Everyone knows that Twitter is all about the conversation, right? It’s about connecting with people, developing relationships and sharing information in 140 characters.
Some communicators are better at balancing the three than others, but this post is for the PR and Marketing folk who use this platform to share valuable information. Here’s my first question for you (“experts” can jump to question two):
Do you know what hashtags are?
Hashtags.org defines them as “ a community-driven convention for adding additional context and metadata to your tweets. They’re like tags on Flickr, only added inline to [your message].”
There aren’t any major rules when it comes to using hashtags. Simply throw in the “#” before the message and tweet away.
One of the most popular ways to use hashtags is to use the agreed upon hashtag when live tweeting from conferences. Here’s an example of that in action from BlogPotomac 2009:
“jaywalk1: @loryn24 Some would say YOU don’t determine your brand. The ppl you know and interact with do. I’m not buying that 100%. #blogpotomac“
The hashtag doesn’t need to go at the end of the message, but it often does, and as you can see, by using hashtags, you are able to track tweets posted by anyone using that same tag.
People create all kinds of tags and participate in themed discussions such as #followfriday and #charitytuesday. One extremely popular and useful tag at the moment is
#iranelection. This brings me to my second question:
Are you using hashtags appropriately?
I know, I know. I just finished talking about how there were not any rules to this. I’m still sticking with that, and if you have been on twitter long enough, I’m sure you have a friend or two who get a little “hashtag happy” and create their own tags for everything. I’m not here to regulate, but I’d like to point out the fact that there are established communities forming around these tags…some you know about and some you don’t.
It was at
BlogPotomac during a talk from Shireen Mitchell (
@digitalsista) that I really began to give this some thought. Being in the District, I follow a healthy amount of people truly engaged in political discussion on twitter, and I thought I was decently clued in to the popular tags people used-
#tcot (top conservatives on twitter) and
#tlot (top liberals on twitter).
As someone who tends to throw in my own tags from time to time, I was foolish to think that these were the main ones. In her discussion, she listed a host of others that I had never even heard of and said something that really drove a message home. I use these tags to speak to groups, but I speak to everyone.
Through her use of these hashtags (and there are SEVERAL!), she is able to speak to and share information directly with groups all across the spectrum. She doesn’t simply put the message out there.
You may be thinking, well I do the same thing right now. But do you really?
Many of us simply tweet and put the information out there. There is a beauty to the way twitter works, the serendipity that can occur with the right person just happening to come across the information you shared, but how much stronger could our message be?
How much longer could the trail of the pass along or re-tweets be if really took more time to check out the communities of people we are trying to reach to determine the tags they use, the communities they interact with, the communities they would benefit from being connected to?
My final thought: you could talk “at” everyone and dangle the fishing line, but you’ll do much better in connecting with the right people if you spend some time looking into the communities building around these hashtag conversations and speak to them directly.
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