Welcome to Video #2! We’re going to talk about How to Use Hashtags for Your Business. So first things first, I want to ask you, what are you promoting? Are you promoting a product or service? Or are you a non-profit trying to spread your message? And I want to ask you, what are you top 10 to 20 keywords or the different jargons that people are using in relation to the area of your product and service? As you know, every little niche, every little market has their own way of talking.

What I want you to do is think about your product and service right now and just jot down keywords that relate to your product and service – things that people use a lot. For example, as a web designer, some people would use font names or popular font names, CSS stylesheets, and other things like that. So things that only your niche would understand but popular keywords because a lot of people in their own niche will be having their own conversations, they will have their own hashtags and things like that.

Don’t worry right now about whether those hashtags are being searched or not, just go ahead and jot that down because we’re in the brainstorming process and once you get out of that brainstorming process, then you can learn the fundamentals but before you could do that, you need to think about your company, and you need to think about your audience. So list it out.

The second thing I want you to think about is remove all the keywords, remove all the hashtags, feel free to pause this video at any time if you need to just jot those words down. Next, I want you to remove the hashtags for just a minute. So before using hashtags in your business, what you need to do is you really need to know the inner mind of your audience.

Do you know your audiences’ demographics? For example, do you have in mind a specific person who might be interested in buying your products and services? What they might look like? And things like that. Because guess what? When you get on social media sites like Facebook and Twitter and other sites, then using this knowledge is going to help you go further than your competitors.

If not, I want you to go on to a site called Quantcast.com. Do some research on your niche and create a customer profile so that you can hone in what matters most to your audience. So let’s do that right now real quick!

So, like I said, go to the site Quantcast.com (that’s quantcast.com) and what you need to do is simply enter a keyword that relates to a very, very general part of your market or your niche. Or you can enter a domain name, as well. Now, what I found with Quantcast is well, it doesn’t have statistics about every single website out there. If you can find a good amount of list or keywords that relate to your product and service and enter them here, do that until you actually get some demographic data which is right here.

This is just traffic data up here and it shows you how many people are visiting, that’s not really something that you’re  interested in right now. What we’re interested in now is the demographics. We want to know is your audience mainly male? Female? What age group? Kids? No kids? What kind of income? College? What kind of college? No college? Little bit of college? A lot of college? Grad school? What kind of ethnicity and race and more? And you can also see stuff like other interests that they might have. So even thought that they’re not necessarily, like news might not be related to your product and service, you will know that this type of person is most likely going to be interested in your product itself.

So this is golf niche right here. What we’re seeing is in the golf niche. It’s obviously dominated by male, mainly 45-65 above. No kids – meaning that more likely the kids are out of the house. They have a high income, generally $100,000 or above (basically 6-figure – 7-figure incomes). They have at least college or grad school and they’re mainly Caucasian.

Now that you have a better idea of who your demographic is, you can really hone in on your audience. Another little trick you can do is go on to Facebook and go to these groups and just take a look at the people’s pictures so that you can see does this actually match up? And by doing this, this is really going to help you hone in on the proper hashtags, the proper keywords that people are typing in to Twitter or Facebook in their regular day-to-day conversations. So, remember the whole idea here is to jump into the conversation not by saying, “Hey, hey I got a golf product and go buy my golf product.” But, “Hey, check this out. What are your thoughts on this specific strategic golf stroke? and this? and that?

You really can disarm by just being you, being friendly, and not really trying to sell them, and thinking about selling later down the road. A lot of us as business folk we make the mistake of trying to sell upfront, and that’s a no-no especially with social media.

Okay, so now that you have created your demographic profile, you have a better idea of how to do it, and we used that golf example. I want you to ask yourself, what is going on in their daily lives to even want to get online on social media sites like Facebook and Twitter? So, basically, I want you to put yourself in their shoes to understand what might be going on their minds. What are their frustrations? What do they like? What do they dislike? So maybe list the top 10 reasons why they may get online. Maybe they’re a typical person in your niche goes to work; they get home; they’re frustrated; they need to relax. Maybe they’re frustrated about their age, their looks, whatever.

List out the top 5 problems that keep them awake at night that they have. List out the top 5 inner desires that they might have. What news are they interested in? Do they like to hone in on specific TV shows? specific other types of shows and stuff like that? Because even though it’s not directly related to your product or service, if they match your demographic profile, then most likely they’re going to be interested in your product and service. So go ahead and list those out before you move on to the next videos.