Hashtag Hacks: How not to hashtag

Over the past decade, social media hashtags have become one of the most important and easy to use online branding and marketing tools in existence, but with great popularity comes great misuse. Here are some common hashtag pitfalls and how to avoid them.

Beware of Acronyms

Although acronym-based hashtags are nice and pithy, and great for keeping your tweets under Twitter’s 280-character limit, they should be approached with caution.

Firstly, make sure the acronym you plan to use doesn’t already stand for something, particularly something you would not want associated with your brand. British fashion retailer Dorothy Perkins clearly hadn’t taken double meanings into account when it launched its hashtag #LoveDP in April 2017. Despite DP standing for ‘double penetration’ in certain circles, the retailer continued to use the dubious hashtag.

Even if an acronym doesn’t already stand for something, if they’re too long or convoluted they can become cumbersome and non-user friendly. In 2017, the Greyhound bus company, in a misguided attempt to piggyback off the popular hashtag #FOMO, created the somewhat less pleasing hashtag #FOMOOGLF (fear of missing out on Greyhound low fares).

Unsurprisingly this hashtag campaign was a gigantic flop. Scrolling through a Twitter search for #FOMOOGLF, it’s populated only by the company’s posts.

How to avoid acronym-based hashtag fails: unless the acronym you intend to use is unambiguous, recognisable and easy to read, try using a different kind of hashtag.

Avoid spamming trending hashtags

Hashtag spamming is the practice of including trending hashtags in an unrelated piece of content and it is one of the quickest ways to irritate other social media users. Although there is a right way to utilise trending hashtags, spamming is highly unprofessional.

One particularly damaging instance of hashtag spamming was committed by Celeb Boutique, who used the trending hashtag #Aurora, a hashtag which had emerged in the wake of a mass shooting in Colorado, to promote its Kim K inspired dress.

How to avoid a trending hashtag fail: The golden rule before using a trending hashtag is to find out why it is trending; this can easily be done by reading content containing the tag or googling the hashtag. Make sure before you use a trending hashtag that it is relevant to your post and only use trending hashtags if you are contributing something to the conversation.

Remember to do a find-a-word before you use a hashtag

As a rule, hashtags consist of a word or phrase comprising alphanumeric characters with no spaces or punctuation – and most of the time that is fine. But a common pitfall of this particular hashtag trait is the misreading of hashtags.

One of the most famous, and most gloriously disastrous, instances of a misread hashtag was Susan Boyle’s album launch party hashtag #susanalbumparty. Instead of the innocent and informative hashtag Susan Album Party, the internet had a field day over Su’s Anal Bum Party.

How to avoid the misread hashtag fail: make sure to conduct a thorough find-a-word before you use a hashtag to make sure it can’t be misinterpreted. To help avoid misreading and improve the readability of your hashtags consider capitalising each word so that #susanalbumparty becomes #SusanAlbumParty. Note: hashtags are not case sensitive.

Timing is everything

Even a well-crafted innocuous hashtag campaign can be brought down by poor timing. When Qantas pre-scheduled its #QantasLuxury campaign they didn’t count on it going live one day after the entire Qantas fleet was grounded over failed contract negotiations.

Instead of followers using the hashtag to describe their ideal luxury travel experiences Qantas received a barrage of unsurprisingly negative tweets.

How to avoid timing-based hashtag fails: although we clearly can’t predict everything that will happen within our own company or the outside world, poor timing can be avoided by keeping a close eye on news and trending topics and by keeping track of automated social media publishing schedules.

Hashtags are great for getting content out to a wide audience. The flip side to all this publicity is when things go wrong on social media, it’s almost impossible to stop the very unforgiving online world from pouncing on a hashtag fail. As the saying goes, the best defence is a good offence, so make sure your hashtag game is strong before they go live.