The Importance of a Hashtag
Hopefully by now your startup or business has created a Twitter to engage with possible investors or customers. Beyond sharing your company’s latest developments and industry news, are you actively pursuing a way to uniquely connect with your target audience? Proposing questions and replying to other users’ tweets will push you in the right direction in terms of engagement, but to create a lasting impression on your users, a hashtag can be your best friend.
Awareness
One of the most important aspects of creating a hashtag is using it to spread the awareness of your product, business, or campaign. The hashtag was invented in order to make discovering a certain topic or group easier. To steer clear of any confusion, avoid using acronyms unless they are relevant in your industry. Your hashtag should show off the best parts of your company, and if you’ve already created a great tagline, that may be your best starting point. A great hashtag will create a meeting place for users, allowing them to simply search for it and know there will relevant content and conversations waiting for them to discover.
An example of a hashtag that raises awareness is #Doctors20. Although the proper name for the event is Doctors 2.0 & You, it streamlines the event’s name and makes it easily discoverable to users.
Length
Because Twitter has a limited character count, the length of your hashtag is very important. This doesn’t mean they have to be short, but you must remember that users will also want to have their message heard when using the hashtag. Creating one over 20 characters will deter others from ever using it, but also using only single words can get your content buried under other irrelevant topics.
Content
In order to ensure your hashtag stays relevant, you’ll want to create content specifically for it. Without a conversation or information to keep your hashtag going, it’ll fizzle off as fast as it was started. A great way to have your hashtag included in other relevant conversations is to use it alongside other popular hashtags. For example, if you are trying to promote a medical device, use #MedicalDevice when tweeting yours. This will allow any user searching for that topic to also come across yours at the same time. Although you may want to include multiple hashtags you find relevant to your topic, it’s been studied that when using more than three at a time can deter users from viewing your content.
Creating a relevant hashtag for your product or business can move it forward tenfold, or stop you dead in your tracks. So before sending your topic off into the internet on its own, research to make sure there aren’t any conversations already happening with the hashtag you wouldn’t like to be included in.