Twitter – a wonderful social network. It has become an outlet for opinions and viewpoints from a wide variety of personalities, minds, and most importantly, consumers (from a marketer’s perspective). Twitter helps consolidate a lot of these opinions for the interested marketer. Although some may reject it as a means for attention seekers to receive it, marketers must be willing to provide that attention because Twitter can be used to their advantage, especially thanks to hashtags.
Twitter created hashtags as an easier way to find related tweets. It is defined as the “#” symbol and allows Twitter users to emphasize key words, ideas or phrases by placing a “#” symbol before the word/idea/phrase in their tweet. It is not necessary to use the hashtag in tweets, but its popularity has been on the rise since its inception.
Marketers can take advantage of Twitter and its hashtags. By having hashtags, tweets can be categorized by users in a somewhat crude way. Since hashtags are created by the users themselves, there is no necessary structure and any keyword, idea or phrase can be used as a hashtag. When multiple Twitter users use the same keywords in their hashtags, trends are created. Twitter allows you to search for hashtags, and you can see any tweet in a public Twitter account that has been “tweeted” with that hashtag. In this way, hashtags help marketers find trending topics within the Twitter community, and trends help marketers know what their consumers are most interested in. Current trends can also help predict future trends, which help drive current or new product innovations. There are also third-party websites that help identify the most used hashtags on Twitter for certain categories, such as business, education, and social change.
Hashtags can also be useful when it comes to customer service. Businesses can search for their own business name or specific products/services they offer to see if someone in the Twitter community has “Tweeted” about them. Tweets associated with that company or those products/services will be easily accessible, and the positive and negative experiences of customers that have been “tweeted” will be visible. If managed correctly, marketers and promotions professionals can heal the wounds of customer dissatisfaction. They can reach dissatisfied consumers and increase their chances of retaining customers by providing a solution and maintaining a personal relationship. Positive experiences can also be managed, and positive feedback can be rewarded with coupons, free products, etc. The correct management of the opinions discovered by consumers can help build customer loyalty.
A useful way to ensure you find tweets about the company/product/service you’re interested in is to assign a specific hashtag for your consumers to use. Assigning a specific hashtag allows you to start a following and increase awareness of a product, service, event, etc. asking consumers to use it, especially consumers who have good things to say. This is a great way to spread positive word of mouth and even get short testimonials from happy customers. Social media has made word of mouth that much more influential because of the breadth and depth of the people it touches.
To reiterate, Twitter can be thought of as a channel for collected opinions, giving marketers another way to identify customer satisfaction, increase product awareness, and discover popular trending topics. It’s easily accessible, so take advantage of it and its hashtags and use it to help serve your customers well.