I’m happy to kick off Best Rank’s first-ever video blog with a lesson about the mysterious and powerful hashtag! As you might know, I’m Best Rank’s Social Media Manager, and I’m excited to share some tips.
As one of Best Rank’s core services, social media optimization and management is quickly becoming an elementary part of any Internet marketing campaign. Trouble is, many business owners aren’t quite sure how to tackle the many social outlets and their sometimes confusing intricacies. For expert advice on using hashtags properly, watch my video, Social Media 101: Hashtags Do’s and Don’ts.
If you still have questions, or would like to learn more about social media, you can find me on Twitter (@JBowlesSD) or leave a comment.
Hello, and welcome to the first edition of the Best Rank video blog. Today I’m here to discuss hashtags—how to use them, how not to use them—sort of a hashtag 101, if you will. My name is Jennifer Bowles and I’m the Social Media Manager here at Best Rank. So, without any further ado, what are hashtags?
Hashtags are a way of identifying a topic or a keyword within a tweet. So, for instance, over the weekend I was at home visiting my dad, and over coffee, he asked me, “What are hashtags?” I said, oh God, how am I going to explain to my 60-year-old father what hashtags are? I described the mountain that both he and I like to hike (Black Mountain), and I said, “Well, dad, I could use, for instance I could say, ‘Had a great hike on Black Mountain; can’t wait to get back,’ and I could use the hashtag #cavecreek or even #phoenix to identify the location of the mountain, so it would just give people a little more information about the tweet.
So, how do you use hastags? You can use hashtags a number of different ways. You can use them to keep track of a conversation. If someone had a question about how to build a Facebook fan page—how to edit it, modify it, anything about it—you could use the hashtag at the end, #socialmedia, and it would be a way of modifying the tweet to describe that the question is about social media. Someone could then join that conversation by searching for that particular hashtag themselves.
You could also use a hashtag #tech to discuss the upcoming iPhone 5 that we’ve all been waiting for. You know, if there was a news article about it, and at the end, maybe you did ‘#tech.’
You could also use a hashtag to talk about a cause or join a cause. For instance, October is Breast Cancer Awareness Month, so a lot of tweets will probably involve some sort of hashtag to represent the fight against breast cancer. Such as, #breastcancerawareness, or #raceforthecure.
You can also use hashtags to start a trend. Last week, Jimmy Kimmel asked his audience, his viewers, what’s their most epic party fail. He asked them to communicate with him through the hashtag #partyfail on Twitter. So people were able to tell him their most epic party fail and then use the hashtag #partyfail. He then read those on the air. So it was not only a way of being part of a conversation or joining one, but it also became a trending topic—which isn’t easy to do, and it’s a cool thing if someone’s able to do it.
Another way you can use a hashtag is to run a promotion or a contest. So, for instance, someone may do a “Twitter Tuesday” where they give away a certain percentage off an item, with a code that people can use at checkout. Or, if someone’s doing a model contest, such as My Zerona, who is doing a contest for their laser—they do the laser lipo. So it could be #zeronamodelcontest. That way, people could use that to be engaged in that contest.
You can also use a hashtag to identify a community, such as the #smx, which is the Search Marketing Expo, or #leadfromwithin.
So what are the ways not to use a hashtag?
One of the things you don’t want to do when using hashtags, is you don’t want to use a hashtag in every other word of your tweet. It’s annoying, it doesn’t look right—it’s a misuse of hashtags.
You don’t want to make your hashtags too long. It’s super annoying. For instance, if you said, ‘Just woke up. #shouldn’thavehadthesecondburritolastnight’ that’s way too long of a hashtag. So how you would redo that tweet is, you might say, ‘Just woke up, shouldn’t have had that second burrito. #running’—then it would identify you have to get some sort of exercise to burn off that burrito you had, or the two of them.
You also don’t want to make it something that no one will understand. So if you were to use the hashtag #WTHIT (What the heck is this?), no one’s going to know what that hashtag is, so it’s going to provide no value. You also probably won’t be able to get it trending.
Lastly, you don’t want to dilute a topic or a trend by using too many hashtags in your tweet. It’s rude and it diminishes the genuine value people get from that particular conversation or topic when they’re searching for it. It can junk it up, and it’s kind of spammy.
So today I’ve kind of given you the run-down on how to use hashtags and how not to use them. I hope you got some of your questions answered. If you have any questions, you can find me on Twitter at @JBowlesSD, and I’ll be able to answer any of your questions. Or you can comment in our blog. Until next time; I look forward to talking to you. Bye!
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