Use Hashtags For Greater Twitter Success Here's a Twitter tip:
You can easily use hashtags to reach many more people and build your follower base faster.
Say you've just started with twitter. You have under 1000, even under 50 followers. You may ask yourself, "Why bother tweeting to so few people?" And you're right.
By using hashtags, you can change all that and reach a massivle larger audience than your small following.
Here's why. Other people use the twitter search box, or they use tweetdeck to routinely view hashtag search results, where you can set up permanent searches that appear as columns.
It's amazing how many people who don't understand twitter think it's for telling where and when you had coffee. Sure, there are some incredibly boring or narcissistic people who really think that's what twitter is for. And maybe some celebrities can get away with it. But for most on twitter, they are trying to make a difference in some way-- for a cause, an ideology, a campaign, or a business. Those people want to reach a lot of people, build a follower base and get their ideas and information out there.
In the spirit of the movie The Graduate, I have one word for you. No, not plastics-- the word is Hashtags.
More sophisticated twitter users routinely use hashtags to reach more people, which is a great way to get new followers.
Hashtags, since they are sought by twitter searchers, instead of just your followers seeing your tweets, can help you to reach 1000s, even tens of thousands can see them.
I first picked up on this at a 2009 Personal Democracy Forum (#pdf09) panel session, from conservative political consultant, David All (@davidall or www.twitter.com/davidall.) He pointed out that #tcot is one of the most popular hashtags used by conservatives, including members of congress.
I asked which were ones used by progressives and got a crowdsourced answer from the audience, that #p2 and #topprog were used, but not as widely as #TCOT.
I've been writing a lot about healthcare, where I'm advocating for single payer, so I did some research to identify related hashtags. I came up with #HC #healthcare #hcr #singlepayer, and from conservatives-- #obamacare, #healthbill . And there are many more. Another tip-- don't use commas between them. Commas eat up your 140 characters.
Here's a list one person used in just one tweet to reach as many conservatives as possible:
#obamacare #healthcare #tcot #ttparty #tporg #teaparty #sgp #palin #entrepreneur #rush #nra
If you're not sure what hashtags to use, do a little research. Use the search function on twitter with some keywords. Interested in immigration? The first twitter search results page only shows #immigration. But the next page gets me to #RI4A-- Lots of talk on immigration in the tweets with that hashtag. But what does it mean? I google it and get an answer. Its a conference on immigration. Want to reach people interested in immigrant advocacy who are attending that conference or following it? Use the #RI4A hashtag.
Next, I consider Abortion. Instead of using that word, I try "right to life" which I expect will pull more right wingers, since it's language they use. I go a few pages and there are no meaningful hashtags. There's one, #3The, but it is all alone, probably a typo.
But "right to life" hardly shows up in tweets, with or without hashtags. That suggests a few things to me. You could actually use the twitter search function to identily trending languaging-- the stuff that Frank Luntz and George Lakoff specialize in. And also, it suggests that either the right-to-lifers are not twittering, they're not using their language, or that language is not working. If I were selling new media services, which twitter fits under, (like David All does,) I might approach some right-to-life orgs and offer my consulting services.
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