Promoting #Hashtag Happiness

Twitter is becoming a favored source for entertainment industry news and promotion, however the volume of tweets is reaching tsunami proportions.

One way to fine tune the tweet-flow, is by using hashtags, a word preceded by the poundsign, i.e. #mynews. Hypebot.com recently wrote about some of the favorite tags its readers are using to parse the news. Although the hashtag uses up some of Twitter’s precious 140 character real estate, most news stories are a headline with a shortened link to the full article, so the space taken up is less of a consideration than the increased search visibility which the tag provides.

For example, Sonicbids, a company which helps connect bands and promoters recommends #ArtistTip or #MusicNews. Music 3.0, a book by author Bobby Owsinski dedicated to how companies can use social media, provides a pretty long list of tags—#musicbiz, #musicbusiness, #musicindustry, #musicadvice, #musicmarketing, #crowdfunding, #recordlabels, #artistadvice, #majors, #musicindustrytips.

Thenextweb.com warns readers to use caution however, and be careful to not cause, “hashtag fatigue.” It suggests some pound sign Dos and Don’ts. For example Do use hashtags to keep track of communities, join a cause, run a contest or encourage topic participation. But Don’t use them on every word in your tweet or string several of them together in an effort to get picked up by more searches.

Social media still lacks the precision to allow users to pinpoint and discover specific topics. Until that search ability improves, hashtags are one way to find and be found.