SMH makes a mess of #hashtags on Twitter

Christmas day is a slow news day, so it a good day to launch a Twitter account associated with a major newspaper. So when I saw today’s trending topic on Twitter search is #RSStoTwitter, I had to have a look and see what it was referring to. Imagine my surprise when it was the Sydney Morning Herald’s Twitter account, only instead of using their own, new profile as the #hashtag, they were inadvertently promoting the bot that converts their RSS feed to Twitter tweets.  Which begs the question - why use hashtags? And why don’t other major Twitter newsfeeds have the same problems?

Hashtags are a way to add additional metadata content on Twitter. They have become popular as a tool to track live updates real time especially for conferences or community events and have come into their own during crises and disasters such as Mumbai’s recent terrorist attack. There is a fine line to be walked with #hashtags with many Twitter users considering it spammy, and with the despicable using the #Mumbai hashtag during the crisis to promote their own interests from marketing to bigotry, hashtags can be easily abused.

So what did SMH do wrong? It would have been far better for @SydMorningHeral to put a #hashtag that related to their Twitter username #SydMorningHeral which would have put them as a trending topic on the slowest news day of the year. Alternatively, no hashtag would have put the RSStoTwitter bot back in the trending topics, based on the content in their Tweets. So not a good look @SydMorningHeral , the bot gets all the Twitter PR, search and trending topics and you get annoyed Twitter users. To quote the Twitter Wiki on hashtags: Used excessively, hashtags can cause annoyance, confusion or frustration, and may lead people to stop following you.

@SydMorningHeral is a great example of confusing the medium with the message. Rather than using the web 1.0 paradigm and using Twitter as a glorified RSS feed to boost their site visitor numbers so they can pump up their advertising rates, @SydMorningHeral could be using Twitter to elicit comments and feedback for their articles. Just like many other Twitter users, the main reason I am on Twitter is to listen to real people and have real conversations, on a variety of topics that interest me.

It’s not about the tools, when it comes to social media, it’s about the way you use them. The tools themselves are designed to make your life easy - but to do a good Twitter brand, you must be prepared to put some real time and effort into it to receive the benefit of real engagement. Rsstotwitter is one of the free, auto converting RSS feeds to Tweets service, which makes it easy to autopublish your blog posts directly to your Twitter account. I personally prefer Twitterfeed - mainly because you avoid any branded URLs which results in the kind of free publicity to the service with no benefit to the poster. And Twitterfeed lets you customise your blog post Tweet’s with a custom prefix, so @SydMorningHeral could have had “SMH on Twitter” which would have alerted Twitter users to a news service they would want to follow, instantly building the profile, and put the brand itself into Trending Topics on Twitter search

Big mistakes companies make when new to using Twitter is to appear be spammy (even when you aren’t) by using hashtags (yes you @SydMorningHeral) and not thinking about a long term build of your brand on Twitter. There has been some great posts recently about Twitter for brands and being a heavy social media user myself, I truly believe you can use Twitter to build a brand. With Twitter, there needs to be some thought and care applied, and a long term view considered. @SydMorningHeral looks like its been set up by the IT guy or the work experience kid rather than a social marketing  or digital brand strategist. It pays to do your homework - sign up to Twitter with a personal account and experience the channel and learn social media etiquette before you make a mess and alienate your potential followers and brand advocates. Also by not having a profile/bio blurb and links to the real site @SydMorningHeral looks like a spammer, even if its as simple as “an RSS feed of SMH.com.au top stories”

News services on Twitter doing it well? BBC News, ZDNet Australia, BBC Sport, @newsnet, @headlinenews, BoingBoing. And the key feature of these services that makes them worth following? None of them use hashtags.