You make them, you see them, you look for them, you avoid them, you love them and you hate them. But mobile marketing surely wouldn’t have been the same without them: The Hashtags.
It’s Started From the Fire
Contrary to popular belief, the idea of hashtag usage was not created by Twitter. Chris Messina, a former google designer, was the first twitter user that kicked off the idea of using the # (pound) character to organized conversations back in 2007.
Not long after that, Nate Ritter, one of Chris’s friends, use the hashtag #sandiegofire to report a fire incident. And the rest is history.
Today even Facebook has embraced the usage of hashtags in its post. People now use it to talk about various things from Game of Thrones to Ahmed Mohamed.
Signed, Sealed, Delivered, and Recorded
A hashtag can give the posts a unique theme. The theme can be as general as your brand (#HaveABreak by Kit Kat), or as specific as a campaign name (#mealforameal by OZ Harvest).
Any content that has been “signed” with a hashtag can easily be found by using simple search column on Twitter/Instagram. Hashtags usage also allows a measurement that can be used to evaluate particular campaigns with tools like Keyhole or Hashtracking.
How They Use It
Alex Kaplan has came up with the helpful tool to design mobile campaign
Hashtags can serve as an ideal platform to execute the 4 I’s.
Red Bull and their #PutACanOnIt has shown how they Individualize the campaign and Integrate it to the customers life as well as Initiate them to create user-generated contents and at the same time be Involved in their conversations. The customers loved to snap a picture with their phones on their daily activities added by a can of Red Bull, and voila! you got some funny contents generated by the users.
Like to grab your mobile and take a picture of your food? OZ Harvest and Virgin Mobile have come out with the #mealforameal campaign that can make that habit an actual charity and raising the awareness of food wastage.
Hashtag, like any other advertising media, is just a tool. But some brands like Red Bull showed that hashtag can be the easiest (and cheapest) tool to commence a mobile campaign. With its convenience feature and measurable nature, it might be wise to put hashtag in your mobile campaign consideration.
Tell me what you think.