We often hear about the use of hashtags for research and social media marketing. In this post I intend to share and explore how to do hashtag research and have a meaningful use of the same for your projects by sharing my experience. This post makes the whole process really simple by starting with what are hashtags and how to do research and get access to conversations on topics of interest. I have illustrated this with example of my Digital Story Project. I sincerely hope that you will find this useful.
To start with let us first understand what is a hashtag.
As per Twubs.com: ”Hashtags are any word in that social conversation that begins with the #symbol” (credit: twubs.com)
Hashtags are used when you are talking about a specific topic. Let me explain how it works. For example if I am talking about RMIT. Then #RMIT will be the hashtag used by me. Effectively Hashtags work as the keywords for making my message appear in any global search, which may happen on the topic of RMIT. Also, it’s good to note that even tough I am not being followed on twitter, but if someone is doing a research on #RMIT, then my contribution or conversations with #RMIT will feature in that person’s search.
Twubs is the platform, which actually aggregates tweets, pictures, videos and other information on one page.
On Twub one can connect with people of similar interests. For our digital story project named food quickies, which gives quick food recipes, I initiated a research to find out the conversations and interest levels on this topic.
Now I decided to use this to do a search for conversations on Quick recipes, which is the theme for our digital story.
So, I did a hashtag search with #quickrecipes which gave me the following : screen shot as below:
I also did a hashtag search with #recipes, which gave me some more conversations: screen shot
The hashtag research on quick recipes helped me get access to all online conversations pertaining to quick recipes. I can accordingly promote my show on this quick recipes platform amongst these participants.
I also joined the twub of #recipes.
I made the list of people from here whom we will follow and engage with to promote Food Quickies.
I also added the hashtag search with#quickfoodrecipes and #quickecipes on Google and got the following links:
https://www.google.co.in/webhp?sourceid=chrome-instant&ion=1&espv=2&ie=UTF-8#q=%23quickfoodrecipes
Now the plan is not just to use this as the universe to promote and engage with for the food quickies show but also get some insights to build our offering so that we have high engagement and participation from them for food quickies. After going through these links I realised that how many people were actually directly /indirectly linked with quick recipes. But after going through many of these conversations, there is an evident current trend on Halloween, Vegan diets and gluten free quick recipes.
Hence now we will consider incorporating quick recipes specific to Food quickies
So this research based on hashtags: quickrecipes/Quick foodrecipes has been indeed very useful in the following way:
- Locate conversations and interest in the topic
- Seek opportunities to engage
- Evolve our offering/product according to interest groups: so now we will incorporate recipes for Halloween, vegans and Gluten free diets.
Now while I saw the group of people with same interest: #quickrecipes, #quickfoodrecipes, I can post my message to this specific group. I can also do a live chat thanks to the chat mode. So my plan is that on Monday, when we do a pre-launch of Food quickies show, which is about quick food recipes, we will use this to messaging on twub to build interest in our upcoming launch.
So We will post messages three times a day with teaser clips of the show on this twub with #quick recipes and #recipes, both.
We will host a chat on the launch day to reveal food quickies to this group.
The above strategy will help in automatically showing us instantly on twitter feeds. Hence our tweets will be easily reachable. With all this information, we have identified a trend and hence a need for us to integrate Haloween, Gluten free, vegan and pizzawiches in foodquickies.
It is fair to round up this conversation with very fruitful results of my hashtag research which have helped us evolve our brand proposition: Foodquickies with all the information I found on the related theme of quick food recipes and the current trends.
monamediamantras 