How can twitter improve advertising and metrics for us marketers? The ability to lock a hashtag could improve tracking, retweet, and consistency of tweets. It's great we can rapidly share our thoughts on twitter but the problem is regularly our messages are edited, reworded, condensed and left a shell of their original message. A retweet is essentially a game of digital Chinese whispers. Often only a single word remains of the original tweet, and hashtags are often the first to go.
A great way to overcome this problem would be to allow users the ability to lock hashtags or even whole messages. That way at least the author can use a service like tweetvolume to see a nice rich summary of how the conversation twisted and turned around the subject. As a writer sharing your message on twitter is integral, however the real gold is the conversation your writing sparks. Think of the input from readers knowing that they can essentially write a review and retweet as the author has locked the metric they wish to retain and track the tweet with.
Take a look at the value Gatorade is getting form social media with their social media hub Mission Control. Gatorade is tracking brand conversations across all social media platforms and experiencing great success. Gatorade has used this platform to engage customers on a one to one basis, and continue to differentiate their brand. Gatorade is rapidly moving from sports drink to sports performance innovator thanks to their continued work in social media. The ability to lock a hashtag would only augment their growing social experience. Implementation of this strategy would also seriously add value to twitters sponsored tweets service.
Lets take a look at what may happen if Twitter allowed users to lock a single hashtag:
- An increase in the number of hashtags would no doubt occur with writers implementing cuystom hashtags. A writer such as @chrisbrogan who blogs twice a day, would undoubtedly benefit from the ability to implement a #brogan locked hashtag.
- Greater feedback for writers. Retweeters would only be compelled to leave hashtag and link, leaving approximately 120 characters for rapid figure reviews. How many times have you wanted to leave a comment and decided you would do it later, and never do it
- Locktags would give Twitter a great ad platform, and greater scope for their featured tweets service.
- This small amount of control could encourage large brands to engage in twitter more.
- Hashtags become more popular amongst novice twitter users.
There are so many more benefits to allowing users to lock a hashtag, please share your comments and thoughts. Join the conversation on twitter. Be sure to include @twitter in your RT if you want to make locked hashtags a reality 😀