How to use personalized social promotion hashtags on Twitter
As far as social media sites go, Twitter seems to be the one where just about anything goes.
On any given day, you can log onto Twitter and see an outlandish conspiracy theory on top of a piece of celebrity gossip on top of someone applauding themselves for all of the #adulting it took to finish their laundry.
Somewhere in the mix, you might finally find a tweet relevant to you and your interests.
In other words, Twitter is a place for just about anything, but that can make it especially difficult to grow your brand there because there is so much noise and so many distractions.
How hashtags can help you cut through the noise
We’ve established that Twitter is a chaotic, lawless land, so how can we get past that?
In short: hashtags are a great way for Twitter users to see the content they’re interested in while ignoring the rest.
Twitter isn’t like Instagram, though, where users will jam as many hashtags into one post as possible. On Twitter that is seen as spammy, and you’re better off using just one or two really targeted hashtags.
Which hashtags should you use?
The best hashtags will vary niche by niche, and even then there might be hundreds of relevant tags you have to choose from.
For example, I spend a lot of time looking through Vegan Twitter, so I’ll search #veganrecipes or #plantbaseddiet in Twitter’s search bar, but I won’t search #vegan.
The reason is, oftentimes the most obvious hashtag is going to be overused and a bit spammy.
If you’re a blogger, you might think searching “#bloggers” would help you find a community. Chances are, though, there will be millions of results and only a fraction will be what you’re searching for.
Instead, get more specific. Are you a travel blogger? Try #solotravelblogger or #suitcaseentrepreneur.
Or, consider creating your own social promotion hashtag for Twitter.
What are social promotion hashtags?
Like we discussed in our Instagram hashtag post, social promotion hashtags are hashtags specific to you or your brand.
The entire idea is that this hashtag can be traced back to you and the people using it will either be posting about you, your business, or a movement that you started.
For example, let’s go back to pretending you’re a travel blogger named Fran. You can make up a hashtag called “#AroundTheWorldWithFran” and use it for any and all of your travel pictures.
As your brand grows, your fan base will grow, too. If part of your brand is meetups around the world, you can encourage everyone who attends your meetup to use the hashtag #aroundtheworldwithfran when they share any pictures. This does a few things:
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It builds your brand. Anyone who follows the people who attended your meetup will see them using that hashtag. Imagine you had 20 attendees use your hashtag and they each had 100 followers. Now, your brand has been exposed to 2,000 new people.
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It makes it easy to engage with your following. As you’re building your brand, you’ll want to engage with the people supporting you. If all of your support is in one place under this hashtag, it’ll make your job a lot easier.
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It builds your marketing material. If after a dozen meetups you’ve had over 100 people tweeting about the experience, you can easily comb through these tweets and (with permission) share them in your future marketing material.
Girls Love Travel is a great example of a Twitter account using a personalized hashtag, #GLTLove, to grow their brand.
Creating a social promotion hashtag for your course
You can also use social promotion hashtags around your online course or trainings. Your students can use the hashtag to share their progress, find a community, and ask questions.
Creating these social promotion hashtags for online courses are especially great if your students can share concrete updates. For example, if you’re teaching a ceramics course, you can ask them to share their projects on Twitter using #CeramicsWithFran so you can see what they’ve been working on.
This strategy acts like free advertising. The more you can get people to use your personalized hashtags, the more exposure your brand gets.
Using your personalized hashtag on Twitter
We talked about personalized campaign hashtags on Instagram a few weeks back, and the general strategy there was use your hashtag in conjunction with dozens of other relevant hashtags.
On Twitter, that’s not the way things work.
If you use more than three hashtags, people are likely to skip over the tweet altogether, as it’ll look spammy.
Instead, you should use your personalized hashtag first, and then one other relevant hashtag that will help others in your niche find your tweet.
Remember, until others start using your hashtag it won’t help you in terms of visibility; instead it’s intended to build your brand, which is why it’s important others in your industry are able to see your tweet.
When to use your personalized hashtags on Twitter
On Instagram, we recommend using hashtags on all of your content, but Twitter is another story. Not all tweets warrant hashtags. Instead, ask yourself if your content is relevant to your brand or your hashtag goal.
For example, on Twitter I’ve used the hashtag “#morganmeetsworld” for my travel posts, but I’d only use it if I were sharing a beautiful picture or an update from a trip, not random airport rantings or questions I have about locations because those aren’t brand building.