Blu Maya Digital Marketing Agency

If you’re not familiar with the use of Hashtags, I recommend you read that post by Mashable on how to use them for business purposes and them come back here.

How do I make it so my blog posts don’t get lost in a sea of Tweets?

Do you know how scientists put an electronic tag on an animal they wish to study to keep track of it? Well something similar happens on Twitter but here the electronic tag is a hashtag (#) and people use them to track/search for information tagged under a specific hashtag.

An elegant solution but with an inherent problem.

The problem is most people on Twitter will research hashtags (#) for tweets that interest them instead of individual people. Why? Because it’s a lot more easier to scan a category as opposed to looking through everything you’ve tweeted including stuff they don’t care about. So unless you’re an established source of information (like Mashable) for a specific category (#socialmedia) then you won’t have this problem but if you’re not you’ll have to accept it and counter it to make sure people see your tweets long after you’ve publish them.

One way to counter this human problem, is to just add a categorical hashtag at the end of your tweet. For example if you have a blog about cooking recipes, add the hashtag #recipes or #cooking at the end of your tweet and voila! your blog post will appear with all other posts tagged with those hashtags.

Nice!

Another option that works if you’re more experimental and publish posts directly to Twitter from your blog (which I’ve been experimenting with here), is to add the hashtag directly to your blog post title like I did with this post: Unconventional #blogging advice.

I haven’t seen anybody else try this and haven’t really noticed a negative response to doing it this way. Finally, you should also publish your posts maybe 3 times at different intervals during the day (with the hashtag!) so that people who where not online at a certain hour can see your post when they are.

Closing thoughts…

Hashtags were born out of the necessity to filter information and have grown to have many more uses which makes them very valuable. Add them to your blog posts and experiment with different types of hashtags as well as putting them directly in your blog post.

Help people find your posts!