Hashtags are great, in fact SEO, marketing, events, PR people just to mention a few use Hashtags for various reasons like competitions, keeping track of who is present at an event, makes it easy to aggregate search relating to the Hashtags amongst many other reasons and useful purposes.
What I have noticed even more recently is the misuse or abuse of twitter Hashtags that then go on to appear as spam and on the contrary readers or audiences deter from them because it makes no sense.
Both individuals and companies do it, maybe because of their lack of understanding or maybe they are just throwing everything on the table with the hope that one of the tags might attract new followers or get their tweet found thereby leading to click-through’s.
The trick to having good Hashtags is making them short, meaningful and precise, if they are short hand of a full word or greater meaning, use another tweet to explain what it is and remind audience of what it means.
Pick the Hashtags very carefully, putting a Hashtag on the word ‘the’ will not get you anything or Hashtag behind a really long word like #whywelovetocelebratechristmas, will leave little or no space for people who will re-tweet good tweets as we only have 140 characters to play with.
Moral of the story? Keep it simple and short, best practice is to use maximum of meaningful, short Hashtags that can be tracked and monitored using tools like Hootsuite.
Over to you, what do you think? Any tips and tricks? Best practices, leave a comment below.
