Which UK General Election #hashtag is best?

There has been a lot of head scratching about which election hashtag to use. I thought I’d do a little research to help answer the question and explain why corporate communicators should take note.

#GE2015 is currently the most used election hashtag; it’s in the lead with almost 60,000 potential hashtag views per hour and will likely peak at way, way more than that come April/May. According to Rite Tag, #GE2015 also receives the most tweets and retweets per hour.

Does that mean a wise tweeter would stop using #election2015 and #GE15? If the Huffington Post UK is anything to go by, no. The news outlet has sensibly decided to split its tweets across at least two of the three as a way of receiving additional engagement for its content. Each of the three hashtags — and there are many others — has its own political-media community of users and therefore the blog-based Post wants to tap into as many digital conversations as possible.

As I told CNBC last week, social media is for politicians like a modern version of kissing babies in the high street, hoping to be photographed. The more ways in which they can get attention the better. The Conservatives’ spending on Facebook advertising is another example of this.

Here’s a look at the three main General Election hashtags along with which influencers are using each one.

#GE2015
Unique tweets per hour — 58
Retweets per hour — 104
Potential hashtag views per hour — 58,254
Tweets with images — 36.21%
Tweets with links — 29.31%
Tweets with mentions — 50%
Who is using it: Sky News; BBC News and the Today programme; The Sun; The Guardian; Huffington Post; The Liberal Democrats and Nick Clegg; Alex Salmond; MPs from Labour and Conservatives such as Sadiq Khan and Nick de Bois; The Institute of Directors; Cancer Research UK

#Election2015
Unique tweets per hour — 8
Retweets per hour — 9
Potential hashtag views per hour — 25,725
Tweets with images — 0%
Tweets with links — 50%
Tweets with mentions — 50%
Who is using it: Channel 4 News; FT Weekend Magazine; Huffington Post UK (splitting between two hashtags in all likelihood to increase the chance of engagement); The Times’ political cartoonist Peter Brookes; Ipsos MORI; Times Higher Education; estate agents Knight Frank; The King’s Fund

#GE15
Unique tweets per hour — 12
Retweets per hour — 88
Potential hashtag views per hour — 25,350
Tweets with images — 0%
Tweets with links — 66.67%
Tweets with mentions — 33.33%
Who is using it: The SNP; The Guardian’s Comment Is Free; and Hanover consultants (who will henceforth ensure they also use #GE2015)

What can business learn from this? The days of tweeting your corporate announcement once are long gone. The average half life of a tweet is at best minutes and at worst, seconds. Looking at General Election hashtags tells the corporate communicator that one, rigid social media messaging plan may fail to achieve cut through, just as in media relations, one key message alone is a risk. The plan should be: lots of messaging, at different times, using various hooks to capture attention. Think of it as a real time focus group, but out in a live environment.

Social media is not an exact science: it’s an art. It’s called ‘shared media’ for a reason: anyone can come along and create a ‘thing’ that resonates and takes hold. The savvy social media manager now uses tools such as Buffer to tweet a piece of content multiple times using slightly different messaging, hashtags, pictures and videos — but always a link. Newspaper community editors and heads of digital have also woken up to this trend: just look at the social media feeds of The Independent or The Sun and you’ll see just how many times throughout a 48-hour period each ‘clickbait’ story is shared.

Cross-posted from the Hanover communications website. Originally, Which General Election #hashtag has most reach?