Social Media for Consultants: Use Twitter Hashtags to Add Value and Responsibility to Your Tweet
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 hashtag cloud.
- 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 take responsibility. For example, Jeff Herring created a challenge called 100articles100days. He created the #HAHD hashtag to make it easy for participants to hold each other accountable, cheer each other on, 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.
