It was in the July of 2009 when Twitter officially started hyper linking hashtags to the relevant search results. It helped the growth of Twitter by enhancing the flow of conversations. Soon afterwards, businesses started using hashtags as a part of their social media marketing strategy.
Other social media sites like Facebook have also adopted hashtags, which makes hashtags all the more important for marketing. Here are some ideas of utilizing hashtags cunningly in your marketing campaigns.
Trendy is the keyword to keep in mind
Twitter is one of the fastest evolving social media platforms where everyone posts their thoughts. Sometimes, it takes the proportion of a battlefield and it is a potent breeding place of social media revolutions.
New and diverse hashtag topics crop up all the time. Marketers need to keep a very close tab on the trending topic and use the exact hashtags that go really well with their marketing campaign. Mindless hashtagging will get them no where. It has to be done intelligently by closely monitoring trends on Twitter.
Branding through hashtags and avoiding risks
Twitter allows a limited number of characters in a single tweet which makes unnecessary number of hashtags impossible to fit in. To make sense to your target audience you have to coin to the point hashtags that go well with your brand image.
Generic tag-line hashtags such as Nike’s #makeitcount can help in reaching out to more members of target audience. Branded hashtags give your opponents and those who hate your brand a chance to criticize it. So be careful and choose hashtags that are either trending or in conversation or expresses the spirit of your brand image.
Hashtag decoded for marketers
Non fussy, generic yet to the point hashtags are what brings back the most relevant search results. A great way of testing hashtags is to coin as many relevant hashtags possible for a particular ad campaign or event. Then test them on a platform like Twitter.
The hashtags that get you best response or engage highest number of target audience members should be taken seriously and utilized for further driving conversations and building your brand image.
It’s all about spotting an opportunity
For getting more followers on Twitter through hashtagging marketers should be able to read the signs of an opportunity. Brands are promoting hashtags that tell a story through their ad campaigns. Tell a story that involves the mass and affects their life in some way.
For example, if there is a crisis and your business can be one of the solution providers then create a story based on that. If there is a natural calamity and your company is taking initiatives to help then create hashtag for that too.
Finding hashtag topics
As hashtags have become a powerful tool for driving opinions and rolling social media conversations, new resources have emerged to help marketers spot interesting and trending hashtag topics.
Hashtag.org is a paid service which provides data regarding what topics are trending in the last twenty four hours. The trending topics are short lived and have to be taken advantage of at a quick pace. What The Trend is another useful resource that marketers can use for finding relevant hashtag topics. Marketers should carefully launch provocative and unique hashtags that speaks volumes about the brand they are promoting.
Twitter and other social media platforms have embraced hashtags as conversations drivers. Marketers can benefit from using them in their marketing campaigns if they can coin relevant and unique hashtags that are easily relatable to their brand image.
