Twitter Hashtags are Not Ownable (But They Answer Marketers’ Needs Effectively)

Many marketers think that Twitter hashtags are great marketing tools that can carry brands to a new level of engagement with their followers. While some can pull it off really nicely, the potential upside of doing so is not that big. Here’s why.

Owning Twitter hashtags – you wish!

Attempting to “own” the hashtag for your very own brand and purpose is not ideal for several reasons:

• You can’t own Twitter hashtags – so get over the idea that you could. You can create the coolest hashtags, but even I can just use the hashtags and spam you and others who use the same hashtags.
• You can’t control who’s using your hashtags: Even if you can dominate the hashtags, people can just use them to leverage their social media effort by riding on popular hashtags.
• Somebody can hijack your hashtags: If I have a large following, as well as budget, I can even takeover the hashtags by the number of mentions that lead to my brand/business. Not cool.
• Marketers ruin everything: Until Twitter decides that a user can claim a hashtag for herself, it’s no use to spend your resources to own it. Chances are, marketers – ethical or not – will always try to take advantage of the non-ownable hashtags.

The social media expert (-slash-entrepreneur-slash-author-slash-investor) Gary Vaynerchuk explains it all:

You see, everyone on Twitter can create a hashtag. You can. I can. I even create my own Twitter hashtags to track a particular set of tweets of mine – to make things easier for me to search for the tweets, retweets, and favorites.

I was also trying to make a hashtag mine. Brands do it. Experts do it. So I think, “why not?” Luckily, I didn’t invest too much time on it. I realized that hashtag branding is not possible for the long term – especially after I found out that spammers are using my hashtag because there’s a keyword on it.

So, how to use Twitter hashtags effectively?

Get your tweets found

Turning your tweets’ keywords into hashtags mean that when tweeps search for those particular keywords, chances are, your tweets will appear in the stream, and increasing a chance for tweeps to follow your updates, click your links, etc.

Let’s just say that hashtags are like SEO for Twitter.

Twitter hashtags as search utilities

I (finally) learned that hashtags in Twitter functions like exact-match keyword search in Google (searching with double quotation marks.)

To me, Twitter hashtags are search utilities: I use “Keyword” hashtags to get my tweets listed on those particular hashtags, so that whenever people are searching those particular keywords, my tweets show up. I use “branded” hashtags, as I mentioned above, to help me search activities and engagement on my tweets.

Twitter hashtags as tracking tools

I run a media company, Previso Media, and recently I started to use hashtags for tracking my clients’ Twitter activities. It’s coded and I make sure it’s very unique – e.g. #glgacc (my social media marketing activities for an accounting firm.)

Takeaway

Twitter hashtag is not a marketing engine – it’s a utility. That’s why you can’t own it.

With that said, you could make the hashtag trendy, but the upside is not too significant, as everybody on Twitter can jump in, ride on the popularity of the hashtag, and – some people just do this for some reasons – spam it with irrelevant tweets.