Make Your Own Hashtag For Local Impact

I had a hoot at The Best of Kensington and Chelsea's networking event on Tuesday night. I was co-hosting the event and gave a short presentation on local business marketing, which was a lot of fun as The Best Of always draws such a good crowd.

One of the free tools that I mentioned during my presentation was Twitter. Twitter is a great way to market your business for many reasons; 2 key ones being:

* a good number of your target clients are already hanging out here
* small business marketing relies heavily on relationship building, and Twitter is a great way to build that relationship and increase your "know, like and trust" factor.

As you probably already know, Twitter is a global tool, but what you might not know is that you can use Twitter very effectively to market your business to local clients.

There are a number of techniques that you can use to do this, and one of the best is to et up a local business hashtag, and get others to join in.
I first came across this idea via @aidrianEXG with his #GlosBiz tag, and then created one for Kensington and Chelsea, which is #KandC.

The reason that you want a local hashtag is that people on Twitter (Tweeps) click on hashtags to see what other people are saying on the same subject. This works for topics, events, TV programmes and all sorts of things.

In this week's tip I'll show you exactly how to do the same thing for your local area.

this week's tip: make your own local hashtag

This is really easy to do, even if you're brand new to Twitter.

First, decide what your tag is going to be. Remember that you need to keep it as short as possible to save as many as your 140 characters as you can for your actual message.

However, it still needs to be recognisable to local people who see it, so you could use a common abbreviation for the name of your town or area (eg KandC, Glos), an affectionate nickname (eg Scouse) or maybe even your postcode if widely known.

Second, decide who you're going to tell. You probably already know a few other local business people who are on Twitter, so DM (direct message) them individually to encourage them to use the tag.

Third, decide what you're going to say in your first 3 tweets that use your new hashtag (because one tweet is not enough!). This could be about your positive experience of a local business, what happened at a local business event, or an item of local business news.

Fourth, re-tweet ("RT" is when you repeat someone else's message on Twitter) a good number of tweets about local business issues and add your hashtag on the end. This mean that the person who sent the original tweet will see the hashtag, as well as all of your followers.

So go ahead and create your local hashtag today (or if you're in Kensington and Chelsea use mine! #KandC).

By: Tamsin Fox-Davies

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Tamsin Fox-Davies: Small business marketing mentor, consultant, speaker & trainer. Teaching entrepreneurs to do their own marketing. Living boat life in London. www.enthusemarketing.com/