The Great Hashtag Debate

Amnesty International demonstrated this earlier in the year, with their social media timebomb for International Women's Day. While this was carried out across various social media platforms - Twitter formed a key part of the strategy. Users were asked to post the same message, with the hashtag 'oneten'

The tweet got mentioned around 3,000 times throughout the course of a day. I took part as it was clearly for a worthy cause, but at the same time I couldn�t help wondering what the value of my tweet was, and if there was really any direct benefit to the campaign. If the objective was general awareness, then I'm sure this was achieved.

For businesses however, awareness is not usually enough of a KPI when experiementing with social media. Hashtag competitions are the latest phenomenon on Twitter for businesses. Web design company Moonfruit made a big hit in the social network space, with their #moonfruit competition. The concept was simple - users were asked to write any tweet using that hashtag, to be entered into a competition to win a MacBook pro over 7 days. You could enter as many times as you wanted. The campaign clearly worked, on Twitter at least. Moonfruit was frequently a top trending topic (until it was removed by Twitter).

But what happened outside of Twitter? Analytics from compete.com show that the site was only capturing 1.99% of the traffic for the search term 'moonfruit'. Presumably the majority of traffic was going through to Twitter, and editorial coverage/blog posts around the subject. The site ranks number one for the term on Google, but clearly people had little interest in clicking through to the site. It is one thing to own the Twitter space, but quite another to bring this into the 'real world'. I'll readily admit that I didn't even know Moonfruit are a web design agency until I began researching this post.

MPORA - Europe's largest action sports website, are certainly finding out the value of trending this week, with their competition to win a MacBook Pro each day this week. The campaign is running until the end of the week, with a special prize tomorrow. All you need to do is write a tweet with the hashtag #mpora .

I entered yesterday, though I'll admit I wondered if all I was doing was contributing to some ambient noise.

So what is the value to a company of being a hashtag phenomenon? I caught up with Mark Tempest, the head of digital at MPORA, to find out how the campaign is going for them.

Firstly the concept behind the competition. Mark said they opted to run the competition through Twitter as it is 'a fantastic open platform and the hashtag allows 3rd parties to collect entries or trends via the Twitter API or RSS.' As well as measuring tweets internally, MPORA are also using the free tool Twist to measure tweets.

Brand awareness is obviously a clear objective here, but MPORA have managed to bring this value back to their website. As well as tracking over 30,000 tweets with the hashtag so far, site traffic is up 150% and registrations have quadrupled. These stats are clearly very impressive and it's encouraging to see a business able to utilise a huge presence on Twitter and turn it into a tangible business benefit.

It's also worth remembering that while MPORA are making headlines this week, they have a community on Twitter (currently over 4,000) that will be around after the campaign. I asked Mark how he plans to use the Twitter account once the competition is over. He said "We will continue to grow the account and use it to keep the action sports community up to date on the latest content and news.  Each day we get up to a hundred or so videos uploaded to MPORA - some of these are great so we use twitter to tell our followers about them."

I'll admit that I was cynical about the concept of hashtag competitions and wondered what it really meant to a business to be 'trending' on Twitter. It's the resulting activity on a company's site that gives this meaning to me.