Hashtags can help add value to your brand and expand your visibility quickly.
On Twitter, hashtags are fun little tools for tracking topics, conversations, communities, and live events. A popular (almost old) hashtag is #followfriday. This is where people recommend other people that you should follow. So they would include a person’s Twitter ID and include the hashtag at the end of the post. For example, if someone recommended me, I’d tweet my userid plus #followfriday (and maybe include a note saying “follow her, she’s great”).
Personally, I don’t search for hashtags. Usually they are already attached to a conversation that I want to add to. However, here are some hashtag resources:
- # hashtags.org is the first place to find the latest and most popular hashtags with popularity trends.
- Twemes.com is another useful resource for discovering and tracking new hashtags. It has a cloud of hashtags.
- Wthashtag.com is a user generated hashtag wiki. If you don’t know what a hashtag means or how to use it, you can use the site search and get a well-compiled entry that explains the meaning of the hashtag.
Coaches, consultants, and community leaders use hashtags to connect others to their niche, topic, club, or challenge. Talk about triggering a viral effect around a topic, it does! If the subject is something that interests me, I simply intervene.
As a coach / consultant, you make it easy for your supporters and club members to talk to each other and hold themselves accountable. For example, Jeff Herring created a challenge called 100articles100days. He created the #HAHD hashtag for participants to hold each other accountable, encourage each other, and follow the conversation. In two weeks, the club had attracted close to 800 members as a result of the rumor created with a simple hashtag.