#SocialStudies: Hashtags Help Consumers Find You

This article by Allison Travers, Eldorado Trading’s director of marketing communications, appeared in the May 2018 issue of AVN magazine. Click here to see the digital edition. Social media is not going away. In fact, it’s still growing. In 2017, there were 1.96 billion social media users worldwide. This number is expected to grow to 2.5 billion in 2018. Of those who participate on social media, eight out of ten people regularly use social media and 59 percent of those users access their accounts almost every day. In fact, over one-third of people check their accounts over five times a day. The networking sites where these active users spend most of their time: Facebook, YouTube, Instagram and Twitter. The reality is, people want to engage digitally. They regularly document their lives online and share with those they enjoy most. More importantly, 64 percent of consumers are more likelyto trust a brand that interacts positively with consumers online. In fact, 72 percent of consumers trust online reviews as much as personal recommendations from real people. Some 68 percent of consumers intentionally go to social networking sites to read product reviews. Consequently, 90 percent of consumers say that positive online reviews influence their buying decisions. Not only is social media not going away, your customers are digitally engaged even if you are not. Meanwhile, pleasure products are a $15 billion industry. There are hundreds of manufacturers and distributors, and thousands of retailers around the world. As the ability for consumers to create and share content in these online forums grows, so does the need for the pleasure products industry to participate in social networking. If we expect continued mainstream success and growth to happen within the pleasure products industry in the years and decades to come, it’s imperative for our businesses to utilize social media to join those discussions. Conversations about our businesses and the products and services we offer are happening with or without us. If we aren’t a part of the conversation, we lose control of the narrative. One way for our industry to collectively regain control as well as assert our collective experience and authority on these topics is through the use of hashtags. Hashtags are pound signs with a word or phrase (with no spaces) that hyperlink to any other content that also included that specific hashtag. Hashtags are the World Wide Web’s digital equivalent of a card catalog at your local library. It’s how content creators can label and file their content so the end users can access that content quickly and easily. Hashtags are widely used to search for content within social networks and search engines, which means hashtags give you a greater opportunity to get your information in front of potential customers without paying a single cent. If you aren’t using hashtags, you are missing the opportunity for your content to be found by those seeking the very products you sell and the services you offer. Each company will naturally use their own branded hashtags, like #ForeverEldorado or #ElevateU, to make their marketing campaigns searchable, and then there are hashtags to spotlight events, contests and even specific product names. Still, it’s the regular and consistent use of the most common and likely searched terms—like #AdultToys, #Lingerie or #PartySupplies—that should become standard social media practice to include any time a pleasure product is posted on social media. This would effectively create a vast and valuable online database of industry-related content, one that was built with the knowledge and experience of this industry rather than left to the will and whim of the end consumer. Everyone in this industry talks about the need to mainstream our products and services. We obviously want to participate in the broader conversations happening, but that requires we first participate in the communities where our customers spend their time and then use the available tools to make it easier for them to find and have those conversations with us. We have the power and the presence to be the authority on pleasure; we just have to wield that power one hashtag and one product post at a time. This article originally appeared in the adult distributor’s monthly newsletter. To sign up for the newsletter, email [email protected]