What do you know about using hashtags in Twitter?
December 30th, 2008 by 
John Dilbeck
As you may, or may not, already know, I’ve decided upon two main areas for my marketing activities for 2009.
1. Affiliate marketing will continue to be the main thing I do and I’ll probably devote about 75% of my time to this.
2. Promoting my adopted hometown of Murphy, NC, and the people, events, and businesses here. This will probably take less than 25% of my time.
For the last several years, I’ve been testing several websites for my local town and county. I wanted to learn how much effort and time it would take to keep them current; how much interest there is from local residents and business owners; and how effective they would be in achieving my marketing goals.
I have answers to some of those questions, but I’m still seeking more answers.
I’ve decided to focus on Murphy, NC in particular and not on the whole county. Since there are only two towns in the county, that means I’m not going to be covering activities in Andrews, NC. I’ll leave that to someone else.
Now that I’ve made that decision, I’m looking for a simple way to tie blog posts on my other blogs to Twitter in a way that it makes it easy to find everything related to Murphy NC without introducing tweets about people named Murphy and other tweets that include NC, but are somewhere else in the state.
I thought this would be relatively easy, but I’m learning that it isn’t.
I’ve tested using the hashtag #MurphyNC when tweeting, and I can reliably pull out just the tweets that use it. While I should be able to consistently use it, I’m wondering how much effort it will take to get others to use it, too.
By adopting a local hashtag, those of us who may be interested can easily search for the tag and Twitter will even generate an RSS feed (in Atom format) that can be syndicated on my Squidoo lenses and blogs.
This will also eliminate the tweets that casually mention the town, but aren’t really related to what’s happening here.
I’ve tried using the advanced search options at Twitter to find only tweets that contain #MurphyNC OR “Murphy, NC” OR “Murphy NC”, but the search still returns tweets that mention Murphy or NC even though I’m looking for exact matches to three terms.
So, I’ve been wondering whether it makes more sense to syndicate just the tweets that contain the hashtag or to use more criteria which would result in tweets that aren’t really related.
So far, I prefer searching for just the hashtag, even though it would mean I’d have to educate others to include it - which shouldn’t be much of a problem since there aren’t many people tweeting in this area.
This concept can be applied to other topics as well, such as when mentioning specific products and services, but that may involve stepping on the toes of others who are using obvious hashtags already for other purposes.
Here’s an example of a search for just #MurphyNC and another for “Murphy, NC” OR “Murphy NC” OR #MurphyNC and you can see the differences in quality of the search results.
Who knows? Perhaps I’m trying to solve something that someone else has already solved.
Do you have any experience with this? Can you offer any advice?
Act on your dream!
JD
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This entry was posted on Tuesday, December 30th, 2008 at 10:47 am and is filed under Blogging, RSS Syndication, Social Networking, Twitter, Western North Carolina. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.
January 17th, 2009 at 7:33 pm
John,
Not sure if you have solved this yet. I use TweetDeck and my best results come when I do a search there for the # or I put “keyword” adding the “’s seems to work better on Tweetdeck, not so sure about the regular search though.
It’s just a thought,
Sheryl
Sheryl Loch´s last blog post..Blog Co-Op at The Internet Marketers Guild
January 18th, 2009 at 11:32 am
Good morning, Sheryl.
Thanks for your observations.
I still have not decided the best way to deal with this, but I’m going to set up my primary blog for Murphy so that it will automatically use the #MurphyNC hashtag when tweeting a new blog post.
I’ve also created a Twitter Group for Murphy NC that uses the #murphync hashtag.
I still need to do some research about how the searches differentiate between #MurphyNC and #murphync.
Hopefully, I’ll find a tool that makes it easy to find and syndicate tweets with either of these tags.
Tweetdeck would probably be a good thing to try for just myself, but I’m looking for a tool that I can set up and others can use without knowing all the background.
Still searching.
I appreciate your comment.
Act on your dream!
JD
January 18th, 2009 at 9:23 pm
Ok, I have another Idea you might think about.
Go to Search.Twitter.com
Click Advanced Search
List exact words, hash tags….
Then do your search.
Now you can pick up the RSS feed from that search and direct it to a FriendFeed Room you set up for people from Murphy, NC. I would use the city and state in the room name.
With a FriendFeed room you can then bring in all the search results from Twitter (via RSS) for that term - invite those people to join your room or just follow them on Twitter.
The advantage of a FF Room is you can also list links to articles of area events, news stories (Even a RSS feed from a local news paper). It also lets you have a place for all members to leave comments & be more chatty than Twitter.
People could visit a FFRoom and catch up on people and things easier than if you missed a day of logging into twitter.
Since you have done all the searching and linking of RSS Feeds they just need to Join FriendFeed, stop in, join the group, and chat.
Wow, I am just full of ideas today. To bad it does not happen often. LOL!
Ok, I am off again,
Sheryl
Sheryl Loch´s last blog post..Blog Co-Op at The Internet Marketers Guild
January 19th, 2009 at 6:23 am
Good morning, Sheryl.
Those are some good suggestions.
I don’t have a lot of experience in using rooms on FriendFeed, but I followed your suggestion and created a new room for Murphy NC 28906 and added the RSS feed for the Twitter search, one of my blogs, and a community I’m (re)starting on Ning.com.
There are a couple of other RSS feeds I’ll add, later.
I wanted to get this up and working while I was thinking about it. Creating the room and adding the feeds was extremely easy.
This also has the advantage of creating a merged RSS feed that I can syndicate on other sites.
Thank you.
Act on your dream!
JD
April 6th, 2009 at 1:39 am
Yeah, I’m late to this discussion, but only because I just started using a couple of hashtags because I had no idea how to use them before. Actually, I must have missed this back when it was new, or else I wasn’t using TweetDeck yet, because now that I’ve learned how to follow some folks with it, I’ve set up one specifically, for central New York; I still may do Syracuse, but right now it gets way too many posts, oddly enough.
Mitch´s last blog post..I’ll Write Articles For You; For A Price
April 8th, 2009 at 10:53 am
Good morning, Mitch.
At first, I was really confused by hashtags on Twitter, but now they seem easy to use.
I don’t use many and mostly I’m using the #MurphyNC hashtag to make centralized places for following the discussions about my adopted home town.
I still haven’t seen anyone else use it, but I am starting to find others who use Twitter around here.
It’s going to be interesting to see how it develops over time.
It’s always good to hear from you.
Act on your dream!
JD