Worst of all, people who don’t understand hashtags were very scared of sounding stupid by asking that really simple question:

“How do hashtags work and how to I use them in my social media channels more effectively?”

If you want advice and guidance on how to hashtags and mentions, there’s no need to feel stupid when you ask for an explanation. Don’t worry, you’re not alone. In fact, it was a casual conversation with some clients and friends that highlighted the subject.

In a recent client’s marketing meeting, someone commented “Have you seen XXX’s Twitter? They use loads of amazing hashtags”. I began trying to explain how that particular strategy wasn’t going to work and then realised that the person making the comment actually had no idea how hashtags actually worked or how to use hashtags and that this was going to be a long conversation.

It was that discussion we had that highlighted the need to write this article. The comment, that one of their competitors or rivals used a truly prodigious amount of hashtags in their Twitter feed and that looked really impressive was interesting to me. Over coffee, the discussion between a group of us made me realise that for many people, hashtags can be a bit of a mystery. And while they are aware of the importance of them and they are indeed eye catching, it can be difficult for many people to truly understand how they work and above all, how best to use them in their own business or personal social media feeds.

This article will hopefully explain the basics of hashtag principles, what they are and how to use them most effectively in your social media marketing.

Hashtag Basics – What is a Hashtag?

A hashtag looks like this #hashtag and has several uses and benefits. In your social media feed, it is a clickable link and is viewable to anyone with an interest in your hashtag, crucially including those outside of your social circle. This means that, it expands your reach to anyone who may search and click on that hashtag phrase or keyword.

Hashtags are an invention of Twitter and in the early days it allowed people to categorise and add keywords to thier content. Since then, other social media channels such as Facebook and Instagram have adopted the same system. Think of a hashtag as a keyword search for something you may undertake on social media.

So how do hashtags work across the different social media platforms? How many should you be using? Which ones should you choose? Do they work in the same way on each platform?

Today, they are a popular tool used by many platforms. From breaking news to TV shows such as X Factor or Apprentice through tourism channels and trending topics. Here are some basic tips on choosing hashtags that work for you.

How to Use Hashtags.

No spaces or punctuation, they break the tag. A typical example might be #thankgodit’sfriday The hashtag will stop at the apostrophe. Instead, use #thankgoditsfriday or the ever popular #TGIF That’s the reason why sometimes hashtags can sometimes be a little hard to read.

No characters immediately before the hashtag. Again, this will break the hashtag and make it invisible. Be sure to put a character space before you type #

Use appropriate hashtags and not obscure ones. This is really important. Using #myfavouriteplacestogoanddrive isn’t going to gain much traction. Think about what others with similar interests to yours might respond to and also be looking for. So #design #photography as a genre, #yorkshire or #halfterm for family tourism outlets or if you wish to join the conversation, #motogp and of course, #F1 are just two motorsport hashtags which are obvious choices. Right now probably the most famous, or infamous one? #brexit ….

Choosing a hashtag to start a marketing campaign must be used with care. The online world is littered with the wreckage of badly chosen hashtags and it’s easy to create a hashtag with less than optimum connotations. #susanalbumparty is possibly the most famous, intended to promote Susan Boyle’s new album party. Can’t see it? Look again… The world is littered with hashtag mistakes.

Twitter and Hashtags

As mentioned previously, Twitter was the originator of hashtags. Just clicking the Twitter search box on your device of choice will show you what is trending at any given time of the day, anywhere in the world.

Keep them short. Using several shorter hashtags is better that one long one. They quickly become unreadable and readers simply don’t engage with them.

Stuffing hashtags into your Tweets can easily make them unintelligible. Better to use just two and make them count, as the Twitter character count is as short as people’s attecntion span here. Building hashtags into your Tweet rather that adding them at the end is a good way to maximise your character count without your Tweet becoming unreadable.

Pick up on popular hashtags and add your own take to them. There are hashtags that occur regularly that are always useful ways to reach a new audience. for automotive brands, the hashtag #turbotuesday can be useful, plus #throwbackthursday is always useful for classic and historic cars. For example, whenever there is a Friday the 13th, then #fridaythe13th works really well for this client, reaching out far beyond the traditional audience.
Use the suggestion tools on each channel, Twitter’s search tab and Instagram’s auto-suggestion that suggest hashtags as you type are useful ways to engage with people that you may not be aware of.

Neil Patel claims that a Tweet with effective hashtags has 2X more engagement – clicks, shares etc – than one without.

Instagram and Hashtags

Instagrammers absolutely love hashtags. For many people, the more the merrier is the philosophy. The Instagram hashtag limit is currently set at thirty. While you may not think you need to use all thirty, the capacity is there, so try your best to use it. Obviously, 30 hashtags is a lot and there are three things to consider:

1. Simply adding 30 hashtags right after your Instagram caption can make your post look spammy and cluttered. You’re not doing anything wrong by using your 30 hashtag limit, however it can look messy. Two ways to keep things tidy are either to hit the return five times to move the hashtags further down the screen out of sight. Or if you’re also pushing your Instagram feed out to your Facebook page, them consider adding your hashtags as a comment immediately after you’ve posted your image. That way they hashtags will only appear on Instagram. However, Facebook now supports hashtags too, so right now, I recommend moving your hashtags down your feed a little and taking advantage of the extra reach.

2. The second thing to consider is that 30 hashtags is a lot to either memorise or even discover. I have taken to curating my own list of hashtags for the various genres of Instagram posts and other clients we work with, keeping them together in an Evernote file to simply cut and paste as needed. It’s well worth spending some time to research your hashtag list and compiling a list of the hashtags. Time spent researching and refining your list of hashtags is well worth it as once you have your core list of hashtags for each genre, you can simply copy and paste them, then perhaps add a couple more that are relevant to that particular image.

3. Instagram will tell you the popularity of any particular hashtag. It may be obvious to go after the ones with huge figures alongside them, however don’t forget that means you face a strong competition for that phrase. By all means use it as part of your thirty and also consider lower ranking phrases with lower numbers, as they may actually be more tightly targeted at the people you are trying to reach.

Facebook and Hashtags

Facebook now supports hashtags, though right now, the method of discovering them is a little obscure. Not all mobile apps support it, though they do work on desktop. That’s sure to change and so it’s worth adding a few hashtags to your Facebook page feed. While hashtags are very much mainstream on other platforms, on Facebook, people don’t seem to be picking up on them. So right now fr Facebook, I’d say they’re less important, though that could well change very quickly.

For those who want to get scientific and in depth, this Buffer article offers several great resources for digging deep into hashtags

Hopefully, if you made it this far, you now have a clearer idea of the basics of hashtags, how simply adding the # character to some words won’t always work and how you can use them to reach out to people beyond your immediate social media follower count. Hashtags form an important part of your digital marketing strategy and used creatively and intelligently, can be a useful tool.

The post The Complete and Utter Beginners Guide to #Hashtags appeared first on Winward Media.

Very often, we work with clients who come to us with great ideas for projects and need help to both report on them and also create an entire eco-system of distribution to make the best use of both the event and all of the video and images we shoot. By working alongside teams such as the Yorkshire Air Museum, we are able to not only create a film for delivery, but additionally run complete social media programs.

100 Years Of Collaboration In The Air – Les Invalides, Paris, May 2018 from Yorkshire Air Museum on Vimeo.

Working alongside the Museum team, the French Armee de l’Air and Britain’s Royal Air Force, we documented the transportation and display of two WW1 biplanes inside of the historic location to commemorate 100 years of collaboration in the air, part of the RAF100 celebrations.

In addition to being embedded with the team travelling, Winward Media were instrumental in co-ordinating with the Museum management a travel schedule that allowed us time to integrate with the team and film the whole process.

Security restrictions decreed that no announcements of the event were allowed to be broadcast until the actual ceremony, meaning that we had to have significant amounts of content queued up in readiness to respond to the significant international interest.

Film clips, social media content and also film assets were shared across the Museum’s platforms and additionally made available to the international media, including BBC Paris who used footage to cut into their own feature of the event, giving more variety to the reporting.

The final film was prepared for release just a few days after returning to the UK, via Normandy where we also documented a special ceremony for French veterans.

Following on, we created blog content and other related assets to help the Museum to report on this remarkable achievement and form part of the Museum’s blog archive material.

By working alongside the team and devising a complete strategy for distribution of the film and images across multiple platforms, the Museum did not simply have a film delivered that the then had to work out how to distribute. Instead they had a plug-in press and digital media team alongside ensuring that the very best was gained from the event.

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Promising to offer an ice driving experience that went beyond the ‘Winter Rally School’ genre, the timing of Ice Driver coincided nicely with the launch of the Bond movie Die Another Day.

What better inspiration could there have been to travel to Scandinavia than the prospect of Pierce Brosnan impressions on ice?

Ice Driver re-invented the genre of driving experiences at high speed on ice and now have a ten year record for creating high quality, bespoke ice driving events for clients from their base in Norway.

Each winter, drivers and guests from across Europe and beyond converge on their meticulously prepared tracks created on frozen lakes and experience driving on ice. For Winward Media, the Ice Driver business model spans the two areas we are most active in, automotive and motorsport, plus leisure and tourism.

The ice driving genre has blossomed in the ten years that Ice Driver have been in operation. Competitors offering budget activities operating more basic offerings, plus car manufacturers catching on to the excitement of the genre have latched on to the sexiness and excitement of ice driving as a platform for selling cars.

A classic Porsche 911 and a frozen lake. Waht’s not to like?

Ice Driver needed a fresh website to make them stand out from the opposition.

The Ice Driver product is a high value experience which clients will inevitably have questions about. The objectives we set were:

• To differentiate Ice Driver from the competition and car manufacturer led activities.
• To create a website using imagery we had shot for previous projects with the team to showcase the spectacular setting of the Norwegian wilderness
• To explain that travel to Ice Driver is actually both cost effective and easy. Many people assume that travel on frozen winter rail networks and roads will be arduous. In fact, the Norwegian infrastructure is, as you’d expect, geared for this each winter
• To show options for non-driving guests and provide an opportunity for a family holiday combined with Ice Driving at the team’s snow resort headquarters, something that no other ice driving company can offer in such close proximity.
• The website was to be mobile responsive, with particular emphasis on a really simple to use Call to Action at the footer of each page to galvanise visitors into taking one of several set actions.
• Finally, a short viral video was created combining both new and existing footage to give a flavour of just how fast and exciting the driving experience on ice can be.

We managed to turn around the whole project in just five short weeks, from initial discussions on the objective to the final design and content going live. In the 2016/17 season, Ice Driver enjoyed a record breaking year of activity, something we are very proud to have contributed towards.

The post New website for Europe’s leading ice driving experience business appeared first on Winward Media.

The holiday cottage industry is a very competitive sector in today’s world. Gone are the days of simply being able to own a French Gite or a collection of Yorkshire Holiday lets and being confident they will be busy all year round.

Families on holiday have a far greater choice, making it more important than ever to show potential visitors the quality and care you have taken with your investment and reassure them that they are making the right choice by booking with you.

We had worked with Middleton Cottages previously creating photography for their stunning holiday cottages in North Yorkshire. They have a lovely collection of holiday cottages situated in the rolling countryside of North Yorkshire, each one with it’s own hot tub, private garden and contemporary decor.

Their initial website had been built in house and while they’d used a good content management system as a foundation, it was now several years old and as with all websites, it’s age was showing.

Holiday cottages in Yorkshire with private hot tubs

Over a chat to review the website, we agreed that several areas would benefit from attention and further development:

• The website wasn’t mobile responsive, something which is so important with modern mobile devices.
• It could be difficult to work out pricing and there was no mechanism for prospective visitors to quickly check availability before booking.
• We felt that he overall ‘look’ of the website did not really reflect the high quality of the holiday cottages and their fresh, contemporary decor.
• While the cottages were busy, the bookings were often through agents rather than direct. But with a busy farm business to manage as well as keeping the cottages in pristine condition for guests, they didn’t have the time or expertise to engage in an in house website project.

How We Helped

From previous visits to carry out photography of the cottages, we knew just how high a standard they had been built to and saw that the interior decor and quality finish wasn’t reflected in the old website.

We took some time to imagine what a prospective guest to the holiday cottages would be thinking and worked out ways to link that to some of the unique elements that Middleton Cottages offered, in particular:

• Each cottage has its own hot tub, situated in it’s own private area of the garden so that nobody overlooks any other visitor.
• One of the cottages is a huge ‘barn’ that sleeps up to ten people. This is very rare and unusual and we created a page to reach out to family groups and reunions.
• Some of the cottages are dog friendly. This is really important if you own a happy family dog and are faced with the upset and possible additional cost of kennels. But at the same time, not everyone likes dogs, so we made it clear that not all cottages are allowed pets.

Private hot tubs are a great selling tool for holiday lets

From experience of booking holidays of our own, we also knew that visitors want the reassurance that they are not too far from the activities of the area and the things they came to enjoy. There’s little point in having lovely accommodation if everything involves a long drive. We created some landing pages with resources and links to some of the most popular tourism areas, places to eat and things to do in the locality.

An additional element was to make it much easier for visitors to check availability. Once website visitors had identified that the cottages would be a good place for a holiday, they need to quickly check availability and pricing.

Owners David and Caroline offer a flexible pricing policy, so a range of price guides were added.

Then each cottage has it’s own availability calendar added so that visitors can see at a glance which cottages might be available for them. This was designed to be easy to administer with just a few clicks, with the additional benefit that it also cut down on the number of email enquiries checking dates and brought customers several steps closer to booking when they finally did email, as many questions had already been answered through the information on the website.

So when the full holiday cottage website went live, as many changes to the content of the website were made as to the design. By giving visitors the information they need to make a decision to book, the new website resulted in a significant upswing in guests booking directly with the owners, rather than through agents who take a percentage.

Best of all, we’ve also convinced everyone that a little bit of Facebook marketing can be a great added element too.

If you have a project you would like to talk to us about, feel free to drop us a line below.

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Much like Winward Media, a lot of their business is word of mouth and recommendation, but of course without a method of contact, it’s difficult to get in touch with even the best business. David needed a website that gave the business good visibility online in their specific agricultural niche.

The website had to do two things.

Firstly, to quickly reassure the visitor that they had found the right Teward (there are more than one in the agricultural sector) and give a fast way to contact them by telephone.

Today, many people in farming and agriculture use mobile devices as a primary method of search and contact. David lives on his iPhone and with high speed data available in even the most obscure farmland these days, so do most of his clients.

With this in mind, the website we created was primarily mobile first.

To give a visual confirmation that this was the business they were looking for, we used images of the distinctive red liveried trucks that the company is well known across the region. Images of David Teward’s distinctive red trucks were prominent on the first page to load,

Importantly, we added a prominent telephone number with a mechanism to create an immediate dial option right from the moment the page loaded, we made it easy for David’s customers to dial the number straight from the browser of their mobile device.

By creating the home page with this specific task in mind, it helped busy farmers who needed David Teward’s services to contact him quickly, even if they only had a name and no contact number.

Having the telephone number as a direct dial from any mobile device helps David’s cleints to contact him quickly with no additional steps needed.

Secondly, Find New Niche Customers

Of course, while it is important to make it easy for referral and existing customers to find you, a good website should also find ways of bringing in new customers too. David’s company supplies specific products and services across certain parts of the UK. Therefore we used a long tail keyword approach to consider what specific search phrases prospective customers would type into search.

Then we created several pages specifically designed to attract those contacts, including carefully chosen search terms such as Lime Spreading North East and other phrases. This helped ensure that the traffic attracted to the website were tightly targeted to specific tasks in specific geographical areas.

Finally, we submitted the website link to Google’s map search to ensure that the businesses geographical location was clear to both people and search engines.

It’s great to see the bright red David Toward trucks across the region and it was an interesting project for us, as we gained an insight into the busy world of agricultural services, something which we perhaps all take for granted as we go about our daily work.

You can see David Teward’s agricultural and lime spreading business here.

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A talented team of fabricators, coupled with state of the art pipe bending technology and plasma cutting equipment give Exhaust A Fix the ability to create a complete exhaust system from scratch in a cost effective way.

The same skills can be used to repair existing exhaust systems in a cost effective way, without having to replace many of the complex, one piece systems common on many modern cars.

Coupled with their independent ownership, these skills give them a loyal customer following. We created a mobile responsive automotive website design to showcase their skills.

To provide an insight into their custom fabrication abilities that make them unique, we created an ongoing series of blog posts showcasing real-world examples of their work and explaining how they saved customers money and created quality exhaust systems.

By training their staff on some basic techniques in using camera phones, we were able to gather content on a regular basis without impeding the busy workflow of the workshop, so that shooting some images and emailing a quick note explaining the work was easy for them without taking up too much time.

Content Marketing Programme

We created useful articles for customers facing exhaust failure problems, paying particular attention to creating articles about particular exhaust issues, some of which could prove potentially expensive, such as Jaguar XF Diesel exhaust failures.

The articles highlighted the typical problems that owners encounter, the potential expense involved, then proceeded to show how the company solves the issue in a cost effective way. This content proves very effective both for search engines and also human readers.

Exhaust A Fix moved into the tyre fitting side of the car maintenance business, though the popular brand name now worked against them.

Starting from very small numbers, we achieved a manifold increase in tyre sales over a period of just a few months by creating useful, informative articles that address the issues customers face when choosing new tyres. Carefully written to integrate keywords and ‘long tail’ keyword phrases designed not just for tyre sales but also the geographical location of the business to generate targeted visitors.

We then created Google Plus pages, Google Maps locations and Facebook pages and then carefully responded to reviews and feedback by working with the Exhaust A Fix staff to reach out to customers.

Project date: Ongoing.

Mobile responsive Exhaust A Fix website:http://www.exhaustafix.co.uk/

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The Control Tower at The Yorkshire Air Museum sits in the Museum grounds and is the original building occupied by Allied aircrews during the second world war. This film is part of a series of short films designed to show the Museum as a destination for both enthusiasts of history and also family visitors.

The shoot took just over one day, mainly due to the winter weather. It shows the many original features of the building, together with a short interview with Museum director Ian Reed which we dropped into the sequence.

The Control Tower is a fascinating building once visitors begin to explore it, but it is sometimes overlooked as people head towards the aircraft exhibits. This is part of a series designed to show the diverse nature of the Museum as an attraction and encourage families to visit.

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