Jan 06

Hashtag Do’s and Don’ts: What Works and What Doesn’t on Twitter

Hashtags, Social Media, Twitter No Comments »

hashtags101One aspect of planning a Twitter party or chat that people often seem to need help with is selecting a hashtag.

At first glance, it might seem to be one of the easier pieces of the Twitter chat puzzle: it’s usually no more than several characters in length — how tricky can it be, right? But if you want to get the most out of your hashtag during your next Twitter party or chat, here are a few things you might want to consider:

Length: It may seem like a ‘no-brainer’ but it’s true: the shorter the hashtag the better. Since you only have 140 characters to work with in a tweet, you need all of the real estate you can get. That doesn’t necessarily mean make it so short that it goes unnoticed. It’s one thing to tweet an abbreviation everyone recognizes (like #TGIF or #FF), but a hashtag that is abbreviated that stands for something very few people would know (like #ACTP for Acme Company Twitter Promotion) won’t garner many clicks. For brevity’s sake, you most likely will only want to use one hashtag as the Twitter party’s hashtag rather than cluttering up the event with two. However, if your company typically uses another hashtag in tweets, you might want to use both when promoting the Twitter chat.

Appeal: Hashtags are not case sensitive. If you type in #TGIF or #tgif in Twitter search you will get the same results. Mixing up lower and upper case letters can help with readability. Which hashtag is easier to read: #acmeconewyear or #AcmeCoNewYear? If you want your hashtag’s message as clear as possible, consider using both upper and lower cases to make each word stand out.

Best Practices: There are some things you cannot do with a hashtag. Hashtags cannot include spaces or punctuation — the minute you add either one, the hashtag ends (for example, if you type ‘#Acme Co’ or ‘#Acme-Co’, the hashtag would only be considered ‘#Acme’). You can start your hashtag with a number, as long as you include letters (it cannot be all numbers). Which means #2015 will not be searchable, but #2015Acme will). Also, if you accidentally put a number or letter immediately before your hashtag (like promo#AcmeCo), your hashtag (#AcmeCo) will not be searchable either (source: Twitter Help Center). Twitter also discourages hashtag ‘stuffing,’ or including as many hashtags as possible in a tweet with the hopes of getting noticed. You just might get noticed by Twitter — as a spammer.

Avoid Epic Fails: Occasionally, selecting the wrong hashtag has a way of backfiring on a promotion. Consider the infamous hashtag to promote singer Susan Boyle’s album: #SusanAlbumParty. The hashtag ended up trending, but mainly because tweets took the non-case sensitive tag, made a few new capitals and gave the tag a not-so-nice meaning (#SusAnalBumParty). Take a look at your hashtag from all angles and make sure it is incapable of being altered to create an unintended meaning.

For more information on planning a Twitter party or Twitter chat, get our eBook!

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Aug 19

Twitter Hashtag Tracking Definitions: What’s It All About?

Hashtags, Twitter, Twitter Party tips No Comments »

Often when we help plan and host a Twitter Party or Twitter Chat, our clients request that we provide them with an in-depth report of how their hashtag performed during the event. And, more often than not, once the report is sent, we receive questions about what all of the statistics mean and what the differences are between them.

Here’s a quick synopsis of common terms used when tracking a hashtag, what those terms mean and how they were achieved:

REACH Simply put, this term reveals the maximum number of Twitter users your hashtag has reached. Or, the maximum number of users who might have seen your hashtag at least once. For example, if I have 100 followers and I tweet using a specific hashtag once, my reach is 100. If one of those users retweets that tweet just once, and  they too have 100 followers, that tag’s reach is now 200. If I tweet again using that same hashtag, I’m still ‘reaching’ the same users, so my reach stays at 200.

EXPOSURE This term measures the number of impression the hashtag had. This is different from reach in that the data on impressions shows how many times that hashtag showed up in someone’s time line. To expand upon our example above, I tweeted twice to my 100 followers, one of those followers tweeted once; our total reach is 200, but our impressions is 300. That hasthag appeared in a timeline 300 times.

ACTIVITY This gives you the number of individual tweets that were sent using that hashtag. In using the examples above, I tweeted using the hashtag twice; one of my followers once. Those three tweets reached 200 users and had a frequency of 300. But since it only took three tweets to do all that, our activity is just that: three tweets.

CONTRIBUTORS These are the total number of users — regardless of how many tweets they sent — who sent a tweet containing that hashtag. In our hypothetical example, I tweeted using the hashtag twice, and one of my followers retweeted it once. Though three tweets used the tag, only two users sent them. Thus, our statistic for contributors is two users.

The above terms will help you to best judge how many times your hashtag bounced around the Twittersphere. However, whether or not people saw — and better yet absorbed — your message usually can only be judged by the results of your calls to action sent during the party (such as added followers, newsletter sign ups, coupons used, new Facebook fans, etc.).

For more information on tracking hashtags and what service providers to use-as well as how to plan a Twitter Party or Chat-please check out our eBook now available for purchase at http://bit.ly/tweepartiesbook!

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