Everywhere I go now I see people advertising hasthtags and trying to get things trending on Twitter. I saw about ten examples at the weekend alone. Movie trailers. On outdoor advertising, pushed during TV shows. On food packaging and in restaurants. People have suddenly gone #hashtag mad.

The aim that most people have is to create “word of mouth” marketing where lots of people are mentioning something with a hashtag and then linking it back to their product. Hashtags were actually created by the Twitter users themselves as a way of grouping conversations together, but it is marketeers who have embraced them most recently.

Stop Thinking About Getting Things Trending

You can see why people would want to get trending on Twitter. It means a lot of people are talking about the thing you are trying to promote. Will all that effort even help you though? If 200 people tweet with your #hashtag will that really make much of a difference and help you stand out from the over 250 million tweets sent every single day? It might a little bit but Hashtags also annoy plenty of people and some even choose to filter them out. If somebody I trust gives a positive review about a movie or a restaurant they have been to I’ll trust them as it is and probably don’t need a hashtag to be in there.

When It Works Well

There are of course ways in which #hashtags work well. Some of the TV stations are owning the conversation well around shows that they air and driving more audience by encouraging conversation online. They work well for conferences as well because people like to tweet what is happening and by using the #hashtag that makes more people aware of the event who might want to attend future conferences. The other good thing is that they don’t actually cost you anything to start up so apart from a bit of time creating the #hashtag and getting it printed or marketed you haven’t really lost anything by trying.

Twitter Think Hashtags = Advertising Revenues

Even though Hashtags were one of the quirky features that geeky users starting introducing themselves when Twitter was still young the social network themselves have really started to jump on them. You can even get your own hashtag button to add to your website or blog. Many of the test advertising campaigns on Twitter were promoted using hashtags with a view to trending worldwide or in specific countries. The big problem is that works great when only a handful of brands are trying this but when hundreds or thousands join in the hashtag noise will become too loud. What do you think? Hashtags…good or bad?