Twitter, with its incredible number of users and huge online reach, is an exciting way to market your business on the Internet and establish a fan following. If you effectively play by the rules of the Twitter game, you’d need no extra publicizing and print advertisements at all – for no cost, Twitter promises you a wonderful way to increase your revenue, promote your business, book, blog, or whatever product you’re promoting, and stay in the limelight for a considerable period of time.
Hashtags on Twitter are wonderful tools to categorize your posts (and the responses you get) and make them readily available for a user who wishes to know more about the topic in vogue. Hashtags are great ways to make sure your topic trends and to increase the organic traffic to the sites you own. According to Montreal’s social media professionals, hashtags must be used with caution – they can make and equally break your publicity campaign.
Keep the Hashtags short and sweet for better Social Media Marketing
No one would remember a complex hashtag that contains jargon (or worse unpronounceable gobbledygook). Instead of using a complicated hashtag, see how simple you can make it for your followers to talk about it too. For example, Anybody Can Dance could be shortened to #ABCD and McDonalds could be shortened to #McD, but a hashtag like #MCRealCorp0456 will be soon forgotten and lie obscure.
It is a bad idea to use #hashtags #in #every #word #in #your #Tweets, for obvious reasons. Make sure you use hashtags selectively and effectively to propel your sales in the right direction.
Don’t resort to piggyback rides
When Entenmann’s decided to use #notguilty as a hashtag to drive attention to their new meal time venture, they ‘didn’t know’ that the hashtag was already in use for the Casey Anthony murder trial judgment people speculated on Twitter and other social media forums. Thus, most of Montreal’s social media companies caution against using hashtags without proper research.
Please understand that riding on another brand’s bonhomie to drive traffic to your own website is cheating, and Twitter vehemently opposes this strategy: in fact, you can get your account suspended if such activity is detected or reported.
Use the Hashtags you had created on other social portals
If you run more than one social media account and have a separate blogging page as well, use the hashtags there without changing them. The more your target audience views your hashtags being repeatedly used, the more they tend to memorize them and use them themselves when talking about your company or business. Keeping hashtags constant on every forum to which you post links is a great social media marketing strategy.
It is important to realize that hashtags, like many other areas of social media, can carry negative (and often unforeseen) consequences too. For example, #McDstories was created so users could blog about positive experiences they’ve had with their food retail chain. However, a lot of users blogged about their negative experience with the #McDstories hashtag too.
Choose your hashtags carefully and they may just drive more business to you in the long run.
