Have Hashtags Become the New Slogans?
July 28th, 2015 by
In the world of marketing, businesses seem more focused on creating a captivating hashtag to correspond with the newest campaign rather than a fresh slogan. Is it possible for the two to coexist, or are slogans as we know them well on their way to becoming a thing of the past?
Slogans 101
Slogans are defined as brief, catchy phrases used in marketing campaigns with the intent to direct a customer’s attention toward a particular product or company. Often referred to as taglines, especially in advertising, these short strings of words often stick with the company for a long time or forever if they are successful.
However, that success may have been transferred over to the power of the hashtag, as there has been a steady decline in the use of advertising slogans in both the United States as well as the UK over the past 20 years. Perhaps they were on their way out before hashtags were more than just a pound sign smashed into a string of words.
The Hashtag Takeover
Hashtag is defined as a word or phrase that is preceded by a hash or pound sign and used to identify messages on a specific topic, generally on social media sites such as Twitter.
The newly invented hashtag first appeared as a practice of writing for Twitter posts during the 2009-2010 Iranian election protests by both English- and Persian-speaking users.
However, the term was presented in a blog post by Stowe Boyd, where “Hash Tags = Twitter Groupings” was written Aug. 26, 2007. Twitter jumped on board and began to hyperlink hashtags in tweets July 2, 2009 as a way to link all corresponding tweets to a particular hashtag to be incorporated in search results for Twitter users.
A Look at #TodayAsWeKnowIt
Fast forward to 2015, and hashtags are used for numerous reasons, including event promotion, campaigns, human rights, awareness and absolutely for marketing, making the hashtag far more versatile than the slogan. For example, the recent trending hashtag #mondaymotivation received more than 76,000 tweets as of July 28, according to Twitter. The #betterforit Nike Women brand campaign hashtag, for example, has received more than 800 tweets just this month. That’s according to Hashtracking.com, a website that tracks hashtag mentions. And so we circle back to the question at hand: Is the traditional slogan to be replaced by the ever-present hashtag?
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