How to Use Hashtags as a #PromoProducts Distributor

Twitter Results for #PromoProducts

Hashtags Are Easy to Use and Help You to Get Found Online

If you are creating any online content for your promotional products distribution business, you want to maximize the effectiveness of that content. The effectiveness starts with getting eyeballs on the

Boogles Molded Bicycle Safety Lights

content.  If you can get someone to look at it, hopefully it is crafted in a way to create action or conversion.  Simple.  Almost like a promotional product.  If I can get someone to look at the message on the product that I have given them for free, and they take action as a result, the product has done its job.  We happen to believe that our cute little Bug-Eyez or Boogles bicycle safety lights are really good at getting folks to see the message.  (Sorry, I couldn't help myself.)

Online content comes in two forms, long and short.  Websites, blogs, YouTube videos, articles, PR releases are all long form.  We typically use the short form media to point to the long form.  So we Tweet or Google+ or Pin or Instagram or update on Linkedin or Facebook with teaser messages to get folks to go look at the long form media.   These short form media can all take advantage of hash tags to create a better chance of more action.

A perfect Tweet might look like this:

#Chicago school raises $20k w/ bicycle safety light #fundraiser. Read How! bit.ly/schoolPromo #promoproducts

Your potential client might be doing a search on Twitter or some other Twitter search engine.  If they look up #Chicago or #fundraiser or #promoproducts, your tweet will be there.  Once they see your tweet, they might just choose to go immediately to the underlying media using the short url that you have provided.

Not all hashtags are created equal

Why not have #safetylight as a hashtag in the above sample.  Because no one is looking for the hashtag #safetylight.  We wish they were, but they aren't.  So, your primary use of hashtags will be to use them where there is lots of traffic.  How do you know?

There are many ways:

• Obvious things like virtually any major city name, major brand, movie star, current news story
• Important groups of things like cats, homes, kitchens, authors, cakes
• When it is less obvious, you can check with Twitter and see how often there is action
• You can also check with other services like http://www.hashtags.org/analytics/

So the above perfect tweet is using hashtags that were either obvious, like Chicago or fundraiser, or that I had researched.  #PromoProducts is the most used item in our industry, although #PPAI, #ASICentral, and #Swag were also good hashtags.  On the other hand, #Swag gets a huge amount of traffic, but much of it is unrelated to the industry.

Other instructional hashtag links

My goal in this post was to lay out hashtags in the simplist possible way.  If you already use social media in the way I described in the opening paragraph, then this will be about all you need to start using hashtags.  However, you might really want to dig deep and learn all there is to know.  Here are the resources that I found most useful:

http://4bn.co.uk/community/articles/hashtagsare-you-using-them-effectively-on-facebook-and-twitter?goback=.gde_1173397_member_5792884151577231362#!

http://mashable.com/2013/10/08/what-is-hashtag/?utm_cid=mash-com-fb-main-link

http://kljsocialmedia.com/what-is-a-twitter-hashtag/#!