We’ve watched many brands take advantage of “trending” hashtags and topics to increase their own reach. (See here, here, and here.) In fact, Social Media Beast isn’t above high-jacking hashtags or jumping on a timely bandwagon if it ties in to the messaging of our brand and content strategy. (Think: Blackhawks.)
However, this isn’t something we do every day, which led us to thinking: “Hey, Beasts. Let’s take a crack at some trends and see what positive gains we can reap from them.”
Granted, this was a short experiment and thus the results should be taken with a grain of social salt. We used our own Twitter handle and tweeted about a trending hashtag or topic for four days, every hour of the “working” day. For this Beast, that’s generally 8-5. Also, it’s worth noting that we didn’t stop our usual tweeting during this time. So our scheduled content, twitter chat Tweets, and retweets still occurred without fail.
The concept was simple, but this was not necessarily an easy task. Finding the time each hour to check in on the trending topics, choose a suitable one, and craft a (semi) witty tweet takes time. And sometimes, there were just no suitable topics meshed well with our brand. For example, one day of the experiment included the Donald Trump/Lindsey Graham debacle and various other negative or tragic trends that didn’t feel appropriate to tackle from the perspective of our brand.
The first Tweet that started this whole experiment was coincidentally also one of the most successful Tweets the SMB account has ever seen. I jumped in on the #PrimeDay conversation, both for personal and professional interest. That first Tweet had 6,723 impressions, which is about a third of our total impressions usually seen during any given month. None of the other trending Tweets posted over the next four days even came close to that number, but here’s a rundown of what happened:
Day 1 & 2
Day 3 & 4
Comparison
To give an idea of what a non-experimental day might look like, I took a Wednesday/Thursday and Monday/Tuesday combination of analytics from the prior month so that you can compare the days:
Here’s a look at analytics from a typical Wednesday and Thursday from the previous month:
Here’s a look at analytics from a typical Monday and Tuesday from the previous month:
What Does it All Mean?
One glaringly obvious point is that our impressions are much higher when we increase our volume of tweets. During this time, other colleagues were also participating in Twitter chats, so that only helped with the experiment as well. To really give you the full view of how much tweeting more often and timely material helps you, take a look at the month of July as a whole…I think you can tell which days we “experimented”:
Those spikes can’t be ignored – but what does this mean for us? While we don’t think you should jump on every trending Tweet just to get the reach, there is something to tweeting about trending topics when it applies to your brand in some way. Allowing time for drafting timely content is an easy way to reach people on social outside of your usual audience pools and give a more human/relatable twist to your business. We hope to test this theory again and bring more evidence to the table. In the meantime, keep jumping in on those hashtags – you never know when something like #PrimeDay will turn into prime social success.
This article was syndicated from Business 2 Community: Using Trending Hashtags On Twitter: Does It Work For Your Small Business?
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