What the Hash? How to Utilize Hash Tags for Your Brand and Business
10:00 am Eastern Time
Here’s more from Hover friend and guest-blogger Jessica Muhlbier. Jessica is a genuine chatterbox, social media guru, avid writer and up-and-coming digital celebrity. She lives at www.jessicamuhlbier.com.
If you’ve been on Twitter for more than a few minutes, chances are you’ve seen a tweet or two with a hash “#” symbol, also known as a hashtag. Trending topics develop and revolve around hashtags. Some recent trending topics are #ladygaga #googlewave and #Twilight. So, what exactly is a hashtag?
A hashtag is a simple way to catalog and organize tweets around a specific topic.
Exploring Twitter in all its glory, hashtags don’t just spark trends. They are both extremely useful and beneficial for your online brand or business. Why? Well hashtags are a community-driven convention for adding additional metadata to your tweets, which helps to provide extra context for your audience, and in Twitter’s case, followers. Hashtags work similar to tags on Flickr, Facebook, or Google maps, only they are added in-line to your post.
You can create a hashtag simply by prefixing a word with a hash symbol: #hashtag. For example, if I were to tweet about Hover it would look something like this: “I’m so excited to be blogging for the #Hover community!”
How to Utilize HashTags for your Brand or Business
Because hashtags develop and spread so quickly, it can be overwhelming to know which tags to use or create. A good rule of thumb is to use hashtags that are consistent with your brand. If you are a foodie then why not share some recipes on #tastytuesdays and if you’re a musician then #musicmondays is a popular trending topic not to be missed.
Essentially, if it makes sense for your brand to join the conversation then go ahead and tweet with the appropriate hashtag.
Now while participation is all good and fun, you may want to start your very own hashtag. Many conferences assign a specific hashtag, which has proven to be a positive networking tool and a convenient way to follow different presentations. I was recently in San Jose for the KMWorld conference and was unable to attend a specific session; however, I was able to follow the tweets simply by searching the #kmw09 hashtag, which was extremely helpful.
Like conferences, hashtags are very helpful for small businesses as a way to track social media campaigns, engage your customers, and to further build your company’s sense of community.
Getting Your HashTag Started
The first and most basic step is deciding on the tag word. It’s best to pick something short and sweet, easy to spell, and of course memorable.
Once you’ve chosen the tag itself, the next step is a no-brainer: start using it and promoting it! But do ensure that your tweets with the hashtag are worthwhile and valuable to the conversation stream; and don’t overdo it; the last thing you want is to appear spammy to your beloved followers.
A great and fairly recent example of a hashtag promotion is when Starbucks (@Starbucks) launched the new VIA instant coffee. #StarbucksVIA became a popular hashtag in customer’s response to the new product, which in turn was great (and free) feedback for Starbucks.
Keeping Track
Once you’ve become a Twitterholic-hashtag-using-machine all that’s left is to keep track of your tags within the Twitter discourse. You can search hashtags via Twitter Search (which is the most popular), What The Trend and of course, Google. However, if an easy search doesn’t do you justice then check out Monitter or TweetGrid. Both these programs are good web-based control panels for performing real-time Twitter searches of hashtags.
Happy Hashing!
