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 massively 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 who may see them.
A hashtag is simply a tag which has the # sign in front of it. So the hashtag for the tag, "hashtags" would be, "#hashtags."
I first picked up on the power of hashtags 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 hashtags were used by progressives and got a crowdsourced answer from the audience, that #p2 and #topprog were used, but not as widely as #TCOT.
Since then, whole articles have been written on which ideology is doing better on twitter, based on stats on #tcot and #p2.
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 , #publicoption, and #hc09 and from conservatives-- #obamacare, #healthbill, #handsoff. And there are more.
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