Don’t Make a Hash of Yourself: Tips for Using Hashtags Effectively
In a follow-up to last week’s post on The Rise of the Hashtag, here are some tips and pointers for using them to promote your own work.
First and foremost, possibly the most important tip regarding hashtags: Use them sparingly. You definitely don’t want to catch yourself posting this kind of thing:
#I need a #snack! Maybe #potato #chips or #Doritos or
even something #healthy like an #apple or #V8 or
#California #raisins.
… which is not only visually unattractive, but comes off as looking desperate for attention. Ultimately, the more hashtags you use, the less likely anyone is to click on them. In fact, as early as 2010 there were reports that Google evaluates tweets containing hash tags as “lower in quality” — possibly because of postings like the one above.
So: The best approach is to limit yourself to one or two hashtags per posting, and try not to use them in every single posting.
Figure 8: Vadim Lavrusik, Facebook’s Journalism Program Manager, demonstrates what not to do.
Next, beware the pitfalls of ambiguity. Sometimes the lack of spacing between words in a longer hashtag can cause confusion.
When Margaret Thatcher passed away earlier this year, the hashtag #nowthatchersdead (for “Now Thatcher’s dead”) quickly surfaced in Twitter’s trending topics box. Unfortunately, some users misread the hashtag as “Now that Cher’s dead,” leading to a series of confused tweets expressing shock and dismay over the loss of Sonny’s better half. (Happily, as of this writing Cher is still with us.)
Figure 9: A few of the confused tweets from those who misunderstood the #nowthatchersdead hashtag.
The lesson here is that it’s always a good idea to double-check your hashtags for unintentional double-entendres. (Fans of Arrested Development fans might recognize this as the same problem Tobias Fünke tends to have with business cards and license plates. If he weren’t fictional, I’d suspect him of being the originator of #nowthatchersdead.)
Hatching Your Own Promotional Hashtags
When you’re getting ready to launch a promotional hashtag of your own, remember to keep it short—conserving characters will help more people fit it into their tweets. The harder it is to shoehorn a hashtag into the 140-character limit, the less likely users are to adopt it. (This may be slightly less of a concern on Facebook or Google+, #buttheresstillapointwhereahashtagbecomestoounwieldytobeviable.)
Next, focus on making it fun and memorable—something that will jump out at users and make then want to click if they see it in the Trending Topics box. The #DadJokes and #soirritating campaigns were successful in part because they have the right playful vibe.
In some cases you might want to avoid reinventing the wheel—check to see if there’s an existing hashtag in use that already does what you want it to do. If there is, it may be easier to hop on board an existing conversation than to try to build one from scratch.
The downside to this is that if you use an existing hashtag, other users might be using it in ways you aren’t expecting.
Entenmann’s bakery fell into this trap in 2011 when it decided to use the hashtag #notguilty in a playful promotional way—apparently not realizing that Twitter users were already using that hashtag to express outrage over the Casey Anthony “not guilty” murder verdict.
Figure 10: The tweet that got Entenmann’s in trouble.
After a fair amount of criticism, Entenmann’s was forced to apologize for the perceived insensitivity.
The moral: Before you deploy a hashtag for marketing purposes, always do a search to find out who else might be already using it—and how.
Dave Awl is the author of Facebook Me! from Peachpit Press. He currently teaches social media marketing classes, in addition to helping organizations large and small successfully develop and maintain their social media presences. For more info, visit his website at Awlpoint.com and Like the official Awlpoint page at Facebook.com/Awlpoint.
Excellent article, Dave!
More of a repetition of the bottom quarter or so of the original article.