What do you know about using hashtags in Twitter?

December 30, 2008 by John Dilbeck · 6 Comments
Filed under: Blogging, RSS Syndication, Social Networking, Twitter, Western North Carolina 

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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