In the Papers
Top tech news from the papers
In The Papers 31 March
- Collison brothers raise funds for Stripe
- Xilinx acquires Belfast telecoms firm
- Facebook launches Deals in Ireland
- Google explores 'social search'
- Tablet sales to boost annual IT spend
ENN Click
Digital media blog from ENN Content Services
How to use hashtags on Twitter
Twitter can be overwhelming; it can be difficult to separate the interesting nuggets from the thousands of irrelevant tweets. Hashtags can be your best friend on Twitter, helping you to easily seek out what interests you and allow you to get your message out there to the relevant people.
What’s a hashtag?
If you use Twitter, you’ll notice tweets featuring the # symbol followed by a word, phrase or acronym, like #cloud, #jobfairy or #UCC. These hashtags are clickable and will bring you to a page that lists all the most recent tweets that also used these hashtags. Here are five ways you can make use of hashtags for your business.
Find relevant people to follow
Hashtags can be a great way to look for people who have similar interests to you. If someone is using a hashtag you’re interested in, chances are they may be a good person to start following. Look for hashtags relevant to your business or your target audience. Check out the people regularly tweeting using these hashtags – these could be thought leaders or key influencers in your area.
Make your company easy to find
Use hashtags to allow relevant people to easily find you. If you’re a prolific tweeter, hashtags can be a great way to categorise your tweets into different areas. If you’re a large business with several different divisions, segregate your tweets using hashtags relevant to your different business units or areas of interest. This will help interested people find your tweets and start following or engaging with you.
Join the conversation
Hashtags group tweets with a common theme together. By seeking out the hashtags that focus on your key areas of expertise you can join in with conversations that are already happening on Twitter, allowing you to showcase your knowledge.
Start the conversation
You can also use hashtags to start the conversation. This is a useful way to drive engagement with your company, by encouraging people to interact with you on various topics or asking for their opinions. If you do go down this route, make sure to promote your hashtag, add it to your social media bios, website, marketing collateral, etc. There’s no point in having a hashtag if no-one sees it.
Promote an event
If you’re organising an event, hashtags are a great way to spread the word before the event and also boost interaction with attendees during the event. In the run up to your event, add your hashtag to all promotional items. At the event itself, make your hashtag feature prominently on any pop-up stands or multi-media displays. This could encourage attendees to tweet about the event, upload photos and comment on speakers, etc. This activity could help to boost interest in your event on social media and, if it’s a regular event, could increase attendance at future events.
Things to bear in mind with hashtags
- If using a hashtag to promote an event, be vigilant to the possibility of someone hijacking your hashtag and using it to tweet inappropriate content. Here’s a short video showing you what to do if your event hashtag has been hacked.
- Keep your hashtags short and sweet. A long, convoluted hashtag can be difficult to read and could lead to misspellings when people are using the hashtag. This could mean your hashtag gets diluted and pertinent content ends up getting lost in Twitter.
- Now that you know what hashtags are and how to use them, resist the urge to go hashtag crazy. Not every tweet needs a hashtag. And if you are using hashtags in your tweet, limit it to one or two. The idea is you want to focus your content on one, or two, key topics – using too many hashtags in one tweet means you’re joining too many conversations, and it can also make the tweet difficult to read.
How are you using hashtags for your business? What clever uses of hashtags have you seen on Twitter?
Main image: Mike Cogh
How to use hashtags on Twitter is a post from: ENNclick - Expert copywriters in Dublin, Cork and Edinburgh.
How to use hashtags on Twitter is a post from: ENNclick - Expert copywriters in Dublin, Cork and Edinburgh.
Weekly Digest
Top IT stories of the week
Weekly Digest Issue No. 559
- Good week on the jobs front
- Collisons do it again
- All change at the top for Twitter
- eBay ramps up competition with Amazon
Web Pick
23 March 2011 by Ralph Averbuch
Mozilla Firefox 4 - It’s been a long time coming but now it’s here. At time of writing the latest generation of the Firefox browser, version 4, has been downloaded over 10 million times and 24 hours have yet to pass. Firefox was a breath of fresh air when it first arrived into a browser market in stagnation due to the near total dominance of Microsoft’s Internet Explorer. Slowly that began to change as Firefox proved it could be done better. At it’s peak Firefox had 24 percent of the browser market, doing relatively better in Europe than the USA. That’s now more like 21pc but the big loser has been IE. Today we have three strong contenders in the recently launched IE9 (Vista and Win7 only) Google’s Chrome and, of course, Firefox. That revival in browser competition is thanks in great part to the not-for-profit team behind Firefox and this latest version will continue that trend.
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Caped Koala Studios has built a virtual world for kids, combining education and social networking 