Health & Fitness
What is a #HASHTAG and How Can My Business Use Them?
Understanding what a hashtag is when you post a tweet on twitter and how to use these tags for marketing your business.
Ever go on twitter and notice some words have the # symbol in front of them and others have a @ symbol, yet when you search for a keyword they all show up. So what gives? Which one do you use and why?
The @ symbol (as in @jp3solutions) is a username on twitter and the # is called a hashtag (#allstar).
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The thought around using a hashtag for tracking trends in keywords or topics on twitter. As we 'Tweet' certain words become popular and a hashtag allows you to easily find these groupings in searches on twitter or with 3rd party apps.
A great example of a hashtag made famous was by Charlie Sheen in 2011. The forever famous #tigerblood by @charliesheen was able to get 1 million people in 24hrs to talk about his #winning topic about #tigerblood.
Marketing With Tweets
Business owners can take advantage of hashtags at trade shows, in store events, or anywhere really with the use of a TweetWall (Check out http://www.projectorfy.com).
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A TweetWall will display a specific hashtag on the screen in a waterfall type effect, displaying the newest post on top. At your event visitors to the booth can tweet #showname or #company name and appear on your tv monitor in the booth. The effect here is to get people at the show talking about your company, service or product live and spread the word virally online for all their followers to see. Sometime we see this combined with a contest.
If your company is trying start a marketing campaign online a hashtag can be used to track the success of your campaign. As others quote and retweet your posts with a #campaign specific hashtag you can track its growth online.
In summary a #hashtag is used when you are trying to create a trend on twitter or group a collection of tweets easily. And some additional advice direct from the folks at @twitter about hashtags:
- you Tweet with a hashtag on a public account, anyone who does a search for that hashtag may find your Tweet
- Don't #spam #with #hashtags. Don't over-tag a single Tweet. (Best practices recommend using no more than 2 hashtags per Tweet.)
- Use hashtags only on Tweets relevant to the topic.
