If a tree falls in a forest and no one is around to hear it, does it make a sound?
If a thought is shared with the Internet and no one reads it, was there any point in sharing it?
These deep philosophical issues have been pondered for generations (actually, only the first one has,if we’re being honest here) but there are tools available to help ensure your thoughts are heard and read by as big an audience as possible.
A hashtag, which looks like this – #iamahashtag – is effectively a tool for adding your tweets or posts on social media into a global pool of information, easily accessible by anyone looking to find it.
Hashtags are now offered by most social media platforms, including Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, Pinterest, YouTube and Google+. You can invent hashtags to suit your brand’s social media campaigns or you can use established hashtags as you see fit.
Inventing your own hashtags will let you easily monitor the response to your brand’s social media campaigns; piggybacking off more popular hashtags will allow you to maximize your audience quickly. For example, say you have 300 people following your business’s Twitter account.If you send out a tweet and don’t include a hashtag, you’ve got a pretty small audience reading your thoughts. That usually means minimal interaction, minimal exposure and minimal chance of new people discovering your content and becoming familiar with your brand.
Adding a hashtag, for example #grandfinal or #summer, adds your Tweet or posts into a global pool, significantly broadening your reach. It potentially means hundreds of thousands of people who search that hashtagcould see it – depending on which hashtag you choose.
For brands looking to broaden their reach by using hashtags, there are pitfalls to consider first. For example, people may be cynical about brands that try to piggyback off popular hashtags that are irrelevant to their products or services.
There are also many cautionary tales of brands that have invited social media meltdown by encouraging people to use ill-consideredhashtags that simply invited criticism of their products or services. In one of the better-known cases, Qantas launched a social media campaign inviting people to share tales of luxury inflight experiences, tagged with #QantasLuxury. Unfortunately, they did so shortly after the airline had experienced significant mechanical problems with its fleet, leaving thousands of people stranded. The #QantasLuxuryhashtag was quickly overtaken with angry customers sharing their ironic ‘luxury’ travel experiences, including being stranded overnight.
Don’t let that put you off using them – hashtags are an invaluable way to quickly find your target market on social media and to significantly increase the reach of your messages.
The lesson is to put some thought about what hashtags you assign to your branded messages and to know your brand and audience first.