If you use Twitter, you probably know about #hashtags. If you don’t, then WOW are you ever missing so much! Twitter users identify tweets with specific hashtags to make them easily “findable”. Or search for tweets by hashtags to find topics of interest to them and their business – like #staffing, #SHRM11, #justsayin, #katyperry and just about anything you can think of. Attend a webinar and follow the hashtag to see the twitter “conversation” during and after the webinar. And more and more conferences are using hashtags for their events so that twitter users can follow along and join in the twitter "discussions" about the conference.
Hashtags, which started organically by twitter users several years ago, are a wonderful tool in blocking out the noise on twitter – i.e. pulling out of the thousands tweets each day information that is of interest to you.
As a marketer would you find it useful to access the tweets about a specific conference to see what attendees and exhibitors thought of the event? What did attendees like, what were the hot session topics, what were vendors saying about the expo? Let’s face it, exhibiting at conferences can be very expensive and getting this kind of historical information can be an invaluable piece of measurement. This kind of unsolicited feedback would be helpful in deciding to participate in the conference next year, right?
But a key sticking point to using twitter hashtags as a research/planning tool is that twitter doesn’t store tweets for more than a week, so accessing this kind historical data could be challenging. But if it were stored somewhere, would it be see
n of as a great resource? I can hear the roar of YES’s all over the place. Good.
This week HRmarketer.com is adding “Event Twitter Hashtag” data to our Conferences & Expos Database Profiles. HRmarketer.com software users can now find the event hashtags and monitor the tweets directly from their account. And once the event ends, we will “archive” the tweets that were posted during the event so users can view the previous year’s “conversation” for that event.
Check it out . . . another cool tool to help busy marketing and PR pros!Labels: conference and expo, social media, trade shows, Twitter
