How TWITTER. and HASHTAGS CAN HELP YOUR PR AND MARKETING # # #

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1 How TWITTER and HASHTAGS CAN HELP YOUR PR AND MARKETING # # #

2 Finding the right customers at the right time and being able to talk directly with them is one of the ultimate aspirations for marketers. It s now possible by using hashtags words and phrases that highlight conversations happening on a specific topic on the social web. In fact, one of the most effective ways companies and consumers can find each other on social media is through hashtags. Most blogs and websites use hashtags as part of their search optimization efforts. Twitter incorporated hashtags into its service and several of the top social sites followed suit. Now the social web allows brands and consumers to put each other on speed dial according to need and relevancy. Hashtags allow you to quickly connect to thousands of targeted online conversations on a given topic at the click of a mouse. By following these conversations, your brand can get to potential customers and engage them instantly. How can you make hashtags work for your social marketing efforts? It starts with an understanding of how hashtags are used, and learning how to correctly create and track them. 2

3 WHAT HASHTAGS ARE # Hashtags are a way of categorizing any update or conversation that you might be engaging in online, whether on a blog, Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest, or Instagram (or any of the hundreds of other social media sites employing them today). Hashtags are words or phrases with relevance to a specific topic (think #WorldCup2014), which allow people who are interested in that topic to see all discussions surrounding that topic at a glance. Users from anywhere in the world can participate in a larger conversation, and can contribute if they include that hashtag in their messages. WHY HASHTAGS ARE IMPORTANT Hashtags are important because they tell you what people care about in the form of trending information on a variety of events and topics. It s like having a news crawler that shows you only the news you want to see in real-time, as the stories evolve. You can monitor hashtags and see conversations you re interested in as they happen. When you announce a new product or service, unless you ve conducted extensive market research, you ve only been able to make educated guesses as to what potential customers want and those wants may change over time. That s why it s important for marketers to listen to customers in real-time. You can react quickly and attend to their needs, thus taking any bumps out of their road to purchase. If you actively participate in customer conversations, then you can even A/B test your approach along the way, refining your message as you gather their feedback. Hashtags are also your shortcut to where pertinent conversations are happening online. You can track a hashtag or group of hashtags specific to your vertical market and get a sense of the priorities and desires of your audience. You can track conversations over time and see the verbatim comments and sentiment about a topic so you can gauge your messaging as your company grows. SPECIFIC BENEFITS OF USING HASHTAGS There are specific strategic advantages to working with hashtags: Track relevant conversations You can use a listening tool to follow one or more hashtags in your vertical market to get a sense of what that vertical s advocates are interested in and curious about. This can help you find a place to ease into the conversation, identify the most influential participants in the conversation, or understand sentiment and pain points of participants. Find out how far discussions have traveled While you might be focusing your marketing efforts on a particular geographic location or demographic segment, you might be surprised at who actually uses your hashtag and participates in conversations pertaining to it. By using listening tools you can see how far geographically your hashtag has traveled and identify the demographics of the participants. See how long your message stays active Reach and frequency of message are important, but so is longevity, especially on the social web. By monitoring hashtags, you can see how long people participate in conversations in your vertical, and whether that means simply retweeting your original message or developing conversations that last over a period of time. Catch negative sentiment and contact those people directly There will always be times when you need to deliver information that will be divisive. By using and tracking your hashtag, you ll be able to see negative reaction, questions, or debate over your message, and be able to engage participants in conversation with the goal of changing their opinion, or at least lessening the negative impact. This can be a very useful tool. Amplify positive sentiment by retweeting and engaging positive contributors The other side of the conversational coin is that you can amplify positive conversations surrounding your message, and engage proponents in conversation. By retweeting positive comments, you can help these messages travel faster and encourage fans to similarly contribute. 3

4 HASHTAG BEST PRACTICES Nomenclature is important to every aspect of marketing. You wouldn t buy a product with a terrible name, or one that led you to believe the product itself was substandard. This is no different with hashtags. You want to make sure that your campaign hashtag is as specific to your campaign as possible. Tagging a conversation with a broad topic like #marketing won t help you tap into the audience you want. You ll also want to make sure that your hashtag is unique to your topic. You can always append your conversation with a secondary hashtag in a more general topic at the beginning to draw potential participants in those broader conversations to your specific topic. It s important when deciding on a hashtag to be clear on your goals. This will temper the tone of your hashtag selection. Do you want to generate buzz? Are you looking to piggyback on a topic or an event the public is already interested in, like the Academy Awards or the Super Bowl? This will all have a bearing on what you name your hashtag, or whether you append a word to a commonly used hashtag. If your goals are to launch a product or a campaign, you might consider how you can leverage your campaign tagline in a short but effective way. It s important to keep your hashtags short so you leave as many characters as possible for the actual conversation, or for participants in your conversation to also include links. Resist the urge to add too much information or brand awareness into your hashtags. If you re marketing tennis balls, don t make your hashtag #OurTennisBallsPerfomBetter because there is a huge risk it not only won t be spelled correctly, but that no one will remember it. Think about the best brand tag lines you ve ever read. The best ones are short and evocative. There is always an opportunity to make your tags briefer and more memorable. Be aware that due to the mobile adoption of these services, many people using hashtags may spell them incorrectly due to input error or inability to see them correctly on a small screen. Try to plan for this by making your hashtags easier to spell (read: don t have too many repeating letters in a row, or words above a grade 6 reading level). Spelling errors will still happen, though, so plan for the most common ones and make sure you have a complete list for tracking those hashtags as well so you can see the whole picture. An important final check of your hashtag should be to make sure that there are no inadvertent other words created when you butt words up against one another. Children s Wear = Children Swear, for instance. An unfortunate confluence such as this might help your hashtag go viral, but not in the way you were hoping. 4

5 HOW TO DEFINE HASHTAG SUCCESS Many variables determine how your hashtag will be spread. If you are announcing something for the first time, or from a new company, your lift on your message will be significantly less than that for a larger company or account with a larger following. It s simply a matter of familiarity and numbers. The higher your follower account, the greater the number of receptive fans will participate in your conversation. For these types of announcements, consider prepping business allies or influencers ahead of time to help your hashtag gain traction. The right tweet from the right person could make all the difference in how well your hashtag gets spread. However, if you can position your announcement as a response to a news item or pop cultural topic, you can gain pickup for your conversations as a result, because often people are looking for more perspectives. Be aware that your response will not garner the same amount of pickup as the original story, likely because of the nature of the news cycle and that eventually stories reach an end of traction. Consider the timing of your message and the activity in the vertical market at the time. It might seem smart to tweet a product launch during CES or SXSW, but you will have a problem cutting through the noise and be heard among the hundreds of thousands of announcements during the same timeframe. Be very honest about just how niche your announcement might be. Your company is likely not Oprah. You need to think about what kind of reach seems reasonable and base your success on those expectations. 5

6 MONITORING HASHTAGS There are several free tools you can use to monitor hashtags and the conversations they are attached to. Twitter s own search tool or Twilert are good places to start for a general overview and the ability to flip through specific conversations to judge tone. When you monitor, here is what you look for: How many conversations used the hashtag that weren t from your own accounts? This number will give you a sense of the reach and frequency of your message. What was the tone of the conversations? Was the sentiment positive? What perspectives, complaints, pain points, or other unexpected messages were added? What insight can you glean from this feedback? Did any of your competitors join the conversation? This is an important point, as some brands do actively talk to their competition on social media. If this happened, what were the messages or the brandpositioned responses? How can you knit that into your next message, or plan a response to their conversation? Where were the general geographic locations of the conversations? This will help you gain insights into the demographics of conversational participants. Sometimes, you ll find that your conversation will get two bumps: one when it hits European time zones and another when it hits US time zones (or a bump for each North American coast.) Often, these conversations will have a different tone, and that is valuable to help you regionalize your messages going forward. ABOUT MARKETWIRED Marketwired is a communications leader offering best-in-class news distribution and reporting as well as state-of-the-art social media monitoring and analytics. We open up new opportunities for our clients helping them tune into the conversations that count, find insights that matter, and influence the right people. Marketwired Resonate, an integrated platform for content creation, media targeting, distribution and analysis, lets you easily assign a hashtag to a news release or series of releases, allowing you to see beyond traditional distribution metrics to engagement metrics. Data-rich dashboard reports illustrate the social footprint of your press release and its associated hashtag with metrics that include top influencers, top-related hashtags, sentiment, demographics and more. For a deeper dive, consider tracking the path of your hashtag with Heartbeat, today s leading social monitoring and analytics solution powered by Sysomos. You can get to the root of relevant conversations or branch out from existing discussions and topics to discover new ones, and better understand the many factors that influence them. You can even send messages, track conversations, manage approvals, follow/unfollow, and re-tweet without leaving the interface. Hashtags are a shortcut to find great conversations on social media, and a great way for you to identify fans and potential customers. They give you the ability to ask people what they think about your company and your products and get opinions in real time that can help you inform future planning. It s not always easy to figure out exactly what your hashtag should be, though. You should put in careful thought and consideration before you set it out into the wild. If you follow the steps to creating a hashtag correctly, you can plan for successful conversations that can help extend your brand s online reach and engagement. CONNECT WITH US: WEBSITE marketwired.com US BLOG blog.marketwired.com CANADA UK +44 (0)