n event hashtag is a powerful marketing tool that should never be underestimated.
By creating an official hashtag for your event and successfully communicating it to your guests and social media followers you will help them aggregate all of the social media conversations, images, videos, and information about your event in one place.
Whether you plan on having a Twitter wall present at your event or not, deciding on an official hashtag (or a couple, depending on the size of your event) to go with your event is an important part of organizing an event.
Even if you don’t particularly entice them to – your attendees will tweet about your event in some volume. Some will live-tweet while others will ask questions about the event and send out photos from the venue. They will tell you all about their expectations and goals for the event prior to it – then also let you (and all of their followers) know if you’ve reached those expectations and helped them meet those goals afterward.
Knowing this, you can easily nudge your fans and guests in the right direction and inspire them to tweet more — and make the most of this wonderful marketing opportunity. After all, hey, it’s free advertising! Who doesn’t love that?
It’s important that you start communicating what the official hashtag for your event is going to be a couple of weeks in advance. If you don’t — people will quickly start using a lot of different hashtags to talk about your event. This will result in a lot of valuable information about your event being scattered and lost.
To prevent this, and to benefit the most from the power of social media — always make sure to choose an official hashtag for your event at least a couple of days before the start of the event, but preferably much sooner. After all, it’s not enough to just choose an official hashtag for your event. You also need to promote it!
Now, what makes for a good event hashtag? Glad you asked!
Your event hashtag should be unique
The hashtag you choose for your event should, ideally, be unique. Think of a couple of ideas and when you settle on the best one — use Twitter’s search to make sure someone hasn’t been using it before or recently.
While you can choose to use already existing hashtags, it will “muddy the conversation”, so to say, so we suggest you try and think of your own unique hashtag for your event.
Let’s, for example, say you are organizing an event for pet lovers. A pet exhibition! The #petexpo hashtag has been used so many times before it really won’t be a good idea to use it for your upcoming event. Even #petexpo2017 has already been in use. Oh my!
Let’s say your pet exhibition is being held in Zagreb, Croatia. The standardized city code for Zagreb is “ZG”, and we can use this code — which will be well-known to all of our fictional attendees because it’s such a general knowledge tidbit — with our hashtag.
A good hashtag for this event would then be #ZGPetExpo. It’s unique, never been used before and all ours now!
Say this was an already claimed hashtag. Or, say this is a recurring event. You organize your #ZGPetExpo once a year, every year. We can be even more precise with our choice of event hashtag by settling on #ZGPetExpo2016, or preferably #ZGPetExpo16.
Your event hashtag should be memorable
Even though you will be promoting your event hashtag on fliers, event swag, your website, signup page, and all of your social media pages days prior to the event (and during!) — don’t expect your attendees to remember a complicated event hashtag.
Your guests are busy people, memorizing a lot of information every single day. You don’t want to add to their cognitive load by choosing a complicated event hashtag of all things!
Our #ZGPetExpo was an example of a memorable hashtag. The event hashtag consists of a location and the event name — it doesn’t get simpler than that!
Your event hashtag should be short
An event hashtag should always be as short as possible — not only to improve the memorability of the hashtag but also because Twitter limits us to 140 characters per tweet. By choosing to keep your event hashtag short and sweet you are allowing your guests to use more characters in their tweets, and they will thank you for it!
Now that you know how to craft a perfect event hashtag, let us share an extra tip with you:
Make sure to avoid ambiguity when deciding on your event hashtag
Hashtag campaigns and event hashtags such as #susanalbumparty, #RIMjobs, and #nowthatchersdead are just a couple of examples of what NOT to do.
The first two were meant to be completely innocent hashtags but ended up as laughing stocks of the Twitterverse. The last one caused confusion when Margaret Thatcher passed away in 2013. Saddened and very confused fans of Cher, the American singer and actress, overtook what was meant to be an ‘in memoriam’ hashtag for Margaret Thatcher.
When you think you’ve got the perfect hashtag for your event — wait! And look at it again. Could it possibly be misinterpreted? If the answer is yes, you might want to go back to the drawing board.
Before you leave
Still not sure if your hashtag ideas for your upcoming event are any good? Our expert staff will review your ideas and suggest alternatives if needed! You can also tweet us! We’d love to help.