Best Practices for Hashtags in Marketing Campaigns

Hashtags have always been synonymous with Twitter and smart brands make sure to incorporate them into their marketing campaigns. As we've seen in the world of sports, hashtags help embody an experience and marketers are wise to tap into that feature. As Google+ (and now Facebook) has embraced the use of hashtags, these tools aren't going away anytime soon. Here are five best practices for hashtags to consider for your next marketing campaign.

KEEP IT SHORT

Twitter, Google+ and Facebook allow different character amounts. Since hashtags are mostly associated with Twitter, it's important to be considerate of Twitter's 140-character limit when creating your hashtag. You don't want your hashtag to be so long that it impedes on the length of Tweets. Your campaign’s hashtag should also be short enough for today’s short memory spans.

MAKE IT UNIQUE

If your campaign's hashtag is similar to a hashtag that used in another campaign or in another context, you run the risk of your hashtag not being used for its intended purpose. Even worse, your hashtag could get lost in the mix. Be unique and your hashtag will have a better chance of reaching a trending status.

Along these lines, do you know who really excels at coming up with unique hashtags?  Jimmy Fallon, that’s who.

CONSIDER PARODIES

Can the letters used in your hashtag be rearranged to spell out a vulgar or unintended phrase? If you’re not sure, you better believe that social media trolls will be happy to make this determination for you. Having someone play on your hashtag could negatively overshadow all the other great elements of your campaign. 

USE IT OFTEN (AND EVERYWHERE) 

If you want your hashtag to catch on, it’s got to be seen often…and not just in Tweet form. Include your hashtag on all of your campaign’s printed materials, on your website, on promotional items, on business cards, in your email signature…the opportunities are endless.

AVOID NUMBERS, IF POSSIBLE

Some may consider this last practice to be a little nitpicky. I only suggest it because numbers can be easily transposed by Tweeters sharing your hashtag, which would point follwers in the wrong direction. If your hashtag is associated with an annual event, the use of numbers would be acceptable when indicated the year of the event in your hashtag.

I hope these practices help your hashtags or at least give you something to ponder. Please feel free to tweet some of your hashtag tips to me - @nick_baggett. Thanks for reading!

Three Easy Proofreading Tips

In today’s world, consumers want to make educated purchases. But the way consumers obtain that education is very different than in the past. Gone are the days when humans questioned each other in person about goods and services. These days, it’s all about putting your information online where it can influence buys – a practice commonly known as content marketing.

There are countless ways of getting information about your products and services out to the masses but it all starts with text. It’s more important than ever to have copy that is informative, helpful and error-free. That last one is a biggie as many job postings now stress proofing skills. It can be tedious but here are three tips I use to simplify proofreading.

Simply Wait

Whatever you’re writing - - blog posts, brochure copy, press releases, etc. - - you’ll easily miss typos and other mistakes if you proof your work immediately after finishing. If time is not a crucial issue, wait up to an hour to read your work again and you’ll find that it’s much easier to spot errors.

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It may be surprising to realize that reading your copy word-for-word backwards really helps with your proofreading efforts. But, this method is especially handy when trying to spot issues with grammatical tense and punctuation.

Avoid Distractions 

This goes against our natural urges but blocking out all distractions while composing your copy can have a significant impact on your proofreading steps. You’ll take serious strides to cutting down on proofing time by closing your email, putting your phone away and dedicating a measured block of time to working. A great tactic for bloggers is putting the Distraction Free Writing Mode to use when composing a WordPress entry.

I hope these three proofreading tips will be helpful in your work. What are some of the tricks of the trade that you use? Please let me know by leaving a comment below. Thanks for visiting!

How to Embed a Video in an Email

Learning how to perform a new marketing task by trial and error has resulted in satisfaction quite often for me over the years. But there have also been times when I've been left disappointed, frustrated and even a little hopeless.

Such was the case very recently when I tried to embed a YouTube video in the body of an email. I use a great email marketing vendor called Emma at my job. It’s very simple to use and is the complete package – from design to analytics. Composing your email message with Emma is a lot like writing a new post on your blog.

I recently learned the hard way that you can’t simply copy and paste YouTube HTML code into the body of an email like you can for a blog post. I double-checked with Emma’s competitors and yep, they can’t do it either. There may be a way to get around this problem but as I've stated many times, I’m no guru. It could be that this restriction is limited to email marketing vendors but my research helped me realize that for analytical reasons, embedding video code into an email doesn't come highly suggested. Plus, there’s something about the code that doesn't agree with the email software – a guru could probably be more specific here.

So what did I do? I really wanted the recipients of my emails to view this video in a convenient way. I thought back to all the emails I receive on a daily basis that feature video players right there in the body of the email. It dawned on me that those video players aren't video players at all. They’re images of videos that are linked to a video page. In the back of my mind, I knew how this process worked. But it’s like my mind’s eye “sees” the video within the email.

The solution to my problem required the purchase of a video player graphic template from a site like ShutterStock and inserting a photo along with a “Play” icon. Now that I have this image, I can place it into the body of my email and Emma’s software allows me to link it to any page I desire.

An example of a video player image. 

I hope this post has helped you. Isn't it uncanny how solutions to problems that seem unsolvable often turn out to be so simple? I’d love to read about your similar “problems” in the comment section!