The hashtag has become the new “like” — and that’s not a good thing. Just as marketers used to (and some sorry folks still do) obsess over how many Facebook likes they accumulate, many are now plastering hashtags on their communications and adding up the times they’re used.
The problem is the use of a hashtag can be about as meaningless as a like if it doesn’t affect the brand positively. Few companies use hashtags to generate greater brand engagement. Take the hashtag used by Avocados from Mexico during the Super Bowl a couple of weeks ago. The spot imagined what “the first draft ever” might have looked like back four billion years ago. In the concluding frames, the hashtag #FirstDraftEver appeared under the brand logo.
The brief appearance was enough to spark approximately 25,000 mentions in the first 24 hours after the ad ran, according to Hootsuite Analytics. Twitter TWTR -0.97% users talked about how much they liked the ad and cracked jokes about the various animals and countries. The only problem is that many of the early Tweets didn’t mention the Avocados from Mexico. And it’s really no surprise — the concept of the ad was far more interesting than a piece of produce as it was portrayed. For a small brand that likely blew their entire ad budget on its Super Bowl campaign in the hopes of creating brand awareness, those missed opportunities are very costly.
Then there was the much-criticized Nationwide ad about children dying in preventable accidents. The brand had hoped its hashtag #MakeSafeHappen would start a dialogue about safety for children. Instead, most of the conversation ended up ridiculing and otherwise criticizing the ad. Twitter audiences reflected the general critical sentiment about the commercial — of the over 301K mentions, negative comments appeared six times more than did positive ones.
Super Bowl advertisers have learned that, in order to maximize the value of their ad investment, they need to prompt engagement beyond their 30 seconds of fame. But it seems many thought just putting a hashtag in their ads would be enough. Across all the Super Bowl ads, the average time a hashtag was on screen was less than one second. If people blinked, they probably missed it.
And Super Bowl advertisers aren’t the only ones guilty of worshiping the holy hashtag. Of the brands on the Inter brand 100 list that posted a tweet in Q4 of 2014, 97% included a hashtag. Corporate marketing departments now staff people whose primary function is to create hashtags and track their usage; agencies dedicated to hashtag campaigns are popping up.
But hashtags — like likes — are only as valuable as the engagement they produce. And just because someone uses your hashtag in a tweet or post doesn’t mean they are engaged with your brand. Hashtags should be used less as a message and more as a call to action that leads to greater brand engagement.
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