Professional Documents
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Copyright
This guide is copyright of David Lynch, who asserts
his legal and moral right to the intellectual property
within. You do NOT have the right to reprint,
republish or resell this report.
It is for PERSONAL USE ONLY.
Legal action WILL be taken if this report is found to
be illegally shared.
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Table of Contents
What is a Hashtag and Why Should You Care?......................................................................................4
Intermission...........................................................................................................................................9
Guidelines & Etiquette........................................................................................................................10
Dorothy, Were Not In Twitter Anymore!........................................................................................13
Intermission.........................................................................................................................................25
Marketing Concepts............................................................................................................................26
Intermission.........................................................................................................................................34
Hashtag Tools......................................................................................................................................35
Intermission.........................................................................................................................................42
WordPress, Blogs & Hashtags..............................................................................................................43
Intermission.........................................................................................................................................47
How To #Fail........................................................................................................................................48
Conclusion...........................................................................................................................................52
#Writers...............................................................................................................................................54
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curate content
research content
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Whats interesting is that when you look at the next set of stats from the
same source, you can see that internet users attitudes to hashtags are
very positive. 41% of users will click on a hashtag to discover new
content. Thats a lot of extra exposure for the work involved in adding
the # symbol to a word!
Okay, just to break up the report and give you some fun related to the
topic, I am adding an intermission between each major topic. Just click
the video images to play them. Each is only a couple of minutes long and
relates to hashtags. If you lack a sense of humour, youre welcome to
completely skip them and keep reading.
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Intermission
If Hashtags were a Language
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Just a note: In case I have just confused you - it's okay to join or create a
conversation with #DellPC if you are conversing about Dell PCs, but not to
create it to market your own products. I am using DellPC here only as an
immediately recognizable brand to make my point about branded names
in hashtags.
You will be looking for #yourbooknamehere or #yourwebsitenamehere
Make Them Short
No one will remember #theinternetmarketingsupremacyPLRpackage and
if they do, they won't want to type something that long and it will also
break up the sentence so much that it will just be an annoyance. It also
needs to be easily understood (no #therapist or #susanalbumparty
mistakes here!)
Short doesnt mean acronyms dont use them!
Only One Careful Owner?
Yep, as I said, you can use pre-existing hashtags. By posting a comment
about a run you had and adding #running at the end of the post, you are
sharing content related to running. But you should go one better and
share good content rather than just comments. It doesn't matter if it's
your own content or others'. Curating content in this manner positions
you as an expert when you share good stuff.
The hashtag at the end of the sentence is merely giving a heads up to
other social media users that you have something to add to the
discussion.
Remember Noah's Ark
If Noah had tried packing on more than two animals at a time, he would
have sank the boat. Don't sink your own ship with an over abundance of
hashtaggery. Two hashtags in any post is enough, and dont use hashtags
in every post. Also, make the hashtags relevant, or you will come across
as a spammer.
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NOTE: When you create your own hashtag to market a product or service,
one way to get it known is to use it as your second hashtag. For example,
if I wanted this report to become widely known, I would share the sales
page with a hashtag that already exists - like this: #socialmedia
#MarketingNinja or #SEO #MarketingNinja or #marketing
#MarketingNinja
This gives my product name exposure to others who are discussing social
media, SEO, or marketing.
Oh, and, more on this later when we explore #Fails!
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If you plan to do the same, you could do well to filter your daily chats and
making each subject searchable by making Technology Tuesday become
#TechnologyTuesday. Add a second hashtag for the niche you are in
and bring more exposure to your Facebook group through content
discovery via the second hashtag!
In a statement from Facebooks Justin Osofsky, Facebooks research has
led them to believe that between 88 and 100 million Americans log on at
prime TV hours. A Nielson survey found that 29% of respondents post on
Facebook about TV shows. It seems that Facebook wants to help people
share their favorite TV programs while they are online and watching TV at
the same time, and hashtags are a means to do this.
BTW, in case you need a big red arrow and klaxons to point out a good
niche to you, re-read that last paragraph. 29% of 100 Mill = 29,000,000
people online during prime TV, gossiping about what they are watching.
41% of those are using hashtags to discover stuff. Thats 11,890,000
people who could discover your TV show related niche via your related
hashtag!
Searching for hashtag conversations and posts on Facebook will also bring
to light posts shared from external apps that post to Facebook, such as
Instagram. As such, sharing hashtags on Facebook creates a larger
conversational reach that extends outside of your personal friendships
and into the open arena. One of the most exciting aspects of this is a
greater chance to get a viral post.
If you have noticed lately how some marketers are targeting Teespring
campaigns to the Facebook audience you might be interested in doing a
search for #teespring and seeing how they use hashtags.
Lets take a look at two of the people who show up. If you are one of
them, or know them, I dont mean anything personal in this analysis.
Consider it free advice!
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In this image, we can see that April has tagged TeeSpring and also added
just two more tags: #ItsAnAprilThing (excellent branding!) and
#YouWouldntGetIt (to help extend her reach). This is an example of
hashtagging done correctly.
In this example, we can see that the poster has added #teespring but
then follows up at the end of the post with five random hashtags. Do you
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think anyone will read them all? At best they will skim over them looking
for something that interests them and come away blank. I doubt anyone
looks up #blue, #sweatshirt or #freehoodie, or are even tempted to click
on them to discover more about them. Adding a hashtag #freehoodie is
just blindly hoping that it will help the post get found instead of properly
optimizing keywords. More on that later.
Lastly, a quick tip for you page or group owners and other marketers on
Facebook, if you are stuck for a good viral image to share, try searching
for #funny or #viral. The benefit is, this stuff is proven content that
others have indicated an interest in. You can get some pretty good stuff
worth sharing after a quick scan down the results!
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Thats after two days for a term that I thought up to use as a hashtag to
draw attention to this report. Granted, nobody knew about this at the
time, so nobody would have been searching for #MarketingNinja. BUT, if
you were to brand your product or service in a way that you could
communicate to the public so they knew what to search for, this would be
great news for you!
Think along the lines that Coke should have, to fill up some spots at the
top of the #Coke search:
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Granted, also, that the results will be biased towards my own cookie
monster in my laptop. But if I were branding a product or service and did
my homework properly to find out who my audience is, a similar result
should show for anyone else who might have been following my product
or services hashtag.
Again, major benefits of hashtags on Google Plus include curation,
content research and connection. Just go to
https://plus.google.com/explore and you can explore your chosen
keyword.
To the right of this option you can see that Google is monitoring hashtag
trends. Although you can also see hashtag trends on Twitter, there is a
subtle difference. Each social platform is likely to judge your interests by
previous engagement, so what trends may interest you are likely to
change. However, since there are very few ways of seeing cross-site
hashtags, its really of little importance.
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This list is likely to change on the refresh of your browser, so any notes
you need to take for research should be done so before you move on. In
this case, I investigated #CoffeeThursday. I am interested in coffee and I
wanted to see if there was a group I might enjoy.
The result was a great range of information, graphics and groups of
people who posted a lot about coffee. Thats great, and I am sure you can
see the significance there. But lets look at something else that pops up
when you start exploring the hashtag for an interest that people have.
On the coffee page, the trends box now changes to this:
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Okay, so if you have spent any amount of time in marketing and keyword
research in particular, you should immediately recognize the value of the
list above OF LSI KEYWORDS.
If you are unfamiliar with the term, I recommend the following site to
learn from: https://clevergizmos.com/how-to-make-seo-content
I feel that keyword research is often skewed by the reasons people
perform it. How many people search for something just to see what the
results show in terms of competition for their own blog/business or site?
The figures are also historical. Realistically, isnt live information like this,
based on user participation, a much better indicator of keyword
importance? Just my two cents.
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Note that when I hover my mouse over the top right of a post in Google
Plus I get a dropdown of the three most relevant hashtag categories for
that post. Google adds these hashtags automatically for users, based on
the content of their post (if theres enough content to analyze).
This means Google is helping you out by showing your post to people
doing searches for relevant content thats a major plus! Thing is, it only
works for recently used and shared material (in general we can never
be 100% certain about the Big Gs algorithm).
Click on any of the hashtags in that dropdown and the post will flip over
and show a page with all related content. This is another research idea
that works like something similar to a gangbusters simile thats not so
#clichd.
If SEO interests you at all, I recommend reading this post:
http://www.plusyourbusiness.com/hashing-google-plus-hashtagsuncover-hidden-powers. Pay close attention to the section entitled One
#Picture Is Worth 1000 Hashtags for some very eye opening stuff!
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Final note for this chapter: Dont always be too serious about your
marketing. I know they say you should leave humour out of marketing.
I disagree. Even if I agreed, hashtag marketing is one area the normal
rules dont apply. People who use and are familiar with hashtags
understand the clichs and will often poke fun with some funny hashtags
of their own. Doing this can itself drive interest to your other tags when
done properly and help posts gain a limited virality.
E.g. #VegRecipe #NomNomNomNom
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Intermission
#Hashtag with Jimmy Fallon and Justin Timberlake
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Marketing Concepts
This gives my product name exposure to others who are discussing social
media, SEO, or marketing.
Competitions
Everyone loves a competition and there are any number of Facebook and
Pinterest competitions out there that prove how effective they are as
social media marketing tools. The hashtag can be used very effectively
this way.
Create a Buzz around your product
When creating contests, giveaways etc, you can track discussion around
them by following the event. Think #NaNoWriMo. Participants in the
yearly writing competition
These are methods that beg for a distinctive and unique hashtag.
You can create a competition to engage potential customers and grow
your social network following at the same time. This is a massive benefit
of the hashtag competition. It literally the killing two birds with one stone
clich - two blue tweeting birds! Stick to Twitter for this one - Google+
can be finicky about what they perceive as spam (I got suspended for a
few days for no reason I could figure out - then again, they banned my
Adwords account too, but that's another story). Facebook have very strict
contest rules, so avoid it there too.
Contests can be as simple as asking for a share:
Retweet this #FashionDesigner #contest for a chance to win a $50
Amazon gift card
Speaking of creating a buzz.. whats one of the biggest events in the US?
Thats right the Super Bowl.
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Prior to the Superbowl, Verizon and the NFL tracked fan engagement
during a series of questions asked via tweets. The team who got the most
mentions got to light up the Empire State Building.
Esurance ran an ad straight after the game and promoted their own
hashtag for a discount offer. It was an expensive ad to pay for, but the
hashtag got many thousands of mentions in the next few minutes and
added over 40,000 new followers.
Recognize another hashtag from your Super Bowl Sunday ad break?
Hashtags are being cleverly used in marketing. If you pay attention and
use a little imagination you will be able to spot ways to use them for
yourself.
Networking
You may already have heard of Follow Friday where people give a shout
out to others whose tweets they enjoyed. It's a simple way followers get
attention from others and increase their own followers.
The hashtag for this is #FollowFriday or #FF (some ideas can be branded
with more than one hashtag).
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Keep an eye out for local and event hashtags you can use these to
monitor who is taking part in the discussion and from there you can find
local influencers to connect with.
The press release is always a powerful method of marketing and hashtags
will allow you to connect with journalists. Journalists have long been using
hashtags to both find content to report on and to get their work found.
Some common hashtags used for reaching journalists are:
#HARO
#journorequest (mainly UK)
#news
Another great hashtag to monitor is #journalistrequest where journalists
tweet about information they need for news stories.
Twitter Chats
This is the good stuff if you are marketing your book. John Locke, the first
Kindle million-seller, used a rather ineffective version of this idea to
create buzz around his books. benefitting from this method will be much
more effective when done properly!
A twitter chat is a chat, using hashtags to determine who's involved in the
chat. Since Twitter is a vast social media platform, using specific tags
(and usually a designated time) for chats allows everyone see who's
involved in the chat. Without that chat's hashtag, it would be impossible
to figure out who is in the chat and who isn't. A Twitter chat is usually
something that happens at a specific time and on a regular basis.
Some resources to help you find Twitter chats to participate in are:
http://tweetreports.com/twitter-chat-schedule
http://twubs.com/twitter-chats
Remember, when using these, dont get overwhelmed. <Ctrl><F> is your
friend for finding relevant chats and this will help figure out when the chat
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Dont forget the offline world. Everyone is going mobile, so we are told.
That holds true for social media more than any other type of web
platform. People dont hesitate to voice their opinion.
In an interview with Dave Kerpen, author of the book with the rather
lengthy title of Likeable Social Media: How to Delight Your Customers,
Create an Irresistible Brand, and Be Generally Amazing on Facebook (&
Other Social Networks) I recall him telling a story about a guy who went
to Las Vegas one weekend. I dont recall the exact details of which hotels
were involved, but suffice it to say, the main character of the story had
stayed at a hotel and was unhappy with the service he experienced there.
On leaving the following morning, he tweeted about it and hash tagged
the name of the hotel. The hotel were not far-sighted enough to keep an
eye on what was going on locally,, but their competitors were. Shortly
after that tweet, he received a tweet from another nearby hotel, saying
they were sorry he didnt enjoy his trip to Vegas and next time he could
present the tweet he was reading for a discount on his stay with them.
Hows that for marketing? Guess what. You can do that too. Just head to
http://nearbytweets.com and use the hashtag you want to see what
people near you are tweeting about. You can offer this service as part of
any social media marketing campaign for a hotel, restaurant, shop etc. or
use it yourself for your own business if you have a brick and mortar one.
Make sure to make your customers aware of the hashtag you want them
to use when referring to you. This makes it easier to see both the good
and the bad tweets that mention you.
Use Trends
Keep an eye on whats trending to find relevant subjects to #tweet about
and bring your own product or service into public awareness. Being on
trend means you create very timely posts that will do well in internet
search results. This is also a great way to brainstorm ideas for blog posts
or products. More on this later.
Provide Customer Feedback
Hashtags can be a great tool for customer service and reputation
management.
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You can easily, and very quickly, see what your customers are asking and
respond accordingly. If you already work in social media management (or
plan to) for a client, creating a Twitter Chat around your brand hashtag
will prove invaluable.
Add Tone of Voice
One of the drawbacks to modern textual communication is when
recipients misread the text messages they receive. Hashtags can be used
to diffuse situations by easily adding a context to the message that isnt
readily obvious to its reader.
Note that this can also be used to add sarcasm just as easily with tags
like #yeahright
Finding Influencers
Hashtags will bring you to the core of a conversation and there its
possible to see who the main influencers are. Ive already described how
to go about this on Google Plus, now you can perform similar actions on
some of the Twitter tools I will discuss in the next chapter.
Connect Across Several Social Media Platforms
Many brands and businesses have several social media platforms and
hashtags allow them interact with fans across all platforms. Another
reason you should use one in your branding and cut down on the social
media overwhelm.
Turn Your Fans Or Buyers Into PR
Recently (March 2014), eBay jumped into the hashtag arena when they
introduced smart hashtags on their site. One of the aspects they use
this for, aside from highlighting relevant, searchable material for
discovery, is to promote themselves through social media optimization.
Their new sharing tool allows sharing to Pinterest and Twitter and includes
up to three hashtags for the item, included in the share.
This isnt a new concept, but when you see eBay putting money into it as
recently as March 2014, you can be sure its a worthwhile idea. Think:
Sharing plugins for your WordPress site!
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Intermission
Hash Taggin Fer Land Lubbers
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Hashtag Tools
http://hashtagify.me
Hashtagify is an advanced hashtag research tool that provides information
on related hashtags (FREE), top influencers (FREE) and usage patterns
(FREE). They also offer a paid service for in-depth intelligence. The
surprising thing is, that in a world where we have come to expect a price
tag of at least $27 a month for these kinds of services, Hashtagifys
premium service is only $5 a month!
Whats it good for? Mind mapping good hashtags, finding top
influencers, researching hashtag popularity.
https://tagboard.com
Tagboard is a social hub based purely on hashtags, regardless of which
network. Its free and addictive like Pinterest but with a mix of text and
images.
Whats it good for? Well, what isnt it good for? The site operates crossnetwork (in other words for hashtags on all the major hashtag using
social networks). Its easy to curate information on a topic, find content
creation ideas, and check hashtag availability or business reputation.
http://trendsmap.com
Are you in local marketing? If so, you may notice when you log in to this
site that the little widget on the left is showing rotating testimonials from
nearby users. Im not sure what it will say where you live, but here its
telling me loud and clear that radio stations in the area are using this
service to gather news and event stories. If they are listening, its time
you start talking a trending hashtag that shows up here will catch the
eye of plenty of reporters.
Remember that a book launch, new website or service can be a news
story for local press.
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Trendsmap lets you scroll in and click on a location to see what people are
tweeting about, or search by hashtag. For a branded hashtag that is a
sure fire way of finding your audience.
You can click and drag on the screen to see whats going on around the
world, but note that unless a hashtag is quite popular, its not going to
show up in your search here.
Price plans start at $0 for casual users and then escalate.
http://twitterfall.com
Twitterfall is like a Tetris game of tweets falling downwards. At any time
you can mouse over the tweets that mention the hashtag you have
entered. Just moving your mouse over various parts will reveal things like
what URL shorteners are trying to send you to, smart links to retweet,
favourite, etc., Twitlonger support if you go over 140 characters, and
more. The most obvious benefit is its incredibly fast hashtag stream.
Whats it good for? A dizzying amount of stuff. Read more about them
here: http://twitterfall.com/featurepage.html
Tip: Enter more than one hashtag. Un-tick All Searches and you will get
only tweets that contain the hashtags you have entered when they are
combined in a tweet. This narrows down your search considerably,
specially where your search term might have more than one meaning.
http://www.hootesuite.com
Hootesuite is a more well known app. It has limited (but still very good)
features. It allows you to schedule tweets and posts to Twitter, Facebook
and Google Plus.
Whats it good for? The ability to open new tabs and search for a
different hashtag in each one means it is great for monitoring Twitter
Chats.
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http://ritetag.com
RiteTag is one of the key weapons in your arsenal when it comes to
hashtag laser targeting. Its not so much a feudal ninja tool, but a modern
warriors laser targeted sniper rifle.
RiteTag doesnt have a huge amount of options in their free plan, but
personally I am happy to have five optimized tweets a day on Twitter ,
rather than a high number of blindly thought out ones.
I can only assume the optimization they carry out works across other
social networks too, since this site is one of the few that acknowledges
how hashtags are becoming increasingly popular on other sites.
RiteTags dashboard allows you audit your previous Tweet shares, edit
them and reschedule them using their optimization tool which monitors
the hashtags you use and makes suggestions to improve your chance of
discovery.
You can also optimize from other sources than your own so think
curation here too.
Whats it good for?
This is an ideal tool to maximize your exposure and probably the only one
that can practically allow you go back in time to change underperforming
tweets. In particular, their browser add-on works with Chrome and Firefox
and is hugely helpful as it integrates with Buffer, HooteSuite, Twitter,
Tweetdeck, SocialOomph and SproutSocial.
Heres a quick screen capture of it in action with Buffer (It works on plain
ole Twitter.com too!):
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If you take a moment to look at the legend you can see the colour of your
hashtag change according to #overused #good or #great, allowing you
choose the one that works best. Note also that in this example, the
hashtags from my tweet are shown directly beneath the Chance of
discovery meter, which goes up as you optimize your keywords.
http://tweetchat.com
This is purely for Twitter Chats, so the best thing about it? It actually
works and works well for the most part. Its quite intuitive and when you
enter the hashtag you want to follow you can click on a dropdown menu
to find other rooms which currently have Twitter Chats going on. You
can join any room you want. Plus theres a calendar to see whats up
when. Another similar site, with a calendar of upcoming events and a chat
dashboard is http://twchat.com.
I said for the most part because sadly, TweetChat doesnt make it very
easy to connect with others in the conversation. You will need to click on
their names to open their profiles in order to follow them. Thankfully they
open in a new tab. You can retweet, favourite and direct message from
within the screen though. Also, make sure you click on Sign In button to
be able to Tweet into the group.
David Lynch http://www.internetmarketingexaminer.com
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Aside from the issue of not having an on-screen follow button, this is
probably the best of the Twitter Chat tools.
https://about.twitter.com/products/tweetdeck
Tweetdeck is Twitters own tool and it works well. It suffers from needing
a little bit of a learning curve, but much like Hootesuite, you can set up
streams to watch and monitor your hashtag in real time.
Whats it good for? Much the same as Hootesuite. Its pretty useful for
monitoring and engaging in Twitter Chats. You can follow someone from
in-screen options so it is better than TweetChat for that, but you cant
choose from a dropdown list of chats. #WinSomeLoseSome
My recommendation is to use Twitterfall for curation and Tweetchat for,
well, Twitter Chats.
http://twubs.com
Twubs is another site to watch closely.
Some of its features include scheduling a Twitter Chat session, aggregate
multiple hashtag feed sources, and host a live event! This is absolutely
ideal for live events like concerts and other public events. The tweets that
contain the event hashtag can be broadcast to a screen or ticker widget.
This was used in Madison Square Gardens in New York. This is another
powerful offline feature and it is absolutely FREE.
Though hashtags can be used by anyone.. if you brand it well and want to
go one step further, Twubs allows you to register a hashtag. This allows
you use a brandable landing page for the hashtag this is ideal for
Twitter Chats and group engagement. Think readers circles, marketing
mastermind sessions and more
You can even embed your registered hashtag feed on your website.
http://nestivity.com
Nestivity allows a free account for one moderator (user), and paid options
for groups. This is a community driven web application that gives a kind
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of webinar feel to Tweet Chats with Post an idea and Ask a question
options.
Incoming tweets get moved into different categories for easy monitoring,
and there are analytical tools to boot.
http://www.hashtags.org
This is an excellent resource. Hashtags.org was founded in 2007 and
monitors and tracks hashtags like Mulder and Scully tracked #UFOs.
Unfortunately, you do need to pay for the more advanced features. That
being said, if you browse the articles you can find some funny and
informative stuff.
Lets take a short break and in the next chapter, WordPress, Blogs and
Hashtags Ill explain what I mean about repurposing the content.
NOTE: If you plan to take advantage of a Twitter Chat, you may want to
brush up on some lingoFTFY - Fixed This For You
SMH - Shake My Head
YA - Young Adult
M - Male
F - Female
RT - Retweet
TTFN - Ta Ta For Now
AFK - Away From Keyboard
AFAIK - As Far As I Know
BTW - By The Way
GTG - Got To Go
BBL - Be Back Later
David Lynch http://www.internetmarketingexaminer.com
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Intermission
Hashtag2 with Jimmy Fallon & Jonah Hill
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Hashcore
http://wordpress.org/plugins/hashcore
This one works a treat. Add a hashtag to any word and when your blog
readers click on it, a window opens on your blog with other instances of
the subject. A join the conversation tab at the bottom prompts
interaction and when they click it your readers tweet field comes up prefilled with your blog post and twitter id for an easy social share that will
bring you more traffic.
Evergreen Post Tweeter
http://wordpress.org/plugins/evergreen-post-tweeter
This one is another favourite. It allows your old posts to become
retweeted to keep driving traffic to them. You can exclude categories
and/or specific posts and include a hashtag in the retweet. You can also
schedule the time and use a shortening/tracking service. Very nice!
There are a few other hashtag related plugins, but the four above are the
ones I found to work the easiest and give the best results. That shouldnt
prevent you from searching further if a plugin interests you. We all have
different needs for our blogs.
This stuff works with other blogs too:
You dont need to necessarily use a plugin to take advantage of hashtags
on your blog. If you want to keep a super fast blog by avoiding the
addition of extra plugins, or you like to do it the manual way, or just plain
want some variety, you can curate social media content to your
WordPress blog very easily.
Though its not strictly a hashtag specific method, you can take the
content you find with a hashtag search and add it to WordPress by
embedding the post in your blog as HTML this works from Facebook,
Twitter and other platforms, and has the benefit of including responses to
the post and a live link in some cases.
Remember when I mentioned repurposing your content? Heres what you
need to do after your Twitter Chats to use the content in your blog.
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Sorry, but the colour they chose is a poor one to be able to share very
legibly.
Now you have archived the chat, created extra content for it, turned it
into blog content and driven traffic to it on Storify.
Twitter Chats are a great resource for authors to engage with their fans
and a great way to brand themselves as authorities in their subjects or
just to communicateeither as a participant or a host.
Automation
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Social Media and automation are a bad combination in many cases, but
the hashtag can help you put some of your blogging on autopilot if you
are smart.
One method I use involves the internet automation site IFTTT.com (If
This Then That). You are probably aware of the site. Most people think of
it in broad strokes.. If I get an email send it here or If I tweet, post it
to Tumblr. We can use hashtags to add laser precision to automation
though. Why? Well, Id like some automation, but I am interested in many
things. I dont want a post I make on Facebook about kettlebell training
or running ending up as a post on my internet marketing blog! Thats just
one example of what can go wrong when you try automating the net.
And I have made many of the automation mistakes that end up making a
mess, creating embarrassment and being damn hard to figure out where
and how you set it up so as to stop it.
Notice how in this example (this works with Twitter too, and I daresay
others but I havent used or investigated them) on IFTTT I am setting up
a recipe to send a post from my Facebook status to my blog.
However, I am being very precise and stating that I only want that status
update to post to my blog if it contains a specific hashtag! That wy I can
continue to use Facebook as a human being, but when I want to share
something IM related on Facebook, I can also auto post it and so reuse
the same content on my blog.
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Intermission
Learn How to Hashtag Like a Pro
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How To #Fail
Okay, ready to go take on the world and win? Wait just there, horse!
Theres a dark side to this Force, and you need to know about it.
Theres a reason a specific hashtag called #FAIL exists and its there
because too many people jump in head first and make rash decisions on
how to use their hashtags. Im going to show you some now. See if you
can spot what they did wrong (hint: itll be blindingly obvious!)
Cheltenham Literary Festival: #clitfest WARNING Dont search this
on Twitter if you are easily offended!
McDonalds effort at starting up a hashtag to share positive stories about
its brand: #McDStories
And the one where they actually asked for it! Check out who promoted
the post:
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any possible play on words will be used against the brand in a vicious
onslaught without any consideration of your feelings.
If your business has any detractors, you had better be really sure you
dont give them any room to maneuver on this one!
Do It Right
Turning fan engagement round to make it favorable has worked for those
who have put the effort into doing it right.
Here in Ireland, Dominos Pizza vowed to cut the cost of a specific pizza
by a cent for every time someone tweeted their hashtag #pizzalunch and
the price of their pepperoni pizza from 20 to 13.24.
If you want to know how expensive it is to live in Ireland 20 is approx
$25. I buy my pizzas out of a Tesco refrigerator!
Edge shave gel kept an eye on what was trending and hijacked the tag
#soirritating which was a hashtag that fell in line with something their
product solved irritating stubble. The marketing team sent funny gifts to
tweeters who used the tag and made their product a household name in
New Jersey.
The conclusion you should come to here is that its always a good idea to
incentivize the sharing of your tweets for a reason other than for people
to make fun of you. Here in the world of digital products, I think that
should be an easy enough thing to do, shouldnt it?
My advice is to try out http://www.cloudflood.com and add a good
hashtag to your automatic message with a link to your free download of
choice for anyone who tweets it.
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Conclusion
Relevancy is extremely important. Just like Google strive to give the most
relevant results to its searchers, the most relevant hashtags will lead
people to your content, but without the headache of the usual search
engine marketing tactics. It is likely you will have to try a number of
different tags and searches to learn best how to find your customers, but
the tips I have given you here will help rapidly speed up that process.
Id like to leave you with this thought. I think everyone can agree that
Bruce Lee was probably the greatest martial artist of all time. He was
truly a man who understood his (physical and mental) art. Though he has
been quoted often, one of my favourite quotes of his is:
"Before I learned the art, a punch was just a punch, and a kick, just a
kick.
After I learned the art, a punch was no longer a punch, a kick, no longer
a kick.
Now that I understand the art, a punch is just a punch and a kick is just a
kick."
This is how I feel about hashtags in marketing. Before you read this you
probably just saw them as simple little things to use. Now you have had a
glimpse into the complexity of the world around them, you can go back to
using them as simple little things but understanding their significance in
how you use them!
Thanks for picking up this guide and I welcome you to get in touch
through whichever method you prefer:
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#Writers
A Small Bonus for Writers
Please find below a number of hashtags you can use to connect with other
writers and share your content and book promos.
Note: Not every resource here is a hashtag one many make use of @
too.
#amediting posts from people who are editing
#amwriting posts from people who are writing
#askagent agent questions and answers
#author
#authors
#editing
#fictionfriday
#fridayflash flash fiction on a Friday
#nanowrimo national novel writing month
#pubtip publication tips
#publishing
#selfpublishing
#vss very short story
#webfic web fiction
#weblit web literature
#wip work in progress
#wordcount
#writegoal
#writequote
#writetip writing advice
#writingtips writing advice
for writers:
#99c
#amreading
David Lynch http://www.internetmarketingexaminer.com
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#askauthor
#askeditor
#bookgiveaway
#bookmarket
#bookmarketing
#digital
#ebooks
#editing
#fictionfriday
#fridayflash
#fridayreads
#getpublished
#goodread
#indieauthors
#indiepub
#journchat
#kidlitchat
#litchat
#memoirchat
#mustread
#nanowrimo
#novelists
#novels
#poem
David Lynch http://www.internetmarketingexaminer.com
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#poet
#poetry
#poets
#promotip
#publishing
#pubtip
#romancewriter
#rwa
#scifi
#scifichat
#scribechat
#selfpub
#selfpublishing
#storycraft
#storyfriday
#vss
#webfic
#weblit
#wip
#wordcount
#writechat
#writegoal
#writequote
#writer
David Lynch http://www.internetmarketingexaminer.com
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#writers
#writerslife
#writerwednesday
#writetip
#writing
#writingparty
#writingprompt
#writingtip
#writingtips
#wrotetoday
#ww
#yalit
#yalitchat
#wrotetoday
Some hashtags are specifically Twitter Chats they work in the same way
as usual, but are usually only used at specific agreed times:
#journchat
#kidlitchat
#litchat
#scifichat
#scribechat
#storycraft
#writechat
#yalitchat (Young Adult literature chat)
@freebookclub1
@ibdbookoftheday
@Booksontheknob
@bookbub
David Lynch http://www.internetmarketingexaminer.com
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@kindle_free
@freeebooksdaily
@kindlefreebooks
@zilchebooks
@freedailybooks
@free2kindle
@freereadfeed
@pixelofink
@digitalinktoday
@fkbt
@kindlestuff
@free_kindle_fic
@Bookyrnextread
@CheapKindleDly
@DigitalBkToday
@kindlenews
@ebook
@freeebookdeal
@free
@free_kindle
@freebookdude
@4FreeKindleBook
@FreeKindleStuff
@IndAuthorSucess
@IndieKindle
@kindleebooks
@KindleBookKing
@KindleFreeBook
@KindleUpdates
@Kindle_promo
@KindleDaily
@WLCPromotions
UK Twitter Users:
@free_uk_ebooks
Check out http://booktradedirectory.com for a ton more useful stuff on
Twitter for writers!
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