How to Use Twitter Hashtags to Blast Your Reach and Build Your Follower Base

Another tip-- don't use commas between them. Commas eat up your 140 characters.

Here's a list one person used in just one tweet to reach as many conservatives as possible:

#obamacare #healthcare #tcot #ttparty #tporg #teaparty #sgp #palin #entrepreneur #rush #nra

If you're not sure what hashtags to use, do a little research. Use the search function on twitter with some keywords.

Interested in immigration? The first twitter search results page only shows #immigration. But the next page gets me to #RI4A

Lots of talk on immigration in the tweets with that hashtag. But what does it mean? I google it and get an answer. Its a conference on immigration. Want to reach people interested in immigrant advocacy who are attending that conference or following it? Use the #RI4A hashtag.

Next, I consider Abortion. Instead of using that word, I try "right to life" which I expect will pull more right wingers, since it's language they use. I go a few pages and there are no meaningful hashtags. There's one, #3The, but it is all alone, probably a typo.

But "right to life" hardly shows up in tweets, with or without hashtags. That suggests a few things to me. You could actually use the twitter search function to identify trending languaging-- the stuff that Frank Luntz and George Lakoff specialize in. And also, it suggests that either the right-to-lifers are not twittering, or they're not using their language, or that language is not working.

If I were providing my new media consultation and training to right wing orgs, I might approach some right-to-life orgs and offer my consulting services. More likely they'll reach out to someone like David All, who specializes in right wing campaigns.

Next, let's do a search looking at the Henry Louis Gates arrest story. First, Searching for "Gates" I also see Bill Gates. But the first hashtags to come up are #tcot and #gop. Then, there's #912. Googling it yields this explanation;

The 912 Project Fan Site The 912 Project is providing Americans with 9 Principles and 12 Values that were brought forth to you by the Glenn Beck program on Fox News network.

Not surprisingly, #912 is often combined with #birthcert #TCOT. It's aimed at conservatives.

I refine the search, this time adding the hash mark and search for #gates. Goodbye Bill Gates. Hello #p2, #obama and, eureka, I find #tria. I google it and it doesn't show up, but scrolling down through tweets, I find this illuminating tweet:

@keyinfluencer @donlemoncnn Just caught the segment, thanks again. Tim Wise is a beast. Need you to put me in touch with him #TRIA (TRIA=Race Talk)

So #TRIA is a good one, probably for a liberal perspective. Along with #tria, I see a lot of #BIA, and some #cnn. I'm assuming that this refers to CNN's just released Black In America.

So, if you have written a piece on the Gates Cambridge encounter that you want to promote beyond your followers, you may want to include some of the above hashtags, and maybe some of the twitter users, like @donlemon, too, who are leading the conversation.

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