 Freedom! Today I want to talk to you about hashtags. I'm going to be talking to you about one of three different strategies for using hashtags to market your channel. The three different strategies I'm going to talk to you about are branding and campaign specific, trending, and content. This is probably just going to be the first one, which is brand and campaign specific. The other two we'll save for another video. Brand and campaign hashtags are tags that you create for your own channel. You use them to market your channel, your brand, or your promotions at any given time. Here I'm defining a brand and campaign hashtag to be something with your channel name, your channel or company tagline, just something that specifically calls out to you and or your brand. Make a brand hashtag that is unique to your channel. And make a brand hashtag that defines you and your business. Use your hashtag as your signature tag. People like to use them as much as they can and hopefully people will market for you. For instance, hashtag freedom family, hashtag be free. Or as a personal example for those who follow me, hashtag deeperist thoughts. A campaign hashtag would be anything that you create for specifically your campaign. So let's say you were asking your followers to call out because of some injustice in the YouTube community, or if you were to use hashtags to promote, say, free shipping week on your merchandise site, that would be a great way to use campaigns. Also, if you're doing a short miniseries as a gaming YouTuber on a game, you can call to that audience and work that into a hashtag so that your followers can find each other and commingle. You create your own brand hashtag. No one can do this for you. Usually, you'll use your channel name or a tagline that people are going to be familiar with if they're familiar with your channel or if you can do none of the above, something that people will be familiar with once they watch your channel. This can be something as simple as an inside joke, what you call your fans or followers. Use your imagination because the more imagination you use, the more imagination your followers will use in return. Use this as your central business hashtag, something that you can use or your fans or followers can use on any social network that they're on. This way, no matter what social network they're on, you can find them and they can find each other. Once that you think that you have it narrowed down to a couple of hashtags that you might be able to use, do a search on YouTube, Google+, Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, or any other hashtag enabled site. It's important to actually hit more than one. Make sure that you shop around and make sure that you're not either A, taking someone else's hashtag, or B, one that's been used recently, especially by something that competes with you. Keep in mind, your brand hashtag, you want to keep it short. As short as possible while still maintaining its uniqueness. So for instance, you probably don't want to make a hashtag that's over 10 to 15 characters long. Unless it's got some really cool imagery in the wording, people probably aren't going to use it or remember it. So for instance, hashtag Star Wars is probably a really good one. However, hashtag may the force be with you, that one might be a gamble. The important thing to remember is that it's memorable and that it's short so it doesn't take up too much space on social media that counts your characters. Here's an example of a branding hashtag. KitKat uses hashtag have a break. They consistently use it on all social medias such as Twitter, Google+, and so on. Their customers know their brand hashtag and will use it to engage with the KitKat community. On Instagram, customers get to share pictures of themselves enjoying their favorite snack with the KitKat community. And of course, KitKat gets a lot of free promotion. One note about this particular hashtag is that hashtag have a break is also used by people who are having a break. So there, they actually use that non-exclusivity on their hashtag to their advantage. So it's a little bit more discoverable. Be careful with this, but do play around with it. If you see that something else is being used, maybe look at it and make sure it's not another brand using it and it may actually help you with your discoverability. For a campaign hashtag, I would tell you to use the name of your current marketing campaign. So for instance, if your name happens to be Shane Dawson and Sony is taking down your videos left and right, hashtag Shane Dawson Sony or hashtag Sony Shane Dawson. If that's your campaign to get Sony to leave you alone, then there you go. That is a good hashtag. Or let's say you're Tabuscus and you just got a new branding deal to offer free domains to the first 100 purchasers of something. Well, there you go. Come up with something that is specific to that promotion. Again, the same thing applies here when it comes to having a tag that is already being used by another group or association. Unless you're looking to capitalize on the popularity of that tag, you may not want to use it. Promote your campaign hashtags as a way for your viewers, subscribers and followers to engage with you. So for the duration of that period, somehow interact with your fans on that hashtag even if it takes an extra 10 to 15 hours per week during that time, it will be so much more worth it and you will end up with a much more engaged fan base that jumps on these campaign hashtags in the long run. As an example, a while back, Home Depot was running the HD Game Day hashtag as a way to submit photos celebrating the start of college football. The campaign was run on Twitter and Instagram, however they were actually promoting these photos on Facebook, which is a nice way to move people across the different social medias. The following is just a couple of tips when it comes to these types of hashtag campaigns. Keep brand hashtag campaigns consistent and unique across all social medias. When I say unique, I don't mean have one for each social medias. I mean unique to you. Make campaign hashtags for your social contests, promotions and to generate more interests and interactivity in all of your posts that have that short time span. When you're choosing a hashtag, make sure to make it short and easy to remember and of course easy to spell for your customers or followers, whatever the case may be. Otherwise, you run the risk of someone misspelling it and missing out on the whole show. And last but not least, monitor your brand and campaign hashtags and respond to people using them. This is the most important part. Because you as an entertainer start to grow, you're going to realize it's a lot harder to reach out to everybody, respond to everybody. So this is a really great way for you to respond and reply to as many people as possible and to reward them for helping promote you. Please stay tuned for the next episode where we'll be talking about trending hashtags. Again, thank you very much to this user right here who suggested this entire subject.