by Mike Hallaron
Hallaron Public Relations

I was emailing a client this morning and educating her about tweeting and how to better use her company’s Twitter account for favorable marketing results. In addition to having her tweets crawled by Google and building search engine ranking, I explained she can attract more followers by posting news, briefs, comments.. even retweeting other tweets from those she follows.

Managing two active social campaigns for MH1 Web Design and Hallaron Public Relations, I am on Facebook and Twitter daily. However, I really do some “intensive engagement” once every 2-3 days and I concentrate on posting newsworthy or educational content and passing on useful retweets (RT’s). I reply to other tweets and engage other Twitter users. This quickly builds followers. However some are junk.
 
Qualifying your Twitter Followers with Hashtags

The way to get more qualified followers is by using hashtags such as #marketing in your tweet so people will find your tweets when they twitter search “marketing”. Twitters search tool can be a powerful marketing and public relations tool. (http://search.twitter.com/) Use hashtags that capture your industry or that of your target audience. Be sure that you only use hashtags that are relevant to your tweet’s  topic. Otherwise, it is considered spamming.

Using a hashtag: For example, if you are a hotel in Austin tweeting about your hotel rates, you might use #texastourism #travel #austinhotels #hotelrates.

Duct Tape Marketing’s John Jantsch describes hashtags like this:

“The hashtag or #tag added to a tweet acts as way to create categories, groups or topics for tweets that others can use as well. This way, tweets can easily be grouped together using the search.twitter.com feature.”

Search common hashtags here: http://hashtags.org/
 
Adding specific hashtags to your Tweets will help you qualify the people finding your content. After each session of intensive engagement, I notice an immediate influx of new followers, RT’s of my content, and mentions (@hallaronpr) from other Twits.

Get to know and love hastags. They are your friend!