Complete Guide to Twitter Hashtags - Tips and case studies
Hello, Folks welcome to the eighth lesson of the Twitter Marketing course.
If you're not using hashtags, your content is going to sink into a sea of tweets. On the other hand, if you're using too many hashtags, your message is going to lose its value.
In this lesson, you'll learn how to use the right hashtags on Twitter that are relevant to your client's audience.
Hashtags originated on Twitter in 2007, it is an essential part of your tweets especially if you want your posts searchable.
Nowadays they're used on other social media platforms, especially Instagram, as well as TV and Video campaigns.
A hashtag comprises two parts: the hash symbol - # - sometimes called the pound symbol in the US - immediately followed by a keyword or phrase.
For example, putting the # symbol in front of the words 'Organic Farming' (without space) makes it a hashtag: #OrganicFarming
It helps you convey your point better and grabs hold of your audiences’ attention, instantly.
It’s a great way to get your tweets discovered by a wider audience on twitter.
Your Bio is a section of your profile where you must include hashtags. You can make your brand’s hashtag and encourage your customers to use them as they post their tweets.
You can use your brand’s tagline to create your brand hashtag.
In the below example, the company has used its brand’s tagline as its hashtags.
Their customers use it to search for the company’s latest post or product.
If you’re a potential customer and you want to find out more reviews and feedback from their customers.
Then you can use their brand hashtags that their customers use to check out their tweets.
You will know from these tweets how satisfied their customers are and if their products are effective.
As a business competitor, you can even use their brand hashtag to check out your competitor’s community.
You’ll be able to check every tweet from these people who used their hashtag and you’ll be able to know what their customers like and the problem that they encounter.
That can be your ultimate opportunity to create ideas that you can use to be more effective in using hashtags in your busines
You can look for ideas that the brands in the same industry use and you can pattern that idea or improve it.
Doing this will help improve your brand’s content to be discovered by more potential audience.
Things to keep in mind while using Hashtags
→ Keep them Short and Memorable.
→ Make sure your hashtags are readable since they don’t have space in between them.
→ Capitalize the first letter of each word. it’s easier to distinguish each word and read at a glance.
→ Hashtags are not case sensitive, so when you combine multiple words in your hashtag, distinguish them by capitalizing the first letter of each word.
→ Use hashtags that fit your brand
Avoid these common Hashtag mistakes
Don’t overdo the hashtag on your tweet.
#How #Annoying #Would #It #Be #To #Have #To #Go #Through #And #Read #Thirty #Hashtags #And #Try #To #Find #Out #What #It #Is #Saying
You have 280 characters that you can use in your tweets. Don’t use them all just for hashtags. People won’t see your tweets as valuable content if you overdo your hashtags.
It’s better to stick to using hashtags that fit your brand. You must make it a goal to target the right people and not just more people.
Give more importance to Quality rather than Quantity
You may have more potential audience reach but the number of interested users is not targeted properly. You should use a few relevant hashtags on your tweets.
Don’t use the @ symbol in Hashtags
Your hashtags aren’t designed to tag your network’s users. So combining both a hashtag and an “at” symbol will only tag the person/user, and you won’t send a hashtag at all.
Don’t Spam
There are websites, brands, and individuals that use popular hashtags and just throw them in their social messages with no context, just for the sole purpose of helping other accounts to find them.
This plan may seem to work in the short term, but just when twitter did a complete cleanout of any account that seemed to be linked with spam, these individuals lost hundreds of thousands of followers.
Their hashtag plan completely backfired.
Make sure your hashtags work
If there is a symbol or punctuation in or after the hashtag, you will break the hashtag. Grammar police beware.
If you want to post #I’mback, your hashtag will break after the I. You can tell where your hashtag broke when the blue line turns into black text.
If there are letters or numbers before the hashtag, it will break it before it even starts. So if your hashtag is 123#abc, ABC won’t link to a hashtag.
If the hashtag is made up entirely of numbers, the hashtag will not hyperlink.
But if you include letters with your numbers, the hashtag will work correctly. So #12345 won’t work but #123abc will.
Hope this lesson was useful, we will now proceed to the next lesson which is Finding Great Content Using Hashtags.
Finding Great Content Using Hashtags
The first place to check for trending hashtags is Twitter. People search for hashtags on twitter to find tweets that are related to their interests.
They can also learn more about a certain topic that people are talking about using hashtags.
People can view tweets that include trending hashtags and can also read the conversation of people engaging in a particular tweet.
You might see threads under a tweet, this means that people are commenting on that tweet.
Anyone interested in that particular tweet will keep on sending tweets to that thread and the conversation will continue to grow.
You can join in the conversation
- To let yourself be known as a marketer or business owner representing your brand.
- To voice out your opinion about certain topics
As you can see in the example below, this twitter user joins in the thread and replies to the tweet with a product that can be relevant to this tweet.
When people see this product, they can be curious about it and they might even research this product.
As they search for this product using the product name or hashtag, they can find tweets with a link to a website where people can purchase this product.
From there they can purchase this product.
They have discovered this product from searching for tweets.
You can also try experimenting with which hashtag will come up first with search results by getting keywords from this product name.
Remember Folks Keyword shows more relevant search results. You can use a particular hashtag to browse for more content.
Add hashtags to your content, that will help you get discovered by other users, including those not connected to you.
You can also check out the popular hashtags in Trends. By using the explore menu, you can find the trending hashtags under the trends section.
You can find relevant hashtags as you browse the search results from any of these hashtags that belong to the top twenty trends in your location.
As you can see in this example tweet, the user informs people about what is going on in their area.
People who check out this hashtag - #CoronaVirusTruth will be updated about the latest news on coronavirus cases.
There’s a text here saying ‘show this thread’. When you click on the thread, you will see more photos showing people more detailed media about this tweet.
You can even see the replies that people have posted on the tweet. People always voice out their opinions as they learn about what’s currently happening in their area.
As we’ve seen great content, you may notice this tweet that promotes a product related to our hashtag also uses several other hashtags relevant to this product.
You can take note of these hashtags and you might discover more great content by searching for these hashtags here.
Conclusion
Hashtags are a great way to group and categorize your tweets. People use hashtags to search for topics that they are interested in.
They can use the search textbox to find relevant topics they find useful for them.
You can even find articles that are linked to tweets as you search for hashtags.
People are looking for content that is valuable rather than browsing their feed with random feeds from the people they follow.
Now let’s proceed to the next lesson i.e, Finding Great Content Outside Twitter
Finding Great Content Outside Twitter
Twitter is a great place to share thoughts and build your brand, but how do you craft tweets that get attention?
When crafting content on twitter you might struggle on finding interesting and relevant topics that you can tweet and share with your followers.
You don’t have to create content from scratch. You can find great resources from the internet or results from search engines like Google.
Twitter doesn’t allow a bunch of room for chatter, so it’s important to be engaging and let your content rest on that. Since tweets are only 140 characters (not counting the recent updates to that limit), you’ll need to pack all of your efforts into a small space.
When your Tweets are highly customized and personalized, they’ll have an easier time capturing your readers’ attention and will survive Twitter’s inherently short content lifespan (which is only 18 minutes) a bit more effectively.
Find relevant topics that you can share and use to craft your Tweets. Curating content will help you in adding value to your audience without the struggle of creating great content by yourself.
You can even share content from other websites on twitter.
These can be articles, blogs, e-commerce sites that you want to share with your followers on Twitter that are relevant to your industry.
You can use Google to look for valuable content.
You have to know your audience, find out what interests them. You can check their profile and from there you can learn something from how they post tweets. And what they mostly Tweet about.
You can also view who they follow and by checking that out, you’ll be able to know the niche they are interested in.
Ask Questions
You can tweet about what your audience can expect to see tweets from your posts. Asking this question will allow you to receive broad topics.
That you can list down and start searching for that content on Google.
Give them options to choose from, if you start a poll, you are giving them multiple options of topics that they can vote on.
Polls will engage your audience to vote for a topic. They can easily choose from the topics that you have posted in your tweet.
Your audience won’t have to spend more time thinking about the topic that they can suggest to you.
This will help you decide what topic to search for based on the highest number of votes.
Doing this will make sure that many of your followers would love to see this content and you’ll get more engagement and likes from them.
You may notice in the below example tweet, the top 1 choice percentage result is close to the 2nd top choice.
You can decide on finding content using these two topics since more people voted for these two.
You’ll be getting opinions from your followers of what they are interested in and mixing in your interest with the content.
Conclusion
It's a great practice to share content that you find from other websites. Since the goal is to provide your audience with content.
That they will find useful, valuable, and relevant to them. They won’t be bothered if the content comes from another source since it is the content that they will be checking out.
If they like it they can always check out your twitter account.
To view your tweets since they are already sure that they can find interesting tweets from your account.
Hope this lesson was useful, we will now proceed to the next chapter i.e, Competitor Analysis on Twitter.
Chapter 9 : Competitor Analysis on Twitter - How to beat your competitor See More