Using Twitter Hashtags for Your Organization

When you signed up for Twitter, it’s likely that you quickly realized that the Twittersphere has its own language.  There are followers and retweets and what are those things with the # sign?  Those are hashtags.

Hashtags are predefined markers that you add to your tweets.  They let people easily follow a certain subject by searching for that hashtag.  Using a hashtag is like participating in a public chat room.

The most common ways to use hashtags are for events or topics.  For instance, a Twitter conference will create a hashtag for itself, say #140tc, and everyone tweeting about that conference will use that tag in their tweets.  That way people can interact as to what’s going on.

When used for a topic, hashtags are less of a conversation and more of a way to categorize information.  For instance, if you are part of a travel company, you could use the hashtag #travel in a lot of your tweets.  You could also participate in memes like #traveltuesday.  That way, someone looking for travel information can simply search that hashtag.

Putting Hashtags to Work for You

So how should you use hashtags?  It depends.

• Events: Do you attend a lot of industry events?  If so, you should live-tweet those events to give people who can’t attend a window to what’s happening, and to position yourself as an industry leader in-the-know.
• Topics: There is a hashtag for almost anything.  Think about keywords for your industry (CRM, food, nonprofit, leadership) and use this site to see if a hashtag already exists.  If it does, start adding it to your tweets and save a search for it so that you can see what other people are saying.  Retweet some of the folks that are talking about your topic and get a conversation going.
• Mix it up!  Don’t always use the same hashtag in your tweets.  Find a few different ones that make sense and intersperse them.  Also, don’t make your posts long and hard to RT by adding too many hashtags.  Also, every post doesn’t have to be tagged.

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