Hashtag Graveyards: Bury These Tags Before They Bury Your Engagement

On any social media platforms, there once ruling your feed for a long time, the hashtags such as #YOLO, #SWAG, #NoFilter, such that on every scroll, every story, every caption. Just like memes or something going virals, all the tags considered as digital trends which have a hot periods. When it's over, it goes into what we now know as hashtag graveyards, where the whole world has moved on, or being too cringeworthy now to use it. However, most marketers have no idea if the hashtags already residing at graveyard. It slowly haunting the reach, sabotaging growth and quietly draining engagement.

The Life (and Death) of a Hashtag

As foundational part of any social media platform, they help categorize content, improve discovery and connect users through trends. It have a certain lifespan too, from the it rise to the peak and eventually being overuse till it collapse into spam, bots or irrelevance. When being overused for long time, the algorithm will assumes your content to be more noise than value. Many brands are still using it even being oversaturated or outdated. It become part of the habits and just haven't been searching through more relevant hashtags. For example, #OOTD, once a engagement magnet, but it was used to be. Now they're fallen into category of low-quality content. Even quality content have such hashtags might affect on the algorithm.

The Hidden Cost of Dead Hashtags

While dead hashtags doesn't just look irrelevant, it actively hurts your content's performance. Hashtags that once brought traffic could also now lead to invisibility, not just because of oversaturated with them. Sad thing is, even with one or two bad hashtags along with effective one can dilute the content's visibility. The algorithm is favoring relevance and freshness of the hashtags. Content might be great but if the hashtags are dead, it just bringing it down, wasting a quality content. Even so, why still often dead hashtags are still frequently used? Here's some probable reasons :-

• Outdated templates that pulled out of nowhere, abandoned sites from years ago maybe.

• Recycled content calendars which probably handovers from someone before left the company.

• Lacking updated insights or too reliant on static lists of "popular hashtags" which been use repetitively.

Not All “Alive” Hashtags Are Healthy

Even so, some more general sounded hashtags aren't actually dead. Hashtags like #marketing, #business, or #crm seems like never die as they're active on everywhere on every social media platform. But! here's the problem, it's too general, so everyone using them. By the moment you post with such hashtags, it will be buried under millions of others which just refreshed every second. It just equivalent to you shouting somewhere on the mainstage of Tomorrowland, you're active but realistically, nobody hears you.

Can Hashtags Rise From the Dead?

Yes, but not always. Trends on social media are always unpredictable. Old trends resurface through remix culture or due to carry nostalgic value. Still not recommended to keep clinging to the past and better off staying ahead. However if still insist, here's some recommended ways :-

• Pair it with fresh content.

• Use irony or nostalgia intentionally.

• Test it in Stories or limited-time posts first.

Effectiveness are vary as it just like a walking dead. It's possible in fiction but not a viable strategy. Better to rely more on today relevancy.

Clean It Up with CRM

Keeping tracks with all hashtag performance can feel overwhelming when it could even across different social media platforms. This is where having a CRM tool come in handy on tracking them. It give you clarity and control over the way you handling your hashtag strategy. Some of what a CRM able to do:-

• It tracks which hashtags are still performing in your niche.

• It helps you A/B test different combinations for better results.

• It alerts you when a hashtag starts losing traction, or those new ones getting attention.

Let the Dead Stay Dead

Count hashtags as signals to your audience. In fast-paced digital marketing world, showing dead signals will lead to lost engagement due to no responses. As mentioned, hashtags are not meant to simply put together as captions on posts. It is the key for your posts to reach you