Hashtags are nothing new in the world of social marketing, so you’d think that TikTok hashtags would be no different, right? Not necessarily. Before we get into the weeds on hashtags, you might want a refresh on our top TikTok marketing tips. But if you’re already caught up, there are some similarities in how you use hashtags on TikTok versus Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter, there are still some things that makes TikTok unique.
1. What are the Similarities?
First, let’s start with some of the similarities that all social media platforms share: what is the purpose of a hashtag? The simple answer is that hashtags help customers find your content. These hashtags that you add to your videos are a way to categorize your content to make it easy for others to find – and for social media algorithms to understand.
This is the same across the board for TikTok, Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter. Without hashtags, there would be no way of finding content that is tailored to the individual user. This is why your TikTok feed might be different than your friend’s. The hashtags that you interact with dictate what you are going to be shown while scrolling.
2. What are the Differences?
The biggest difference between TikTok and the other popular social media platforms is what content is shown to you. For Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter, most of the content you are shown is from the profiles that you are following. This means that hashtags primarily matter when you are actively searching on the Discover pages for each of those platforms. Now that doesn’t mean that hashtags are useless on other platforms, but for TikTok, your feed, or your For You Page, is made up of the categories that you interact with the most. You’ll even notice that if you go a week without using TikTok, your For You Page will reset to the default popular videos, and you will have to curate your feed again to suit your taste.
Therefore you should have a mixture of branded and non-branded keywords in your TikTok hashtags. Imagine that you have a TikTok user that is interested in hair care, and they come across one of your videos with the hashtags #haircare and #YouBrand. You have now put your branded hashtag into the bucket of content they interacted with, and this means that any of your videos with that hashtag, but not related to hair care, has a higher chance of showing up on their For You Page.
These content buckets also show the importance of trending hashtags on TikTok, and there are a lot of them. Luckily, there is some consistency to trending hashtags, and Influencer Marketing Hub created a list of the top 120+ Trending TikTok Hashtags to pick and choose from. These will include hashtags like #foryoupage #fyp #thisis4u and more generic terms like that.
But you should not rely on just those generic terms. The best thing about TikTok is that the platform is built around trends. This means that if there is a trending hashtag, you should jump on the bandwagon for some of those views to come your way.