How to harness the hashtag

The humble hashtag has found its way into our dictionaries. We are a culture of memes, selfies, and gifs. These are the identifiers of our time. Social media marketing is hot and getting hotter right now. Of course, we all know of the benefits: constant communication with consumers, emphasis on sharing, integration with wider media, and the simple persuasive power of word of mouth marketing. These are just a handful of reasons as to why many brands are investing heavily in the social scene. But are brands really managing to make an impact?

Whilst hashtags have proved to be valuable assets to marketers, according to a recent insight penned by advertising agency Fold7, you should avoid just throwing in a hashtag and calling your campaign social. Brands need to first establish what their purpose is, and how they want audiences to interact with it. Fold7 examined how the rewards you reap directly correlate with the type of seeds you sow, so it is essential to decide in which direction you want to travel, before setting off on the journey. Whether the objective is to drive sales, attract new audiences, stimulate campaign awareness, build brand equity or ensure cross-platform marketing, social media marketing requires a clear directive, one with pre-planning and forethought, if it is to gain any type of traction.

BWP Group recently identified social media as the perfect channel for Magnitone in a bid to elevate its status as a premium beauty brand. With a celebrity endorsement from singer songwriter Pixie Lott, and her recent participation in BBC’s Strictly Come Dancing, they utilised her social team to initiate conversations with consumers at key moments during the show, providing advice about cosmetics, in a bid to achieve long-term engagement and interaction.  Initial results included over 3,600 new qualified followers across Facebook and Twitter in the first three months.

M&C Saatchi believe that the question of what type of social strategy is suitable for you is given undue prominence, and that the real decision to make is a much greater one.  They argue that, in order to achieve success in the social sphere, you need to focus on understanding the relevant consumer behaviours and how your brand can relate to them. Ultimately, a hashtag is meaningless if no one wants to use it. This approach can take time, and it requires an understanding of the audience and its interests. As M&C Saatchi has said, ‘brands that have successfully used a hashtag as part of a campaign started with a great idea and then had the ability to execute it brilliantly.’ After all, ‘no one is talking to brands; people are talking to each other.’ Maybe the real key to social media marketing is understanding what part you play in such a conversation.

Perhaps the most elusive aspect of social media marketing is how difficult it is to measure ROI. Iris argues that ‘social delivers an inflated expectation compared to the reality of what it can achieve,’ and with most marketers still dependent on soft metrics as a way of judging impact, it is no wonder that people have doubts. Iris states that ‘long-term brand growth is the real measure of social impact’ and ironically, it seems, in order to keep up with the fast-paced world of social media, you need to slow down and take your time. You need to ‘value the long game’ and ‘earn attention, rather than just buying it.’ And that’s just the beginning.

Sometimes the frivolous and fickle nature of social networking makes everything look easy. It is tempting just to stick a hashtag at the end of a tweet, and see what happens. However, it is clear from current campaigns and agency insights that the secret to success is not taking any shortcuts. In a world where abbreviations are used to speed up conversations, communications still need to be as rigorously planned as ever. Ultimately, it comes down to the old cliché: you get out of it what you put in. And, if you want people to sit up and listen, you need to make sure you say something worth hearing.