Hundreds if not thousands of weekly recurring hashtags on Twitter and Instagram are connecting people every day. Some of them are more popular than others. Some are definitely more for private use, but some weekly hashtags can be used by social media marketers as well.
Weekly hashtags are an easy way to engage with your audience. They guide the conversation by giving you a topic and allow for interaction with your followers and fans. Here are our tips for researching and using weekly hashtags and a rundown of hashtags that could be interesting for you.
To cover all your bases, we’ve collected a few basic guidelines that should help you navigate the (fairly big) world of weekly hashtags. It’s not just about finding the right hashtag and then posting away. It pays off to take a closer look at how everything fits with your brand and how you can tailor your interactions to your audience.
Think before you post
Always research hashtags before using them. It’s easy to misinterpret a hashtag, and nothing is more embarrassing for a brand than getting it wrong publicly. Avoid hashtags that can be seen as ableist. For example, #ManicMonday can be seen as disrespectful to people who have bipolar disorder.
Be on brand
Always consider your target group and your own brand before jumping on a hashtag bandwagon. Only use hashtags that fit with your brand and that will provide some value to your customers.
Optimise engagement
As always, don’t just yell into the void, but engage with people. When you’ve picked a hashtag to contribute to, also retweet or share other people using the hashtag if their posts fit with your brand. Use Twitter’s advanced search or boolean operators to search for variations of a hashtag at once when looking for content to reshare.
Consider time zones and schedule your tweets for times when your audience is actually online. You can use Yalabot to help you figure out the best times for posting content for your followers.
Use hashtag research tools
There are various ways and depths of doing hashtag research. Use Ritetag, for example, to quickly check how well certain hashtags are performing and which ones will get you seen right now and over a longer period of time.
For more in-depth research about hashtags, which you are planning to interact with regularly, use Hashtagify. With Hashtagify, you can research individual hashtags, see related hashtags and check out the most important influencers using that hashtag so you can then think of ways to get on their radar.
If you unlock more data by signing up (it’s actually really free), Hashtagify will also give you information on when hashtags are used in various time zones. Under “usage patterns”, you can see how hashtags have performed over the past 2 months. Furthermore, you can compare various hashtags to each other.
For example, if you wanted to check which daily photo hashtag is the most popular, you could do so:
Don’t overdo it by going for eight hashtag posts per day. You’d be oversaturating your follower base very quickly. Instead, pick one hashtag per day that works for you and stick with it every week. Consistency is key because it helps your followers and fans know what to expect from you. Whether you partake in weekly hashtags every day or less often is completely up to you, your target group, and your general content strategy for Twitter.
Once you’ve chosen to post with a weekly hashtag, cover your bases. If a hashtag has more than one variation, use both when you have space for it, e.g. both #FollowFriday and #ff.
Mondays are hard. That’s why two of the most popular Monday hashtags focus on getting people through the day. Use #MotivationMonday (also #MondayMotivation) and #MondayBlues in positive ways, to cheer people up and help them beat the Monday slump. Don’t be negative in your postings even if it’s not always easy to approach Mondays upbeat.
If you’re looking for themed hashtags instead, find something that works with your industry. #MusicMonday is still quite general but would obviously work especially well for someone in the music industry. #MarketingMonday, on the other hand, can be a good hashtag for anything marketing-related, from sharing how-to articles to looking for sponsors or posting job openings. And there’s plenty more hashtags to discover with some googling and research.
Many brands like #TuesdayTreat as a way to share competitions or offer discounts for certain products. Sharing recipes and foodie photos are another option for this hashtag. Watch out, though! NSFW pictures often sneak into this hashtag!
#TransformationTuesday is Tuesday’s #MotivationMonday, so to speak. Often, people post photos of their actual physical transformation and posting fitness-related content. But with a little creativity, you can use this hashtag in many different ways. It can be about how your business has changed since you started it or about progress of another kind. It can be about fostering education programmes, about helping people advance in the job market or about building houses.
Again, if you’re looking for more specialised topics, you have plenty of industry-specific options like #TravelTuesday. And while #TechTuesday is not as popular as other hashtags, it might still be the right hashtag for you if it works for your followers and your industry. This is why it’s so important to do your target group research properly.
#HumpDay is a very popular hashtag on Twitter. Just like #MondayBlues, it’s built on the foundation that workweeks are hard and all everyone wants is to get through them relatively unscathed. #HumpDay is used for a lot of motivational posting but, again, watch out: it can be quite NSFW as well. If you’re looking for a more G-rated hashtag to share motivational content go for #wednesdaywisdom instead.
Wednesday is also a good day if you’re in the wedding industry, thanks to the hashtag #WeddingWednesday.
Thursday’s main allrounder hashtag is without a doubt #ThrowBackThursday (also #TBT), which gives you a chance to post photos from way back. This can be easily spun for businesses as well and works best with a little humour and fun.
You can also use Thursdays to give a bit of a shout-out to people or brands you are thankful for using #ThankfulThursday.
As the week draws to an end, #TGIF is obviously going strong. But a hashtag more interesting to brands would be #FollowFriday (or #FF). FollowFriday is a long-standing Twitter tradition used to recommend people with interesting content. Not only does it shine a light on certain accounts; as a brand it means you get to interact with people and get on their radar quite easily. #FollowFriday is also a great way for people to build their network and get out of their Twitter bubble.
Just make sure you only recommend accounts that would really be of interest to your own followers and give the accounts you recommend a good once-over. You wouldn’t want to recommend anyone who, at a closer vetting, turned out to be quite problematic.
Looking for something more niche? If you’re a palaeontologist, work for a museum or are otherwise interested in the topic of fossils, then #FossilFriday might be your jam. 😀 There are plenty of lesser known hashtags like this one that can be very effective in a niche industry, so do your research!
Once the weekend hits, things slow down a bit for brands. #SocialSaturday is all over the place, from brunch with friends to plugging social media marketing content. This makes it a lot harder to use it in a targeted way and get seen by the right people.
Fortunately, there’s always #Caturday which, you guessed right, is all about cat content. And as we all know, cat content is magnificently versatile and can be used for marketing pretty much everything and anything.
Sunday is also a bit lacklustre, but at least #SundayRead gives you a chance to share reading recommendations and interesting long reads. Both can be tailored to your brand’s interests and topics. Meanwhile, #ScienceSunday is more specific for sharing news, information and interesting tidbits about science.
How about you?
Are you engaging with weekly hashtags on Twitter as a brand? If you’ve not yet considered looking into weekly hashtags, I hope this guide gives you a good introduction to the Dos and Don’ts, as well as a good primer on currently popular hashtags. Don’t forget to do your own research for hashtags that relate to your industry and to keep it up over time so you can reevaluate your strategy down the line!