Does Anyone Even Watch YouTube Shorts?

With 244.4 million video watchers in the US, you’d be remiss not to leverage the power of video marketing as part of your social media marketing strategy, and while long-form content has reigned supreme with 34% more conversion rates, there might be a new sheriff in town.

The average American’s attention span has gone down significantly, and while it’s not yet concretely quantifiable, there’s no denying that most of us struggle to sit through long-form content without planning or preparation.

That means all those movie-like ads, video marketing materials, and extensive video content are not as appealing to the ordinary audience member or consumer any longer—and it makes sense, too.

An illustration showing how YouTube Shorts are winning over long-form videos.

With apps like TikTok taking the world by storm garnering 1.7 billion active users around the world since it was founded in 2016, other apps like Instagram, Facebook, and eventually, YouTube all followed suit with the short-form video format. It’s proven to be the most successful marketing strategy in today’s quick-consumption information overload era.

In 2023, 33% of marketers are looking to invest more in short-form video, including YouTube Shorts, which have over 50 billion daily views as of February 2023! That’s an incredible reach, offering a lot of potential for getting relevant marketing material and content across to your audience.

But these Shorts will only get you so far without a few key components, including:

  • Great content
  • Relevant marketing niches
  • Focus on every detail, including the title, thumbnail, and description
  • Appropriate backlinks
  • YouTube Shorts #Hashtags

An illustration depicting the benefits of YouTube Shorts for brands.

Recommended Read: How to Create Winning Social Media Strategies for Small Businesses

Why You Need to Care About YouTube Shorts

Launched in 2020, this feature on the long-standing video content platform has been a game-changer. YouTube Shorts have a separate audience from its regular long-form content and use the typical 9:16 ratio to display content that is up to 60 seconds long. You can add music, play with filters, add captions, and, of course, add hashtags to make them more appealing.

Our social media management company encourages clients to invest in YouTube Shorts for their business and leverage this mobile-exclusive, vertical video feature for everything it can offer.

Unsurprisingly, sources like Forbes have also begun acknowledging the branding power YouTube Shorts offer, given that they allow you to reach a wider demographic, share more information in shorter time spans, create more content, and stay consistently on-trend. This is all while your standard social media strategy is already running as usual.

What’s The Deal With Hashtags Anyway?

If you’ve been on social media for even a fraction of a minute, you’ve probably seen hashtags everywhere and perhaps even used them to get a few additional likes on your photos and videos.

But have you ever stopped to wonder why we use hashtags anyway? Is it just to be #Quirky, #Fun, and #Interesting? Or is there an actual function to them?

Hashtags are actually one of the most valuable social media tools available to marketers, businesses, and audiences alike. They help classify content, making it easier to search for it on a platform. It also helps the algorithm determine what’s trending and what’s not, what content goes where, and how to personalize content for audiences based on these tags.

An illustration depicting a large hashtag with people sitting around it.

Even something as simple and mundane as #Selfie #WorkOutfit can help the platform filter out what your content is about and push it to audiences who need it—which is why it’s crucial to know the best YouTube hashtags to add to your video content.

Recommended Read: Social Media and SEO: How to Use Social Media to Improve SEO Rankings

Identifying The Best Hashtags for YouTube Shorts in 2023

While you do want to focus on niche hashtags that are specific to your content, industry, business, product, services, brand, and other details unique to you, it’s also important to look at what’s trending.

You can and should come up with unique, personalized hashtags, such as taglines for your business, catchphrases, business names, etc., but you can’t make it big without the right strategic choices, either.

That’s because users will be able to search for your content using the hashtag, too, and you want it to show up higher on their search results, making it necessary to use both viral and trending tags.

An illustration showing how content goes viral online.

So, what’s hot and happening when it comes to the latest YouTube Shorts trending hashtags? Let’s take a look:

  1. #shorts
  2. #viral
  3. #subscribe
  4. #shortsvideo
  5. #viralshorts
  6. #reels
  7. #youtubeshorts
  8. #trending
  9. #shortvideo
  10. #youtuber
  11. #share
  12. #shortsyoutube
  13. #shortsviral
  14. #youtube
  15. #ytshorts
  16. #shortsfeed
  17. #trendingshorts
  18. #shortsads
  19. #shortschallenge
  20. #shortsbts
  21. #youtubevideo
  22. #shortsbeta
  23. #youtubevideos
  24. #shortscompilations
  25. #shortsclip

These are some of our top YouTube Shorts tags that are intended to boost your reach, help you find more audiences, and get your short-form videos trending. But what’s next? Let’s address some FAQs:

Recommended Read: The Ultimate YouTube SEO Cheat Sheet

Where Will I Find Viral YouTube Shorts Hashtags for My Business?

You’re probably thinking we just gave you a whole list above—so why do you need to look for anything other than these?

Well, these are some of the highest performing, viral YouTube shorts tags, but as you can see, they’re also kind of generic.

An illustration showing hashtags for YouTube.

That’s not necessarily a bad thing because it just means you’ll always be able to add these to your content and get traction, views, and engagement—but it also means that they don’t really show anything related to your business, content, or niche.

They’re also not necessarily what’s trending right now, which means people may not be actively searching for these terms at the present moment, and with 2 billion monthly logged-in users on the app, you want to know what they’re looking for.

A great way to look for trending hashtags is to do a thorough examination of:

1. Competitor Videos and Content

This seems fairly obvious when you think about it, but looking at your competitors is a great place to start. Our social media management services include a detailed competitor analysis, which we can perform for YouTube Shorts, too, identifying which hashtags are helping them soar through the algorithm and get recognized.

It’s especially helpful to look at competitors because they’ve already been through the trial and error of using different hashtags to see what performs and what tanks in your industry and with your audience, and if it’s not something unique to them, you can just as easily incorporate it into your content.

Like they say, if you can’t beat ‘em, join ‘em!

2. YouTube’s Own Algorithm for Suggestions

With billions of daily users, YouTube is collecting mammoth amounts of data each day. This means it knows exactly what the best hashtags for YouTube Shorts are, and you should pay heed to its recommendations.

The algorithm has insights and offers data-backed recommendations by analyzing the information you provide, including your industry, products, and other specs. While sometimes these recommendations may not be accurate or seemingly relevant, it can’t hurt to add those hashtags to your Shorts. The simplest way to find recommendations is to enter the almighty # in the search bar or description and just choose tags that seem to fit.

YouTube will automatically recommend tags that are currently trending and popular, making your job significantly easier.

3. Trending Content and Videos on Shorts

Again, a great place to start here is to find trending content and videos and examine hashtags used there. Trending videos are often those that are going viral, or popular among viewers, and thus, more easily recognizable.

You can browse through specific trending categories to see what’s popular and what people are enjoying, and then make your selection for YouTube Shorts tags based on those findings.

This is a great strategy in general since it allows you to not just leverage popular, trending hashtags but also partake in relevant topics, conversations, and information to help you generate content that is also current. You can hack into the latest trends and exciting happenings on the internet and tailor your content to fit those conversations.

4. Designing Your Own Custom Hashtag

There are two things to note about this: you should look at your previous content to see what performed well, and use the same elements, especially hashtags, and also work to create your own tags.

By this, we mean to come up with innovative hashtags that are recognizable, unique, and interesting. Some of the most popular branded hashtags that we’ve seen trending on social media across the board include Nike’s #JustDoIt, Coca-Cola’s #ShareACoke campaign hashtag, and many more. But there are also other category-based tags such as #ASMR, that offer millions of results in a single search, as can be seen below:

A screenshot of the #ASMR tag on YouTube.

While this is specifically for shorts, there are actually 13 million videos that come up for this hashtag alone, and the top two shorts pictured here have 215M views and 252M views, respectively—and they’re not even a year old.

Why this works is that viewers automatically associate your company or brand with that YouTube Shorts hashtag, and can also make videos in response to it, recreate, repost, or reshare them, and find all videos from that campaign in a single place by looking up your unique tag.

Recommended Read: How to Promote Your YouTube Channel: The Only Guide You Need

How Do I Use These Trending Tags On YouTube?

With all this information to deal with, one of the biggest questions you might be left with is how do I even use these trending hashtags for YouTube shorts? Do they go in the video itself?

To put it simply: you have to use the tags strategically.

A screenshot of a brand video with the hashtag #shorts in the description.

As seen above, the hashtag #shorts makes an appearance in this product video’s description, which has 108k likes and over 4M views since it was posted in July 2022. This is a fairly successful brand video that doesn’t use much else other than one strategic, popular YouTube Shorts hashtag—pretty crazy, right?

This goes to show that you don’t need to stuff every single trending hashtag in your posts to make a splash. Make smart choices, adding them to your title if it fits, description, and comments so it can generate traction and views. #YouGotThis.

#LetsGetStarted on Your Very Own YouTube and Social Media Campaign

You may not have thought much about the impact of hashtags on your social media engagement and performance before today, but we know how algorithms work to impact your reach.

Don’t wait around to find the right hashtags that work for your brand or business. Let the social media marketing services at Search Berg kickstart your campaign.

We offer comprehensive, affordable social marketing services that are tailored to your brand’s needs and requirements. Set up a consultation with our team and get a detailed audit, review, and analysis of your current strategy and where you’re falling behind.

We’re excited to help you customize and upgrade everything from your YouTube Shorts tags to your content strategy for more engagement and impactful results. #WeGotThis!