Understanding #Hastags – #Twitter

Importance and recommendations of hashtags:
The hashtag has two main purposes:
1. To help sort and organize content.
2. To help people communicate to a greater universe based on the subject of the hashtag. (Truly becoming viral)

Organizing content
The idea here is that you put a #hashtag on a tweet that shows the topic of the tweet. For example, if you are tweeting about Keratin hair straightening, people would use #keratin in their tweets about that topic. Using the hashtag makes aggregation of tweets about that topic easier. For example, if you throw #keratin into a Google or Twitter search, you will get all content about the topic when people use this hashtag.

Always include hastags in tweets, here is how:
Recommendations for hastags
#hairstylist, #stylist, #colorist, #colorcorrection, #hair, #stylist, #spa, #salonowner, #spaowner

Using hashtags in your own tweets
Using hashtags in your own tweets offers many advantages. First, it helps your tweets on a particular topic get aggregated along with other tweets on that topic. This expands the universe of people that will view your tweet, thus enables further followers of you. By entering in content about corrective color with the hashtag #colorcorrection will expand the view to those outside your current followers.

Recommendations for obtaining followers within your segmentation:
Your twitter address (@wehringerandco) should be included in every touch point that you use today to communicate externally. From your email signature, to your Website, to even your business card, by including your twitter address, people will follow. For the most part, reciprocation is done in Twitter. I follow you and you then follow me. Every day, time will be required to follow as many people that you can, there are technical limits based on an internal algorithm.

The other driver of followers is frequency of content. Within any social media platform, content is king.  Tools like a Bufferapp.com or HootSuite.com where content is loaded and scheduled for dissemination throughout the day/week, helps with engagement. A content matrix needs to be created that falls within all segmentation that your are reaching out to in order to engage. Corresponding hastags must be included within each tweet.

It is common courtesy to respond back to those folks that follow you on Twitter. Creating a message that says thank you and inviting them to your Website/Blog/Facebook Fan Page is a common practice. In addition when someone responds to your tweet the best practice is to respond accordingly and if the response is interesting then we advise to retweet that content.

Recommended Lists:
I recommend that you be listed in Listorious as it enables you to be added in specific lists that have a decent sized universe which will expand your brand and help to attribute further followers. Once you have a decent size list of followers, we recommend that you create lists from these followers. Utilizing formalists.com is an easy way to segment followers and create lists.

Twitter Technical Limits
Every account can follow 2,000 users total. Once you’ve followed 2,000 users, there are limits to the number of additional users you can follow. This number is different for each account and is based on your ratio of followers to following; this ratio is not published. Follow limits cannot be lifted by Twitter and everyone is subject to follow limits, even high profile and API accounts. In addition to this account-based limit, every Twitter account is technically unable to follow more than 1,000 users per day. Please note that this is just a technical limit to prevent egregious abuse from spam accounts.