One Health News: salute, ambiente, animali e società - A cura di ISDE, Festival della salute, Marketing sociale. N°18

Simply put, social media hashtags are designed to enable search on social channels. First coming to prominence on Twitter in 2007 in order to combat the short lifespan of a tweet, hashtags are used to identify a trending topic or specific subject so that interested people can find it, no matter where it appears in the tweet stream. And given that Twitter is all about conversation, hashtags also facilitate interaction between like-minded people with common interests.

What Twitter is so good at …is helping like-minded people across the world find, connect, converse and work with each other. The hashtag is the means by which much of this is achieved. Andrew Spong, PHD (Co-Founder of Health Care Social Media Europe #hcsmeu)

From a marketing perspective, where social media is considered the primary channel for communication, ensuring the visibility and longevity of a campaign or brand message can be a problem. The popularity of Twitter and its ‘real-time’ reporting, as well as the cumulative nature of following and tweet interaction produces a barrage of tweets. Today, an average of 8566 tweets per second were published on Twitter.

So how can a healthcare brand ensure its message is seen and heard? Repetition is one answer, but such a strategy carries with it the potential downside of alienating and losing brand advocates and followers. Advertising is another, but it has obvious cost implications. Using hashtags is not only more cost-effective, but also more productive in attracting and engaging with an interested audience, and in prolonging the lifespan of tweets and social posts. A study by Buddy Media found that using hashtags in tweets can double engagement[1].

A prime example of the importance of hashtag use within healthcare is the Healthcare Hashtag Project. Set up in 2010 by Symplur, this project aims to make the use of Twitter more accessible for providers and the healthcare community as a whole. The project maintains a database of relevant hashtags, and encourages submission of new hashtags in order to facilitate the exploration of healthcare subject matter on social media. Results to date are impressive. Its most famous healthcare hashtag, #hcsmeu, receives an average of 290k impressions in a single day.

Just as social media is transforming healthcare, hashtags are transforming healthcare marketing. Online community discussions, Tweetchats, real-time conversation, events, trending topics and much more are all powered by hashtags, not only on Twitter but also on other social channels.

- See more at: http://www.eurocomhealthcare.com/why-use-hashtags-in-healthcare-campaigns/#sthash.A1KFEs9X.dpuf