How to Start and Track Your Own Twitter Hashtags

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How to Start and Track Your Own Twitter Hashtags

Twitter hashtags can be very helpful for small business as a way to track social media campaigns or create memes which help to establish a sense of community.  However, you certainly shouldn’t use hashtags to describe all of your tweets as that can clutter your messages and be perceived as spam.  The first step in creating your hashtag is deciding as a tag word itself.  Choose something relatable, memorable, easy to spell, and more importantly, as short as possible.  Keep in mind that Twitter only allows for 140 characters per tweet, so no one wants half of it to be taken up by an unwieldy hashtag.

After figuring out the tag itself, start using it and promoting it in your ongoing activity. Assure that your tweets using the hashtag are worthwhile to read and which add value to the conversation. Promote your tag or the social media campaign that uses the tag using related social media channels, such as your blog or email newsletter.  Send tweets about calls to action explaining your new tag at regular intervals without overdoing it.  For example, if you own a bookstore you could run a Twitter contest to give out a gift card to your store.  Your explanatory tweet might say, “What’s your favorite summer reading material? Tweet using #beachreads to win a 0 gift certificate to Al’s World of Books!”

Of course, now that you have people using your new hashtag, you need to be able to keep on top of it so you can respond to participants. One of the simplest ways to track hashtags is by using Twitter Search.  You can watch people using your hashtag (or any other tag you want to track) in real-time, and subscribe to an RSS feed of the results.  TweetGrid and Monitor are two other good web-based dashboards for performing real-time Twitter hashtag searches.

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