Social Media Gibraltar – Twitter Hashtags
Social Media Gibraltar – Getting the most out of Twitter Hashtags
What are Twitter Hashtags?
You’ve started using Social Media in Gibraltar, opened a Twitter account and soon came across a tweet starting with a # ; the hash symbol. While it seems confusing at the beginning, once you understand the purpose and how to use it, you can actually benefit from it quite a lot, especially in your social media marketing efforts in a small place like Gibraltar.
Hashtag’s main purpose is to categorise tweets, it’s similar to a title basically. Hashtags are also exclamatory and catchy, hence they’ve been used for various purposes; from advertising and marketing to expressing political views or protests.
Hashtag is also a simple tool to search what you are looking for. For example, if you search for #Gibraltar on Twitter, you will see the tweets that mention Gibraltar. That’s why one should use tags if you want to be found for your services or products. Regardless where the hashtag appears in your tweet, it will still be displayed on the search results as long as you dont use spaces between words in your tag.
Eg. The correct way of using it is #theartist instead of #the artist. Should you add a space as in the example, it actually becomes a tag of “the”.
One can then use the improved search options and filter millions of tweets by location, language etc. As you can see, this little prefix allows you to create communities of a common interest and makes it easier to find related services, products or people.
Once a hashtag becomes popular and used in great numbers in a day, it will show up in trending topics section on your Twitter. You can actually use “trending topic” as a hashtag and see what people are mentioning about that day’s listed topics. Just search for #trendingtopic, #trending or simply #tt.
What else can you do with Twitter Hashtags?
As the use of hashtags are growing each day, hashtags are the easiest way to mass broadcast when promoting an event, your brand or services. Instead of a simple tweet of your product or service which will be read only by your twitter followers, you can add hashtag to your tweets such as #gibraltar #webdesign #dedicatedservers and reach out to more people.
Using hashtags is a great way to unite your consumers, your clients or your fans, which will be shared amongst all of them and form a distinguished way to represent your company.
When creating a new hashtag, instead of #yourcompanyname, give your hashtag a context and make it catchy and explain what it means in one of your tweets to make it clear. #webdesigngibraltrar
Eg. Red Bull’s tagline has been a hashtag on Twitter as #givesyouwings instead of #redbulltheenergydrink and the consumers use this tag when discussing the brand.
Keep in mind that the longer your tag gets, the risk of misspelling (or boredom) increases.
Eg. You can use #bizwo instead of #businesswomen or #webdizgib instead of #webdesigngibraltar
Make sure it’s unique as it can lead to misunderstanding.
Finally, you will only have few characters so make them count for something and don’t confuse other twitter members. Twitter’s limit is 140 characters, including your hashtag.
A few unwritten rules which will make you lose followers are;
- Do not overuse hashtags as it is considered spamming.
- Noone wants to see a tweet formed of hashtags only. (#they #really #dont #want #it) Keep it to 3 hashtags tops.
- Make sure your hashtags are related to your tweet and not just because they are on trending topics page.
- Do not use hashtags in every tweet, people might think you misuse it.
