Photo credit: Michael Coghlan
Some communications pundits predict 2015 will be the year of the hashtag. Nonetheless, hashtags are already among the essential tools for PR and social media marketing professionals. Use them well and gain bigger audiences; ignore them and risk losing your audience.
For the uninitiated, hashtags are placed before words and terms to make them searchable on social media, as in #hashtag. They are especially useful and popular on Twitter, where they originated in 2012. Hashtags are like signs attracting people of similar interests and mindsets. Without a hashtag, your targeted audience is less likely to locate your tweet.
Most Twitter users find the information they want in two different ways: by following a selected group of individuals and/or by searching for keywords or hashtags. Hashtags make it easier to locate tweets relevant to your interests from Twitter’s continuous and voluminous information stream.
Without hashtags, promoting tweets is nearly impossible. Attracting eyeballs to tweets is especially problematic for Twitter users who are just beginning to acquire followers. Careful and consistent use of hashtags makes it far easier to attract a larger audience.
PR and marketing professionals can capitalize on hashtags in at least four well-defined ways.
Increase engagement. Want to double your engagement? Use hashtags. Tweets with hashtags receive twice the amount of engagement as those without. Tweets with one hashtag are 55 percent more likely to be retweeted, according to PR pro Tom Spencer.
“The hashtag is now one of the most fundamental elements in social communications, with 83 percent of all social campaigns in the past year featuring nothing more than a prominent hashtag, and will be key to campaign success in 2015,” Spencer writes in his This is PRamble blog.
Connect with journalists. Journalists typically monitor hashtags to identify and track stories of interest to their beats. They also generally include hashtags in tweets promoting their own stories.
Monitor competitors & industry issues. Like reporters, PR pros can follow hashtags to monitor companies and industries. A few of the more technologically advanced media monitoring services including CyberAlert can recognize hashtags in media monitoring queries for clients. That’s important because tweets may not include the key words being searched, but will include a relevant hashtag. Here’s an example:
How to effectively combine #PR with #contentmarketing. #publicrelationsstrategieshttps://t.co/CVsSHBQ8QR
— CyberAlert (@CyberAlert) February 12, 2015
Companies using media monitoring to track competitors or industry issues should include the pertinent hashtags among the keywords that they monitor.
Twitter chats. Organizations can use hashtags to create “Twitter chats”, real-time discussions on the network. The chats are typically weekly and often in a question-and-answer format. Sports teams have become active users of Twitter chats, with managers and players answering questions.
Beware of chats involving topics or organizations that could be considered controversial or unpopular. Critics can inundate the forum with sarcastic questions and critical comments. JPMorgan learned that hard lesson when critics flooded its #AskJPM chat, forcing the bank to cancel the event.
Consider Network Differences
While prevalent on Twitter, hashtags don’t work well on all social media networks. Some networks don’t use them at all. The evidence so far indicates hashtags make essentially no difference on Facebook. On the other hand, Instagram posts with over 11 hashtags gain substantially more engagement, Spencer says.
David Wilding, planning director for Twitter UK, says the best hashtags
• Simplify the topic and narrow its focus,
• Compel action either explicitly or implicitly,
• Are fluid and able to evolve over time,
• Are distinctive and not able to be replicated by a competitor.
Possible Hashtag Pitfalls
Caution is essential when creating and choosing hashtags. Understand your audience and how they will react to the hashtag. Don’t jump on a trending hashtag — or any hashtag for that matter — before you research what it means and who’s using it. DiGiorno Pizza committed a huge faux pas when it tweeted “#WhyIStayed You had pizza” next to a photo of its pizza. Women had created the hashtag to relate their stories of domestic abuse.
When creating a hashtag, consider how it could be perceived differently than intended. The marketing team for Susan Boyle, a former Britain’s Got Talent contestant, created the hashtag #Susanalbumparty (Susan Album Party) to promote the singer’s new album. Jokesters wrote it as #SusAnalBumParty, forcing the promoters to hastily change it to #SusanBoylesAlbumParty (including the appropriate capital letters).
Bottom Line: Used carefully, hashtags can greatly increase the reach of tweets and posts. New hashtags developed with care can attract larger or more targeted audiences. Carefully checking the history of existing hashtags can prevent an embarrassing kerfuffle. Painstaking planning prevents hashtag predicaments.
William J. Comcowich founded and served as CEO of CyberAlert LLC, the predecessor of Glean.info. He is currently serving as Interim CEO and member of the Board of Directors. Glean.info provides customized media monitoring, media measurement and analytics solutions across all types of traditional and social media.
Good basic article, I am amazed at how many people still don’t “get” hashtags. There are many ways to monitor media and social media mentions, but hashtags are the popular ones. Thanks!