Musing on Hashtag Popularity

The current module in #engl211 has us delving into the murky world of social media marketing.

What makes one hashtag trend and another fade into oblivion?

Nobody really knows. There are lots of people out there writing essays on the subject. People who want to sell you on  their social media marketing expertise will make lists of ways to get more eyeballs on your content and write them up in neat little bite sized articles. But they don’t really know. They’re making educated guesses. Sometimes their advice works, sometimes it drives people away.  

Our assignment right now is to go on Twitter and promote a hashtag of our own design. The group I’m in decided to go with #BorderlandPics. It is a brand new hashtag so we can shape it any way we want without interference from or piggybacking on preexisting tweets. On my Twitter account I introduced it with this new pinned tweet:

Our idea was inspired by another hashtag - #WolWednesday. This is a hashtag that was started by author Sam Sykes (@SamSykesSwears) back in March 2015. This hashtag, which is all about sharing pictures of owls, is still going. Apparently lots of people like owls. Er, I’m sorry, I mean wols.

You might wonder how sharing owl pictures could possibly be marketing. My Twitter experience is largely in the publishing world. I follow authors, publishers, and the like. From what I’ve observed, if an author goes on Twitter and just tweets about his or her books, that drives potential readers away. I know I unfollow an author after two many straight up promotional tweets and I am not alone in that. Therefore, authors on Twitter generally only do straightforward promotion during specific times. If an author normally tweets like a human being making connections, tweeting excitedly about a book release is quite acceptable. Whether he did it deliberately or is just Sam Sykes being Sam Sykes, the #WolWednesday promotes Sam Sykes author brand by drawing people to his Twitter account in a fun way. This is an indirect form of marketing.

We don’t actually have a product to promote, so the indirect marketing of a picture sharing hashtag seemed like a fun way to go. If anything, we are promoting where we live.

So far, my group has shared a few pictures and we’ve gotten one post to our hashtag from someone not in our group. We’ve only be going for a few days now, so I won’t speculate on reasons why we’re not getting more eyeballs. Of the tweets I’ve shared, this has been my most popular:

I know exactly why it has gotten all that attention. One of the re-tweets was @poisonedpen and that put it in front of a lot of people. Poisoned Pen Bookstore has almost seven thousand followers on Twitter. Given time we can get more tweets in front of more people. Eventually some might join in.

One final thought - after Tuesday’s election, I’m starting to wish I had suggested my other idea for a hashtag - #WarmFuzzyTwitter. The idea behind that one would have been to spread kind and supportive words throughout Twitter and encourage others to do the same. A hashtag like that could be helpful to a lot of people any time, but right now especially. Small joys keep us going in dark times. I thought it was too silly to share, but now it doesn't feel quite so silly.