With the implementation of hashtag search on Facebook, this platform is becoming an incredibly useful marketing and lead prospecting tool.
Here’s some background on the hashtag, and tips for utilizing Nimble to harness this cresting trend:
The History of the Hashtag
The pound (#) symbol began with one guy on Twitter in 2007, looking for a better way to create Twitter Tag Channels. Since then, the hashtag has grown precipitously and is now ubiquitous – according to recent studies 58 percent of respondents utilize hashtags on a regular basis. Facebook and > 1,110,000,000 active users promise even greater usage and utility towards finding people using hashtags.
Hash Signals
The primary goal of using hashtags is to help content (and the poster of that content) be discovered. Within Facebook, hashtags turn topics and phrases into clickable links in your posts on your personal timeline or Page.
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As more people come to the realization that Facebook hashtags enable the same kinds of content discovery on Twitter, the ability to find, monitor and interact with hashtags will grow. For their part, Facebook is looking to enable more of this behavior:
Hashtags are just the first step to help people more easily discover what others are saying about a specific topic and participate in public conversations. We’ll continue to roll out more features in the coming weeks and months, including trending hashtags and deeper insights, that help people discover more of the world’s conversations.
Tools like Nimble will find the platform contains a wealth of useful features, geared specifically towards the search function:
By plugging in a hashtag search on the Signals tab (search algorithm works without hashtags too), Twitter, Facebook, and Facebook Fan Pages are crawled. You can also save searches for greater efficiency.
Then the fun begins. Your hashtag-led search spawns an unlimited amount of contacts (read: Leads). Bring these contacts into Nimble (Import Contact) and the rest of their profile fills in.
You now have a contact within Nimble. Any future correspondence with this contact will be archived here. You can now decide the best ways to interact. The options are manifold, from the basics of Add as a Friend or to Repost their message to other social networks, on up to the more complex– reviewing other social posts and demographic information… The get to know this person phase.
I should mention that this works the same way for companies that are posting hashtag messages to Facebook.
As you pull contacts into Nimble, you can also set them on follow-up tracks. The way to do this is easy– Go to the specific contact record — the Contact Page View (CPV) — and Take Action from the dropdown:
I like to Add Task here, as I can set Due Dates and even assign the Task to myself or others on my team. Any Task, Note, Meeting, Activity, or Deal that this Contact is assigned to is automatically archived in Nimble — so there is a complete history of interactions.
But Wait, There’s More
Now that your contact is in Nimble (I’d be remiss if I didn’t talk about this cool feature), any time that contact interacts with you, Nimble will surface this interaction in our Signals Tab. This means you need not worry about missing the contacts you interact with, because Nimble will let you know! The process of continual nurturing and interaction easily becomes habit.
Summary of Benefits
By engaging with hashtags on Facebook on a regular basis — even a couple of minutes per day — then following up in the ways illustrated above, you should find your number of leads and professional network consistently growing.
Eric Quanstrom is VP of Marketing & Sales at Nimble. He writes frequently for the blog.