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Following on from our post on Twitter and its benefits for your business, our Social Media Manager Luke takes a look at Hashtag Marketing and its potential for spreading the word about your business to a large audience.

If you’re unfamiliar with Twitter, you may well be unfamiliar with the concept of hashtags, although you’ll almost certainly have seen one before. Hashtags are simple tags that are used on Twitter to help users find tweets about a relevant topic. One of the most recent examples of hashtag marketing was during the London 2012 Olympics, with #ClosingCeremony being the ‘official’ hashtag that was used, for example, for the closing ceremony (i.e. the hashtag that was promoted by official Twitter accounts and advertised on TV).

101 segments come together & create the face of John Lennon #ClosingCeremony

— London 2012 (@London2012) August 12, 2012

However, hashtags can be created by anyone, and can quickly become viral. This enables even small companies to gain huge visibility when running a successful marketing campaign with an associated hashtag. One recent example of an innovate hashtag marketing campaign was created by Domino’s Pizza in the UK. The campaign tracked their hashtag #letsdolunch, which encouraged users to tweet it by promising that for every tweet containing the hashtag, the price of its pepperoni pizza would be dropped by a penny. The campaign opened at 9am and closed at 11am, and in that two hour window 85,000 tweets were recorded with the hashtag #letsdolunch, dropping the price of the pizza by half on that day.

    

 

Image courtesy of Lincoln Pizza. 

Hashtags can be used in many different ways, and can be extremely handy for following breaking news stories. In marketing, however, the best hashtag campaigns offer users and incentive to tweet the hashtag, such as money off a product or an entry into a prize draw. If users feel they can have a real-world impact by using Twitter, for example using this Tweet Sweet Clock, then they will be more willing to partake in your campaign. The bottom line is to remember that a hashtag is extremely simple to create, but is much harder to popularise. Be sure to think through why users would be willing to attach themselves with your campaign, and what they have to gain from it, before you start tweeting your hashtag.

If you need more help and information on how to utilise the power of the hashtag and improve your overall Twitter marketing campaign, get in touch with our savvy Social Media team today.