By now everyone knows what a “Hashtag (#)” is, at least for anyone who uses Twitter either for personal use, as an information tool or to market their business.
The amount of information that is already on Twitter is huge; according to the numbers published by Twitter last March 2012, there are around 340 million tweets daily (140 million users). Hashtags help to sort and allow the user to find what he is looking for. Moreover, using these hashtags properly can help to keep the attention of new readers, get retweets and therefore, more promotion of our own messages and ultimately, build a community on Twitter.
However, according to a study published by Michiel Gaasterland, most professionals do not use this valuable marketing tool properly. So through this post I’m going to explain you how to use them in order to achieve more profit.
The first thing that you have to do is to think about the marketing purpose of this particular hashtag. Below you can find some suggestions:
- For branding: Create a hashtag of your business name to make users spread your brand. Try to abbreviate the name if it is too long and make sure that your hashtag is not already created for another purpose (check WTT or hashtag.org).
- Keep your followers informed of a new product. If you are launching a new product create a hashtag for it. To create a more likely spread explain in one of your tweets what this product is about.
- Trends: Check the trendy topics on Twitter and look for a way to use one of those into your own tweets.
- Words related to your business: Think about words that can describe your business and people might use when looking for similar products.
- Create buzz: Create a unique hashtag to become a “trendy topic”.
After choosing it, check if the hashtag that you want to use is already an existing one and create one if it does not exist yet. Ensure that your hashtag is going to be easily associated with the category, if it is short enough (Twitter has a limit of 140 words) and contact people with enough Twitter influence to make them use it.
After having decided the goal of your hashtag and choosing the best one to reach your purpose you can start using it!. So simple, but you have to be careful to not overuse it.
Finally, is really important to monitor your hashtag. There are several tools to do it as for example Twilert that is free and allows you to sign up and receive email notifications each time the hash tag is mentioned.
Author: Triz, SoMazi’s blog writer
