9 Tips for Building a Great Twitter Hashtag

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I’ve used enough and been punished enough by ill-though out hashtags that I’ve put together a few tips to help save our fingers in the future.

Assume many of your hashtag users will be typing with their thumbs on their cell phones. Thumbs get tired of gymnastics.
Keep the hashtags short. My reco is 8 letters or less. Don’t waste my tweet allowance with your non-creative and overly long hashtag.
Do not use numbers. They require fancy finger work on cell phones. (Sorry #MRIA2011)
Do not use fancy characters like – or _ as they also require fancy finger work on cell phones. (Sorry #MRA_AC)
Use capital letters on the first letter of each word. People don’t have to actually type the capitals to use the hashtag. (e.g., #BlogChat)
Use meaningful words so non-users will recognize it. (e.g., #Research, #BlogChat)
Along the same vein, avoid acronyms unless they are undeniably obvious (e.g., #SXSW, #ESOMAR)
Do a search on Twitter and see if anyone else is using the hashtag already. (e.g., #MRX is 99.9% market research, 0.1% weather)
If all else fails and you’ve been stuck with a hashtag like #follow_our_really_great_conference_4_ever, then program your phone to auto-correct to the hashtag. My phone auto-corrects “mr” to “#MRX #li”. During conferences, I change the auto-correct to whatever the conference hashtag is. Easy peasy!