Lauren Gray is a senior public relations major at Western Carolina University interested in PR, marketing and social media. She currently serves at the PRSSA National Vice President of Public Relations and an Editorial Assistant with Social Fresh. Connect with her on Twitter @laurenkgray for more information or just to talk!
We all use Twitter as a medium to share content and connect with others. We use hashtags to talk to people with similar interests and ideas. Are we really using hashtags properly though?
Here’s a test.
Pull up your TweetDeck or Hootsuite and take a look at two of your favorite hashtags. What kinds of content do you see? I’m going to guess that you just saw a lot of tweets with links for self promoted blogs, other people’s blog posts or just links in general.
Whatever happened to actual conversation on hashtags?
Twitter is a part of the social media world. In social media, people talk to people. Twitter has become a platform for pushed content. People and companies are not using hashtags appropriately.
Hashtags were created so people could talk to other people. On August 23, 2007, Chris Messina posted the first tweet with a hashtag: “how do you feel about using # (pound) for groups. As in #barcamp [msg]?”
They were created for groups of people to talk to other groups of people. Social media in general is about talking to other people to build relationships.
At the end of the day, the more content you push the more you will be seen as a go-to person for information and that might get you noticed, but if all you do is push content and you forget to talk to people, you are not making lasting connections and no one will remember you.
I encourage everyone to remember to use hashtags for what they were created for and continue to use them for conversation, not to just push your latest blog post or a cool link you found.
Relationships are the foundation of social media connections. Build relationships by having actual conversations and by getting back into the social part of social media.
