Hashtags are one of the most important functions on Twitter when using it for social media marketing. By using hashtags you can give buzz to a campaign, strike up conversations and brand awareness as well as engagement. The concept behind the hashtag (#) is pretty simple. The hashtag is usually a phrase or word with all the spaces taken out for instance #childhoodmemories.
If you want people to participate in a hashtag conversation, you can search for this hashtag and it will bring up a list of all the tweets with those hashtags present. The Twitter hashtag can cause a phenomenon and propel your company into the spotlight overnight. The power of a Twitter hashtag can be seen in the case of Steven Marx. He had only 20 followers at the time and hardly used Twitter. He felt disappointed with NBC’s coverage of the 2012 Olympics so he voiced his opinion on Twitter using the hashtag #NBCFAIL. Within three days, the hashtag grew to over 20,000 tweets and made Steven Marx an instant online celebrity.
In my previous blog How Your Business Can Benefit From Twitter Hashtags, It speaks about how to use hashtags for a social media marketing campaign. Here is how to create your own hashtags:
When you’ve decided on a hashtag name or topic take a look at Hashtags.org to see if your chosen hashtag has been taken. Type the hashtag into the search box in the upper right hand corner of the Hashtags.org page. From this you can then see any variations of your hashtag idea, as well as valuable analytic information about that hashtags performance. You can see the amount of tweets per hour and where the peaks are.
In addition, you will see related hashtags and their performance, for example hashtags used alongside the original hashtag such as #childhoodmemories and #spicegirls. You will then be able to see a sample of tweets using this hashtag.
If you don’t have search results it means your hashtag isn’t in use and so you can add a hashtag definition on the site. Rather than sending out your tweets manually you can use tools such as Tweetdeck or Hootsuite to schedule out tweets and then a monitoring service such as Twilert to watch for your hashtag.
However if there is already a hashtag out there, jumping on that one can be easier than starting your own one up from scratch. If you want some inspiration you can use Tagalus which is a dictionary for hashtags and allows you to see all of the current hashtags out there. Creating a hashtag is just the first step in creating a campaign. Some will be more popular than others and tools can help you see which worked best. Hootsuite and Tweetdeck can help you monitor all of your hashtag campaigns in one easy to manage place.
Miromedia can help you create a successful social media marketing campaign tailored for your business to engage your audience.
