Lots of businesses are holding hashtag parties on Twitter.
Some of you are probably wondering what a hashtag is.
Put simply, a hashtag is simply putting a # in front of a word or group of words when you are sending out a message (tweeting).
Examples of hashtags:
I could have tweeted:
“I am going to post a competition for #mybusiness today. What topics shall we discuss?”
If you clicked on the #mybusiness, your timeline would show all the tweets that include the term with the hash sign in front of it.
Think carefully about your hashtag term.
Even simpler than that, is to think of the “#mybusiness as a category, or tag that houses all the tweets that have the term in it.
To hold a hashtag party for “tips”, you might agree on the hashtag #biztips and hold a competition for anyone who gave you the best tips to win something nice. People wanting to join in would do a search on the #biztips and keep the search live in their Twitter application to check who has replied and what they have said. Anyone replying with the #biztips in a tweet could be entered as a term of the competition.
These can snowball very fast if you pick the right topic and have the right incentive.
In this picture, I did a search on the hashtag #aberdeen.
You can see that three different people had used the term #aberdeen. Anyone can click on the #aberdeen and it will show all the tweets that have the term in them. It is the same as opening a category on a website for more information.
McDonald’s fell foul of Twitter recently when they used promoted tweets to carry out a hashtag campaign.
They will have paid handsomely for their campaign, but did they choose their hashtag words correctly?
What do you think? Read more – the link opens in a separate window.
http://www.mediabistro.com/alltwitter/mcdonalds-twitter-ad-campaign-was-a-mcfail_b17961
