With so much social media data flowing past our eyes every day, many companies use hashtags to try to understand their own small piece of the conversation. A hashtag is a word or phrase (with no spaces) preceded by a pound or hash sign (#). When added to tweets, this connects the conversations around a single topic.

It is a functional bit of text and when you click on a hashtag in most Twitter clients, it brings up a search result of tweets with that hashtag. It can help companies watch the spread and reach of their ideas. Sometimes you see them around newsworthy topics (#jan25), companies (#radian6) or even events (#bwela).

The Good of Hashtags

Adding hashtags to tweets makes the most sense for online and offline events where you can share the hashtag with participants. Some of the best uses of hashtags are offline events because it creates an online connection of people who are in the same physical space. See our analysis of Blogworld Expo LA, based on their hashtag #bwela. If you are conducting a webinar and you want to know how many people share your ideas with their followers, encourage them to use a hashtag. You can capture these tweets in a tool like Radian6 and look at the volume of hashtag mentions, dig deeper into the conversations to understand what topics were most talked about, as well as who was talking.

Reviewing all this data lets you set conversation goals around the event. If you want to grow the attendance at future events, increasing the volume and presence of the current event draws attention to your events. A simple way to increase hashtag use is to include it on slides. Sample tweets also drive hashtag use. The data lets you see what resonated with participants. You can find influencers in the data, and see how engaged they were with the event. This can include new and known influencers. You can use your understanding of what caused people to tweet to improve for next time and reach your goals.

The Versus of Hashtags

Hashtags are used by a subset of participants talking about a topic. When tracking conversations and looking at data that supports your company initiatives, make sure you include terms besides the hashtags to get a complete picture of the social chatter. This is especially true when looking at consumer-driven events.

To social media veterans, hashtags are a natural part of how they tweet. Have you even been at an event where someone asks what the hashtag is? Less savvy presenters fumble to come up with something. If it is not something that has been pre-planned, you may not be prepared to track it. Or you may not know if it has been used for another event or ongoing conversation. It is always a good idea to plan a hashtag for any event, even if you don’t think your audience is the type to use it.

Many companies use hashtags on every tweet they put out. No matter what the tweet is about. This doesn’t create the brand awareness that they think. While straight retweets will pick up their hashtag, when they look at the data of usage, they will find that their #companytag is used almost exclusively in their tweets. This offers very little value. Hashtags that are about ideas are more likely to spread. If you encourage people to talk about a topic in your industry ask them to use a specific hashtag. This will let you promote something for the community, but also capture volume, preferred topics and Twitter users.

The Evil of Hashtags

Hashtags are open and public conversations, like most of the social web, that anyone can join. If a spammer or unscrupulous marketer sees a popular hashtag, they will start using it to promote their “offers.” In a study by Argyle Social, it was determined that hashtag stuffing doesn’t help a message spread or drive clicks.

If you are searching and tracking hashtags from a particularly large topic, like #socialmedia or the #superbowl, to find people and conversation topics, you are going to have to wade through a tremendous volume of hashtags mentions, as well as lots of irrelevant tweets. You definitely need to be prepared to do some heavy lifting, either with people or technology, but you should approach these efforts with more specific objectives and terms to make it a more manageable process.

Have you used hashtags to aggregate conversations around your online or offline events? What are some of your biggest challenges around digging into the data of hashtags? Learn more about measuring data in this month’s ebook.

Tags: Data analysis, hashtags, offline events, Social Media Monitoring, twitter