Chasing Hashtags
What seemed like an invention by Twitter makers for categorizing and sharing tweets, #hashtags are now working overtime and have become a major source to follow top news stories, products, contests and celebrities gossips. This noble but very powerful tool is being chased by almost every brand on Twitter today. Have brands used it in a logical way or have they abused it ? Does it matter to brands when their hashtags get hijacked by Twitter users from around the world, or does it just give them enough fuel to get noticed ? Only time will tell.
So what are these hashtags ? As soon as you start using Twitter, it’s just a matter of time before you bump into something in a tweet that has a # prefix. Their sole purpose is to help people to search for tweets that have a common topic. For example, if you search on #Bangalore, you’d be flooded with a list of tweets that have #Bangalore mentioned in it. Hashtags, you can say, are a tool to allow you to build a group of people interested in the same topic.
I find it amazing that many an Indian brands on Twitter these days are taking advantage of hashtags to climb up the trending charts in different cities and the country. Hashtags are one of the best tools to grab people’s attention in the Twitter world today. People have started talking about brands by just prefixing a # and mentioning the company’s name, instead of a time consuming search-find-mention brand’s Twitter handle.
What’s depressing to see is the fact that brands are using hashtags only to promote their contests and to give-away freebies. If you scroll through a trending hashtag powered by a Brand, you’d find there has rarely been a value-added information in there. Sweeping all the other trending topics under the carpet, these freebie hashtags have taken over Twitter. Now even political fanatics have jumped into the bandwagon. Mudslinging each other, these political groups have made Twitter their favorite venom spewing zone. Feels like I am walking into a parliamentary session that has microphones flying in the air, when I click on one of these trends these days to see what it is all about.
A couple of months back I used to think getting a hashtag to the top trending spot was a huge achievement. Now I know what it takes to reach the top. An iPhone 5 giveaway contest on Twitter, or a political agenda that is fueled by one or two (bought) social influencers.
#RIP, the simple but great idea of hashtags.
