Introduced by Chris Messina, a product consultant, in 2007, hashtags are no longer just a content aggregation method on Twitter. In fact, it is an indispensable part of every social media marketing mix. When used right, hashtag campaigns have the potential to take your brand marketing efforts to the next level.

In this article, we tell you all that and much more. We cover the benefits of hashtag campaigns, steps to run a successful one and 10 best hashtag campaign examples of all time. In the end, we also discuss an insider tip to get more out of your hashtag campaigns with Flockler.

But first, the basics:

What is a Hashtag Campaign

Hashtag campaigns involve using specific hashtags to promote a brand and its products. In this type of social media hashtag campaign, you promote branded content and encourage customers to share user-generated content using these hashtags.

You can choose hashtags based on your goals, like building brand awareness, launching new products, or running an event. Some of the examples of hashtags that have stood the test of time include #JustDoIt by Nike, #OreoHorrorStories by Oreo and #RedCupContest by Starbucks.

Why should brands run a Hashtag Campaign

With a well-carved-out strategy, social media hashtag campaigns bring in visible results in the form of an increase in traffic, increasing brand awareness, and sales. Here are some of the notable benefits of hashtag marketing campaigns to convince you why it’s worth its salt:

1. To raise brand awareness

A hashtag campaign is a great way to build brand awareness and encourage customers to create branded UGC. You can do this by choosing hashtags that closely align with your brand name or offerings. Repeated use of these hashtags in branded and user-generated content will lead your followers to associate these hashtags with your brand. Monitoring the entire campaign is crucial to engage with users and maximize visibility.

Rihhana’s FentyBeauty, famous for its inclusive makeup range, uses the hashtag #fentyface to promote its products. They also encourage their customers to use the hashtag while sharing content around their products, like makeup tutorials, reviews, selfies and makeup challenges.

2. To promote events and drive engagement

The success of an event, whether live or virtual, depends on how pumped your audience is about the event. A well-planned hashtag campaign excited your audience and builds anticipation for the event. And one of the effective ways to drum up engagement and event buzz is through hashtag contests. You can pick two or three hashtags for your events and incentivize attendees who use these hashtags while posting event-related content. You can also keep a leaderboard and reward the most active attendees.

Lays’s #dousaflavor is a popular hashtag contest where it encouraged their customers to suggest flavor ideas. They produced and brought to shelves 3 winning flavors to decide the ultimate winner.

3. To gather user generated content in one place

Hashtag campaigns are a great way to gather and display social media posts in one place. This is especially useful for brands who want to collect user-generated content to build social proof. You can also use it to aggregate content related to a particular event this way.

A popular beauty brand, Topicals, celebrated its 3rd anniversary by taking 18 BIPOC influencers on a trip to Bermuda. The brand aggregated content on this event using two main hashtags, #TopicalsTakesBermuda and #TopicalsTurns3.

How to create a Hashtag Campaign

Now that you know why a hashtag campaign is worth it, let’s look at how you can create your own hashtag campaign in 4 easy steps:

1. Research your brand and competitors

2. Create a memorable hashtag

3. Publish hashtag content with advocates

4. Measure the results of your hashtag campaign

1. Research your brand and competitors

Start by analyzing your content and how customers talk about your products online today. Are there already mentions of your brand or products on social media channels? If there are, and the engagement is quite natural, consider amplifying that message with, for example, a branded Instagram hashtag campaign. User-generated content campaigns help you increase your reach - and highlight your most active and engaged customers.

If you are just getting started and there hasn’t been a clearly defined strategy on how to use hashtags, take a look at what your competitors and other similar companies are doing on social media platforms. You can always learn from the successes and failures of others. Understanding these elements can help you create a successful hashtag campaign that effectively engages your target audience and promotes brand visibility.

2. Create a memorable hashtag

Creating a memorable hashtag is key to the success of your hashtag campaign – especially if you are running a short-term hashtag competition.

The best hashtags resonate with your customers. Think about the research you may have carried out on social media channels but also consider other touchpoints and interactions with customers. Do you have a live chat on the website, or do your team members meet customers face-to-face? Are there catchy slogans and words customers use quite naturally? Selecting the right social media platform can significantly impact the reach and engagement of your hashtag campaign.

Make sure the hashtag is relatively short and something that others aren’t using already. You want to own the search results for the hashtag you’ll use.

3. Publish hashtag content with advocates on social media platforms

No social media marketing campaigns will be a success story without advocates working with you. Your advocates can be your team members and employees sharing the marketing campaign hashtag on their personal profiles. Many hashtag campaigns collaborate with influencers – platforms like Traackr can help you identify the most influential social media users and reward them for sharing the content.

But most often, the real advocates are your customers. They might be fans of your products and ready to spread the message in niche communities.

4. Measure the results of a hashtag campaign

Finally, measuring the results is as relevant as creating the campaign. If you want to convince your team members (and the boss!) that hashtag campaigns are worth it, you’ll need to show numbers to support the argument.

The metrics and results depend on your goals. Most of our clients use Flockler’s analytics tools to measure the number of people participating and their engagement level - the number of likes, comments, and retweets. When you embed hashtag feed on a website, you can also use Google Analytics and similar tools to analyze metrics like time spent on site and conversions. A well-executed viral hashtag campaign can significantly boost these metrics, as seen with successful examples like Coca-Cola's #ShareACoke.

10 excellent successful Hashtag Campaign examples and ideas

To save some of your time searching for great hashtag campaigns examples and to help you get started, we’ve curated some of the best hashtag campaigns from various industries.

1. GoPro #GoProAwards

Customers are the best advocates for your products. GoPro uses #GoProAwards to celebrate and highlight the most beautiful images and thrilling videos their customers share on social media channels.

By encouraging your customers to share content mentioning your branded Instagram hashtag, your content will reach new audiences and build more organic engagement. The social proof embedded on your website increases sales, too.

2.Natural History Museum in London and LEGO #NHMLEGO

 

LEGO is all about creativity, so naturally, their hashtag marketing campaigns collaborate with organizations that help spark innovative ideas.

Have you ever wondered what life could look like in distant parts of the universe? In London, the Natural History Museum organized the #NHMLEGO campaign asking schoolkids to use their imagination and build their own LEGO Life Form that could survive four different environments.

#NHMLEGO campaign is an excellent example of two brands working together and reaching a shared audience.

3. France.fr #JeRedécouvrelaFrance

France.fr is a tourism marketing site that curates and shares stories about France's best travel destinations. A vital part of the website is a hashtag feed of images and videos highlighting the country's beautiful scenery and tourist attractions.#JeRedécouvrelaFrance campaign is encouraging everyone to share their unforgettable moments with other travelers. The colorful and inspiring social media wall encourages visitors to stay on the site longer and nudges many to book their next trip.

Most travel brands use UGC marketing campaigns to add social proof to their websites and other digital services. The benefits include the growth of reach and brand awareness, increased bookings, and improved customer satisfaction.

4. Waterloo Catholic District School Board #STEAMDays

Schools typically publish a lot of content on social media channels and through internal communication channels. There's a good reason why: there are so many stakeholders involved in the process. Teachers and school staff, students and their parents, government, donors, alumni members (and more) are all groups that a marketing and comms team will try to reach with their content.

One of the benefits of using hashtags is that it helps distinct audiences discover the most relevant content on social media channels and beyond. Waterloo Catholic District School Board uses Flockler's technology to store and categorize their content - differentiated by various hashtags – and the content can then be shown, filtered by hashtag and displayed on specific pages of the website. This helps to make the website content a lot more relevant to each audience without any additional work.

For example, during the pandemic, when schools have been forced to close, WCDSB used the #STEAMDays hashtagcampaign to build an online learning experience.

5. United Nations Foundation #EqualEverywhere

Nonprofits use social media for fundraising – together with traditional channels, social media channels have become one of the best ways for charities to reach new audiences and build awareness for good causes.

The #EqualEverywhere campaign by the United Nations Foundation fights for equality for all girls and all women, wherever they are.

6. Opus Art Supplies #opusartweek

Opus Art Supplies - a webshop providing the visual arts community with fine art materials, digital printing, picture frames, and more - organized a weekly competition asking their community to explore Canada through art. Each week, they ask participants to create something under themes like Canadian faces, wildlife, and landscapes. As a result, Opus has built a virtual art tour and galleries of images created by the creative community that mentions their brand.

In addition to social media, the participants can upload their entries directly to the website. Opus can then share those images on their social media channels.

Asking your customers to describe and share their experiences with your products and services is the most powerful hashtag campaign concept. Especially if the experience includes friends and family members, you'll have a chance to create a viral hit.

7. Sohome #makeityourown

Sohome, an online home store, runs a hashtag campaign to encourage customers to share how they decorate Sohome's furniture. Through the hashtags #sohome and #makeityourown, they invite their customers to add their own unique style to their furniture and share it among others. The best ones are shared in a social media feed embedded on their website.

The brand further takes it to the next level by making posts in the feed shoppable. This means that when website visitors click on posts, a pop-up view appears with product descriptions and a call to action to buy directly from the website. This is a great way to reduce friction in buyers as the social wall gives social proof, and the CTA leverages it at the right time.

8. Calvin Klein #mycalvins

Calvin Klein's #mycalvin started out as a celebrity and influencer marketing campaign featuring big shots like Justin Bieber and Kendell Jenner back in 2014. As a part of this campaign, celebrities and influencers were asked to share images and videos of them wearing Calvin Klein with the hashtag #mycalvin. The campaign became widely popular and garnered the attention of celebrities and its existing customer base.

Fast forward to this day, with roughly 869,047 posts, the brand has made the hashtag campaign an indispensable part of its marketing strategy. They still encourage customers to share their visuals, promising to feature the best ones on their website.

9. Coke #Shareacoke

Coca-Cola took personalized marketing to new heights when it introduced Coke bottles and cans with names through its iconic #shareacoke campaign. People were asked to share their personalized bottles and cans on Instagram, Twitter and YouTube to stand a chance to get featured. The campaign spurred attention worldwide and resulted in an influx of user-generated content.

Started as a way to stay relevant among its young consumers, the campaign had over 50000 user-generated images with the #shareacoke hashtag back in 2014.

10. Loreal, #forbeautywithoutanimaltesting

L'oreal's #forbeautywithoutanimaltesting is more than a hashtag campaign as it is deeply entwined with the brand's stand against animal testing. The brand claims to have embarked on this mission 14 years before anti-animal testing laws came into existence. Today, the brand name Loreal and this hashtag are almost synonymous with each other, owing to its contributions to cruelty-free cosmetics.

With more and more brands embracing new types of cosmetic testing, the hashtag and its variations are now used by makeup brands worldwide to show their solidarity with cruelty-free cosmetic testing. Some of the popular brands and their hashtags are The Body Shop with their #ForeverAgainstAnimalTesting, NYX Professional Makeup and their #CrueltyFree and Lush Cosmetics and their #FightingAnimalTesting.

All set for your next hashtag campaign?

Benefits, strategy, examples. We have given it all, so what are you waiting for? Set your goals, pick your hashtags and set up a hashtag campaign on your preferred social media channel today. Embed these campaign feeds onto your websites to drive more visitors to these channels and further boost campaign engagement.

FAQs

1. Why do you need a hashtag aggregator?

A hashtag aggregator helps you make the best of your hashtag campaigns on various social channels. You can use an aggregator to pull out campaigns from different social channels, build a custom feed and embed it on your websites. This way, you can cover all bases and draw most of your target audience across channels into your website and inform them about these hashtag campaigns.

2. How to run successful hashtag campaigns?

Here are the steps to run successful hashtag campaigns:

• Start by fleshing out your goals - do you want to raise brand awareness, increase traffic to social media channels or promote a product or event?

• Analyze your competitors - Understand what your competitors are doing, but try to wedge the gap in their strategy.

• Choose brand-relevant hashtags - Pick 2 or 3 hashtags that embody the essence of your campaign goal. #brandnameyear and #eventnameyear are some popular formats. You can also go creative and find new hashtags.

• Promote your hashtags and track performance- Launch your campaign and inform the target audience about ways to participate and rewards. Track the results and tweak your strategy if needed.