Not understanding #tags will cost you!
In my experience of internet marketing over the years, tags are a topic matter that eludes me. I use tags daily in my blogs and twitter posts, but which tags to use is not that easy. What matters is knowing which tags will get you found.
Blogging Tags
On my blog, I noticed that tags that were too popular didn’t do me much good, because the search engines wouldn’t pick me up under those tags. So, I started trying to use multi-word tags which worked a bit better. Google is complicated and will pick you up under a combination of a tag and other text in your article making it hard to understand what type of strategy to use. If you use tags on your blog, they will do you good, but how they do you good will change over time and be hard to analyze.
Tweeting your blog tags
On a brighter note, your main tags that you use frequently on your blog should be tweeted at least every 2-4 months on Twitter. I make the mistake of tweeting only links to blog entries, but rarely to tags. Tweeting to tags needs to be something you do on schedule. Work it into your daily or weekly routine! My advice is to create your tweets long ahead of time, put them in a printout, and enter them on Twitter manually one by one. Maybe one tag per day and mix them up with your other tweets.
Twitter Tags
Which tag to use on Twitter is not something that makes “sense.” You use tags that get you retweeted somehow. There are many people that follow the feeds for particular tags and might like your content. If those people see you, they will retweet you. If those individuals happen to prefer one tag over another, you will win if you pick the tag that they like. Once again, there is no logic to what makes one tag better than the other. You have to experiment and find out what tags work in general for your account, and what tags work for particular types of tweets.
In general verses particular tweets.
Obviously a tweet about motivation needs a motivation tag. But, if you tweet regularly about general business topics. a business, management or marketing tag might work well for most of your tweets. I was tweeting about outsourcing which is a specialize business topic. I got an average of less than one retweet per post. The minute I started using tags, I started averaging two or three retweets or favorites per tweet. That is roughly four times as much as I was getting before. The quality of your tweet makes a night and day difference, but your choice of tags is equally important.
Now I get 4x the retweets
Once again, by using tags more innovatively and properly than before, I am getting roughly four times as many retweets as before. I am going to be happy watching my accounts skyrocket now! One already is!