now, when it comes to creating videos on Facebook, it’s important to have the right tool, which is why I’ve partnered with Kapwing to put this video together for you. Kapwing is my go-to tool and resource for creating all of my videos that I use for social media, Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn, all of that. They have a fantastic and vast workspace that allows for me to create so many social specific videos out of my existing content. I’m able to resize video, autogenerate, and embed closed captions into my videos, add images, add text, do the different bars, all kinds of stuff. Kapwing just makes it super easy and super quick, and my favorite part about this tool, it’s free. So, when it comes to formatting, we’re going be talking about two things. How long should your video be? And what size should your video be? How long should your video be? I get asked this question all the time when it comes to anything really related to creating video content. And my answer to you when it comes to Facebook specifically is, it’s as long as it needs to be, but not one second longer than it needs to be. 59% of video consumers will stop watching your video or scroll past it if they think that it’s too long or has too much extra unnecessary pieces of information. So you really gotta get to the point no matter how long your video is going to be for Facebook. So, when it comes to length, I want you to focus on two different kinds of length of video. Long binge worthy content and short thumb scrolling content. When it comes to binge worthy content, these are going to be longer videos that are over three minutes, probably somewhere in the vicinity of like three to seven minutes that people are going to keep expecting from you. It’s where you’re going to be showing up on a regular basis. Maybe it’s a series or something that you’re doing on a continuous basis. Some of my favorite creators that do this is the Holderness family, or a scary mommy, or even people like Kristina Kuzmic, who are creating really great engaging content on the regular, and consistently to engage with you. By creating that longer content, you’re also going to have the added bonus of qualifying for Facebook ad revenue. When you hit a thousand likes on your Facebook page, as well as you hit a certain milestone of watch time, over ten thousand minutes of watch time, you can start earning money on your Facebook page just like you do with ad sets, so when you create binge worthy content that is engaging and long lasting on the platform, Facebook will ultimately reward you for that. The second piece of video content I want you to focus on are the videos that are shorter in length. These are going to be the videos I’m going to encourage small business owners to really focus on. They’re quick, they’re easy, and they’re to the point. In fact, Facebook recommends that small businesses create videos that are 15 seconds or less. But the most important piece of content being in the first three seconds of the video. They want you to get to the point, get in and get out, ’cause again, I call this thumb scrolling content. This is stuff that can be easily consumed in a thumb scroll. Now, the kind of videos that you’re gonna want to create for something like this are going to be teasers for other bigger things that you have going on, but also text based videos as well where you have like text on the screen and video animations or photos in the background, or informative videos as well, which of course you can see on the screen some examples of what I’m talking about. I think the most important thing for you to remember when it comes to creating your videos, the most important thing is not to have information or video or clips that don’t serve a purpose. Get in, get out as quickly as possible and don’t waste people’s time. All right, now let’s talk about the size of your video. Now, over 500 million people are watching videos daily on Facebook, but 65% of them are watching them on mobile, so what’s the right size that you should that you should be using for the videos that you’re trying to create to have the best success for you in that watch time on Facebook. Formatting So, this comes back to us wanting to focus on two different things. We’re going to focus on, again, the binge worthy content and that short content. If you’re creating long episodic content, you want to be using that horizontal format. You’re going to be creating your videos with the dimensions of 1280 x 720. This is pretty standard across the board for most platforms. LinkedIn, YouTube, and Facebook all use this as their standard. And the reason they do that is because it’s the average size of your computer screen or a TV screen. So, when it comes to the size of your short form videos, you’re going to want to think, how much of that phone screen can I take up? The best thing that you can do is create square or slightly bigger videos that are at a 5 x 4 aspect ratio. This is going to be really important for grabbing their attention because it’s taking up so much of their phone. This is especially going to be helpful if you’re doing what I suggested to you when we talked about how long your videos should be about using that first three