Facebook is getting harder to manage due to the ever-changing algorithms. This makes it really hard for you to make your small businesses visible to your followers if you’re not paying for ads.

One of the ways to help with your organic reach is to use hashtags as they can help you improve your content’s engagement.  

Why do hashtags help small businesses?

Here are four reasons why hashtags are worth the time and effort on Facebook:

• Posts with hashtags can be found in a Facebook search. We’ve all used the Facebook search to find what we’re looking for – for example I’ve looked for old school friends using the search bar. In the same way, you can search a hashtag. So, using hashtags on your post to make them more visible is going to help your reach.
  
  Using relevant hashtags will help you with your visibility – for example, a local hashtag such as #scentedcandlesswindon, can help your local visibility for scented candles. Or if you use a hashtag such as #smallbusinessweek2024, someone looking for that could come across your page.
  
  The people searching hashtags may not all have a genuine interest in your type of business, but if they do, they’re likely to look at your page and content.
• If you are using other social media channels, such as X or Instagram, and running a particular campaign, or talking about a particular product or service, using hashtags on that channel, add them into your post on Facebook to keep your channels consistent. You can use the hashtag IN the post, not just at the end, so long as it is relevant. For example, if I’m doing a marketing post about Small Business Week, I could incorporate it in my post – ‘Good morning. The week is #smallbusinessweek2024, so today I’m going to talk about …….’ You get the idea.
• Hashtags can also help to create a community on Facebook. If you share or create a unique hashtag, you can find people who have the same interests or who are in the same group as you.
  
  Using your own unique branded hashtag on Facebook can also increase the visibility of your business, such as the one I use #cindymobeymarketing (which is also the URL of my website). This also makes it easier for people to find relevant related content.
• If you host an event or regularly host events, creating a unique hashtag for that event can give people an easy way to stay updated on that event. You can also do posts about the event using your own branded hashtag for your business.   

How do you know which hashtags are good for your posts?  

To decide which hashtags are good to use for your business and your posts, you need to know that it’s relevant and popular before you use it. You can do this by:

• Checking which hashtags your followers and customers use. This means they will relate to you and if they’re searching a hashtag they regularly use, your content could pop up.
• Use Facebook’s recommendations – when you are scheduling posts, as soon as you start to type a hashtag, you’ll get a drop down menu that will give you variants of what you’ve typed and the volume for each of those hashtags, so you’ll be able to see which ones are popular – try and use a mix of volumes.  
• Look at your competitor’s posts on their Facebook business pages and see what hashtags they use. They might have great engagement partly because of the hashtags they use, so you can add some of them to your list. This is not stealing their ideas, it’s just doing competitor analysis, which is all part of social media marketing.

Facebook hashtag best practice

Here are a few extra tips for Facebook hashtag best practice.

• Use hashtags in sentences. For example, if you were sharing information about an event you’re attending, such as a night market, you’ll be doing a post about that. Instead of writing ‘This weekend you can find us at Makebelievemarket on Saturday #makebelievemarket’ – use the hashtag in the sentence, ‘This weekend you can find us at #makebelievemarket on Saturday. It looks tidier and incorporates the hashtag into your sentence.
• Don’t use spaces in hashtags. For example, you would use #makebelievemarket – NOT #Make Believe Market – as only the first word after the hashtag will count and it will be a completely different one – and not relevant to what you’re talking about!
• Don’t use too many hashtags. It is recommended to only use up to five hashtags on Facebook posts. If you have too many, it can confuse the algorithm as hashtags act as keywords to help people discover your posts. Using fewer hashtags is also easier for you analyse which ones work best for you, as not so many to look at.
  
  That’s not more than five in the whole post, including any you use in the sentences too.
• Make sure the hashtags you use are relevant to your content and your business. This seems obvious but a lot of people use hashtags for days of the week, for example #throwbackthursday. If your post is about a happy memory or a throwback of a previous product that you remember fondly, it’s relevant. If you’re writing about a new product or something irrelevant, it won’t help you with engagement if your post is found on that hashtag and that person is searching for #throwbackthursday.     
• Check your privacy settings. If the settings on your Facebook business page is set to followers only, then you’re wasting your time using hashtags, as you need your setting to allow non-followers to view your content. All my settings on my business Facebook page are set to ‘public’ so anyone can see anything I post. Ensure that your posts are ‘public’ too.
  
  Please note: If you’re using your personal profile page to test your hashtags, you’ll need to make your posts ‘public’ manually.  

Measuring your hashtag use  

You can measure how your hashtags are doing by looking at your ‘Insights’ on Facebook.

• Go to your insights and click on ‘posts.’
• You’ll see a breakdown of your engagement rate, type of post and total reach for each post.
• Now, it won’t give you hashtag performance, so you’ll need to work through your posts and data to find out whether your Facebook posts with hashtags work better than those without (so some testing to do), and over time you’ll be able to see which posts with a particular set of hashtags work better than other sets – again this will be through trial and error, and a bit of insight research

At first you may not see that much difference in results because you won’t have used a particular hashtag enough for it to build a connection between the hashtag and your page/business. This is another reason why fewer hashtags are easier to manage – you won’t know the results if you use shed loads!  

I hope this has helped in understanding how hashtags can work for you and your business on Facebook.  It might seem complicated, but once you get going, it will become second nature.

As always, if you need any help, feel free to message me on Facebook @cindymobeymarketing or email me cindymobey@outlook.com

Other blog posts I’ve written about hashtags include:

Are hashtags still viable in 2024

Hashtags FAQ