Your Own Hashtag

When you start to use hashtags in Twitter, the excitement quickly spreads to finding ways to create hashtags for your product, organization, or group.

The power of Twitter really rests in the hashtags and the ability to draw people into a conversation.  The simplicity of sorting your conversations by the hashtags allows for conversations in one thread to be all about BNI and in another it could be focused on your location.

Once this power is realized it is no wonder the next step is, “How do I get my own hashtag?”

The answer is honestly as simple as one, two, and of course three.

Step One:

Step Two:

Once you do this search there is one of three things that is going to happen.

1. There are absolutely no results for this hashtag and that means it is ready for you to use.
2. There are some uses, but they are scattered or outdated, which means you could probably take over the hashtag, let’s call this method hostile takeover of hashtags.
3. The only other possibility is to see a hashtag up and thriving, with multiple posts and interactions.  In this case you can either join the conversation if it is relevant to the tag you are trying to create, or you can move on and find a tag that isn’t being used that will work for your needs.

Step Three:

In order to make sure you don’t experience a hostile takeover of your tag you need to use it!  Better yet, you need to invite a lot of people into your conversation and have them using the tag.  You can directly invite people by sending them a public message using the @yourfriend mechanism, which has the added benefit of other people seeing your invitation to use the hashtag.  You can also  spread the word through other means such as: email, newsletters, web site, or the countless other ways you are using to connect with the audience you are looking for.

All Done

Now you have a hashtag, use it wisely and you will see that the conversations you can create with it will keep people coming back for more!

Good luck.