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When people tell me they are overwhelmed by the volume of information on Twitter, hashtags are the first thing I tell them about.
As far as I can tell hashtags are the best feature on Twitter. Interested in a topic? Want to read tweets about it?
Get out your # sign out and start plopping it in front of keywords and fun terms in your search box on Twitter.
This is the passive part of “hashtaggery” and an important one if you want to know who is saying what about a specific topic. Once you find out which hashtags are getting the most use in your issue and/or geographic area, its time to start your active tactics of “hashtaggery”.
Use those hashtags in your tweets as often as you can. Keep them on topic and relevant to the community following the hastags. One of my favorite things to do is to include the hashtag as part of the actual tweet language.
If you don’t find a good one for what you want to tweet about, it’s a great chance to do the coolest thing in “hashtaggery”- make your own hashtag and try to get people to use it. Best way to introduce it is to pair it with another popular hashtag and entice people to respond and use the new hashtag.
Here are example tweets that use fun hashtaggery:
The first one is a tweet I wrote about a blog post at Safer Chemicals. Most of our followers are into toxics or environmental health. We use #SafeChemicalsAct or #SaferChemicals (hashtags we created in August when I started) in almost every tweet we do for the organization.
These hashtags are helping us create more awareness about safer chemicals and also track people tweeting specifically about our issue. I wanted this tweet to get onto the radar of the reproductive health community so I added hastags for that community too. The link to the blog post is one that will be appreciated by them – a very important part of dancing into other hashtag worlds in hashtaggery.
The second tweet is from our friends at Naral and uses common pro-choice hashtags as well another great Twitter tactic we’ll be talking about in an upcoming post – targeting influential people with your hashtaggery. Love it.
More Hashtaggery Resources:
- Ben Parr at Mashable’s HOW TO: Get the Most Out of Twitter #Hashtags
- Alan Rosenblatt at Big Think’s Corned Beef Hashtags
- Two of my favorite current hashtag campaigns are: #poisonkiss & #fightingforair
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