Hashtags & Digital Storytelling

By Katie Burce and Shannon Mashek | WRD 530 DePaul University Summer 2015

Hashtags have become an integral, regular aspect of our online and social communities. Because of their ability to aggregate related content into one collection, users have come to rely on them as a source for information relevant to their interests. As such, both nonprofit and for-profit organizations have started to incorporate them into their engagement efforts.

Hashtags will only become more widespread, so there's no better time than now to begin experimenting with these as a way to create engagement for your own digital story collections.In this post, we'll discuss some of the current uses of hashtags in digital stories, offering the following five tips:

• Incorporate hashtags directly into your digital story collections
• Include RSS feeds on story pages
• Promote easy sharing across multiple platforms
• Choose the right hashtag
• Craft a unique hashtag for each of your story collections

What is a hashtag?

A hashtag is a way of categorizing a social media post. Within individual social sites, hashtags aggregate posts by multiple users into a collection of related social content. The hashtag becomes a searchable link, taking you to the collection of posts across the site using that specific hashtag. Hashtags are predominantly used on Twitter and Instagram, but can also been seen on Facebook and other sites.

Because hashtags allow browsing of posts outside a user’s set of followers, they have been extremely useful as marketing tools. Both nonprofits and corporations have jumped on the hashtag bandwagon to increase awareness, advocacy, fundraising and sales efforts. The use of hashtags in campaigns not only connects that organization to today’s social sharing culture but also allows users to act as an extension of the organization’s marketing team.

Nonprofits

Many nonprofit organizations have adopted the use of hashtags to promote their digital storytelling campaigns, gaining more awareness of their causes and increasing fundraising efforts. FamiliesUSA is one such organization, establishing the hashtag #mycoveragestory alongside stories of citizens who have benefitted from the Affordable Care Act (also see #donttakemycare stories). Social sharing was heavily promoted with each video and the hashtag was automatically added to the message for the user.

The Throwback Summer organization employs hashtags in a slightly different way. They develop hashtags that aggregate user-generated content for specific collections, thus creating a searchable social library of content tied to their organization. (#GrandparentsDay is their current endeavor). Because of its simplicity and integration into most digital platforms, the hashtag has become an invaluable tool for promoting content and increasing engagement.

Corporations

It is likely no surprise that for-profit corporations have capitalized on the hashtag’s capabilities to promote their products, services and cause-related endeavors. Under Armour, for example, launched the I WILL What I Want campaign last year to promote its line of women’s athletic gear. This cross-platform campaign featured the stories of female athletes overcoming rejection and adversity to achieve their goals. The hashtag caught on across Twitter, Instagram and Facebook as users showcased how they applied the phrase to their own lives. The campaign was the company’s most successful since their founding:

In another example, a popular video blogger helped Nike launch its #MakeItCount campaign in 2012 as he documented his travels around the world. Upon releasing the video, the Make It Count hashtag spread through social media as users share their own #MakeItCount moments.

While many nonprofits may not have the resources to deploy campaigns on this large of a scale, they can still look to corporations for inspiration when it comes to incorporating hashtags into their digital story collections in small, yet effective ways.

5 Hashtag Tips for Nonprofits

• Incorporate hashtags directly into your digital story collections
  Always Corporation’s #LikeAGirl campaign perfected this strategy. The hashtag truly is central to the campaign: It’s featured across their website via text and images, in their YouTube videos, and so on. Their videos, in particular, call upon the viewer to share how they are unstoppable, with the hashtag incorporated directly into the graphic elements of the videos. Today, the #LikeAGirl campaign sees a consistently high level of engagement across social media. Nonprofits can mirror this strategy by incorporating their hashtags into their digital stories, thus raising awareness and increasing engagement within the social sphere.

• Include RSS feeds on story pages
  A great way to get users to promote your hashtag is by including them in the conversation. An easy way to do this is to include an RSS feed on the page with your organization’s stories that shows user-generated responses using your hashtag. Or you could follow FamiliesUSA’s example and dedicate an entire page to an automatically updated feed of Tweets using your hashtag:

• Promote easy sharing across multiple platforms
  Social media sites extend your stories’ reach to new audiences. An easy way to promote sharing across multiple social sites is to automatically generate sharing messages with your hashtag when clicked by the user, as FamiliesUSA did with their #mycoverage and #donttakemycare campaigns.  #BuiltByImmigrants and DaDaab Stories also employ this tactic in order to raise awareness about individuals stories related to their cause. This simple tactic saves the user from having to manually enter your hashtag into their social content, increasing its use.

#BuiltByImmigrants:

#DaDaabStories:

• Choose the right hashtag
  Find a hashtag that connects to your brand, but make sure it isn’t already being using on social media. Using a hashtag that already has a separate meaning will break the brand connection before it even begins.

• Craft a unique hashtag for each of your story collections
  As noted above, The Throwback Summer uses hashtags specific to certain story collections they want to generate. Nonprofits who may have multi-faceted missions or causes may want to consider following suit. Doing so allows them to generate that social library of content that is dispersed across several social platforms but all ties back to their organization. Not only does this extend the organization’s reach, but it is also a way to illustrate the diversity of their organization and potentially reach new supporters.