Are You A #Hashtag Addict?
Please do not get me wrong, I love hashtags – I even created a business vertical product #bealeader™ with the hashtag built right into the name. Companies have seen the power of the hashtag as well – creating tags for their events, products and services. The power of the hashtag has become very evident. A hashtag can be one that gives your brand a market share and becomes part of your brand image. Many organizations and individuals have created communities around their hashtags and taking great pains to create good karma with the use of their hashtags.
With the dawn of Twitter, the hashtag symbol highlights a keyword, phrase to categorize tweets so that appear in easily in Twitter search. This is also very key for trending topics. Now, Google plus has taken heed and hashtags have made their way to their platform as well.
Image The Bleacher Report
But what is the protocol? It appears many try too hard with their hashtags and abuse many of the common hashtags to populate many topics. How much is too much? Best practice is no more than two hashtags in a tweet. Why? For one, it’s good manners. Two, you don’t want to be seen as one who is simply using hashtags just to garter attention for yourself, it is considered spamming. If you are using more than two hashtags it tells everyone you are just broadcasting your messaging for the sake of exposure. Additionally, for bloggers for use others hashtags within the titles of their blogs without permission or if they aren’t part of the community or brand they are associating that hashtag, you are just trying to ride the tide of another’s work. How does that work for integrity and character? It’s just simply bad form.
You have to take the good with the bad on social media platforms. You cannot control what others do with any content on these platforms, but within the platforms, the communities themselves will police the use by simply not following or engaging those who abuse the use of the common practices that have become rules of the road in social media. No one has put down hard and fast rules, but people will seek out those who engage in positive interaction and separate the wheat from the chaff so to speak.
Best advice. Use hashtags as a way to punctuate your tweets, status updates. Be smart with your content and keep it social.
I appreciate this article so that I know what boundaries are advisable. I often include multiple hashtags to help organize the places I think a tweet will be most appropriate or viewed by people that will gain something from them. If they show up in particular streams because of a hashtag, I know the audience to whom I am tagging. Your post points out that perhaps this is not how it is viewed. I don’t want to have my tweets considered spam, nor am I promoting a product. I will be far more judicious in the hashtags I use to send out helpful, interesting or important tweets! Thank you for the clarification.
Peg
Peg, the issue of over use is taking one tweet with more than two hashtags. I think the best practice may be to take the link you are sharing, add you own comments with the link, share with each hashtag community one at a time vs trying to cover all hashtags in one tweet. It does take a bit more time. The issue has been raised by many others that their own communities, brands have been spammed by those who are only soliciting for their own agendas and not participating in the streams, which again, you cannot control public platforms like Twitter where anyone can use the hashtags for there own purpose.
Hi Jen, I agree that hashtags are a great tool when used properly and in the right context. I also agree that 2 hashtags should suffice for most tweets and, by the way, is also a best practice according to twitter https://dev.twitter.com/media/hashtags.
I think it is important to discern hashtags that are intended to reference connection with a specific community or cause versus those intended to broadcast a message to the general twitterverse concerning a specific event, brand, product or service. Often times, overuse of hashtags occurs when attempting to do both.
Further to the ethical use of hashtags, I also note that injecting links during a tweet chat can also be disruptive (distracting) versus sharing those same links with the community otherwise. As we are all aware, “spamming” can and does occur as disruptive “bots” are known to do on trending topics and tweet chats. Although they have a captive audience it is a short lived marketing strategy.
Your advice here is a good reminder that our tweets will be considered more relevant by limiting the use of hashtags to a specific target audience and avoid the perception of tweeting to “Occupant”.
Thanks, Redge. Yes, Twitter recommends two hashtags as well. Regarding use of hashtags during tweetchat – yes, that most disruptive. Some are bots and some appear, as I have engage with others to be a buffer app tweet that is ill timed as well. It comes back to crafting of the message. Instead of trying to shotgun blast your tweet to cover several communities at once, get back to creating relevant content and limiting the use of hashtags that is targeted. I would also point out, if you are looking for your message to spread, less hashtags the better for the message to be RT’d. If anyone has to modify your tweet, they will most likely pass it over.
Great points, Redge. Thank you.