When it comes to retweeting, they do, says Dan Zarrella
Love them or hate them, hashtags may help you increase retweets.
Or so says Dan Zarrella, HubSpot’s viral marketing scientist. Zarrella analyzed his dataset of more than 1.2 million tweets to find out whether hashtags made these news items move further and faster.
The results? Tweets that contained one or more hashtags were 55% more likely to be retweeted than tweets that did not.
Still … don’t overuse hashtags. Need a hilarious reminder? Check out this Justin Timberlake and Jimmy Fallon video.
And keep in mind this quote, by The New York Times social media staff editor Victor: “The noble hashtag is cursed by a problem Yogi Berra could appreciate: Too many people use it, so no one goes there.”
- Use hashtags, according to research by Buffer Media. Tweets with hashtags get twice the engagement of tweets without them.
- But don’t overuse them. Tweets with one or two hashtags get 21% higher engagement than those without, Buffer found. But engagement drops when you add more.
- Make them short. Keep them to 6 characters or less, recommends Vanessa Doctor from Hashtags.org.
How can you write content readers want to read?
There’s a lot of ME in social MEdia. And there’s a great big I in TwItter. No wonder social media thought leader Brian Solis calls content marketing the egosystem.
Unfortunately, talking about yourself and your stuff on social channels works about as well as it does at a cocktail party. But watch your social media reach and influence grow when you deliver relevant, valuable, useful content.
Learn how to identify what content readers want to read at Get Clicked, Liked & Shared, our content-writing workshop.
You’ll learn to position your company as the expert in the field. Find out how to make sure your posts are welcome guests and not intrusive pests. And discover the power of the most-retweeted word in the English language.
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