INBOUND ACCELERATOR

For nearly a decade, before Instagram took its use to new heights, the hashtag was nearly synonymous with Twitter, the social media platform that introduced its use in 2007 as a way of categorizing conversations and organizing posts.

One of the biggest benefits of creating and implementing social media content as part of an integrated marketing campaign is the opportunity to reach new audiences who discover your content and your brand organically.

Hashtags got their start on Twitter, as a way of sorting and organizing the fast-moving social media channel into areas of interest, but Instagram took the tool and hyper-sized it with up to 30 hashtags per caption.

This may come as a surprise to anyone born after 1990, but this symbol (#) has not always been known as a hashtag. It gained that identifier in 2007 when it was introduced by Twitter as a way of identifying and organizing tweets by subject matter.

In a fast-moving environment like Twitter, timing your schedule can be important to reach followers before the 20-minute half-life of a tweet means decreasing engagement. (Source) You want your content to hit the feed when your audience is most likely to be using it.

While Facebook far outnumbers LinkedIn in the total number of users and its use by businesses, in the B2B marketing realm, LinkedIn leads the way. According to HootSuite, 96 percent of B2B content marketers use LinkedIn for organic social marketing (only 82 percent used Facebook or Twitter).

As millennials, who are completely at home with social media, become the primary purchase decision makers in many businesses, it is imperative that B2B brands become equally comfortable with using social media to distribute content.

Even as new social media channels make the news and take over the attention spans of younger generations, Facebook remains the most-used channel, with 2.45 billion active monthly users. And it is one of the few channels—along with YouTube—that consistently delivers followers for nearly all types of business, both B2C and B2B. 

YouTube is not only the largest repository of video content on the web, but also the de facto second most-used search engine out there, with more than 3 billion searches performed every month.

Market research encompasses many different activities marketers use to identify the needs of their customers, assess how they compare to the competition, find opportunities within the industry, and gather original data that can be used as the basis for content marketing campaigns.