Today, you need to make every second count when you're building your company's follower base. One of the best ways to do that is with hashtags and at handles, its a way of connecting up to communities very effectively with every retweet that you do, and it works on Twitter, LinkedIn, Instagram, and a lot of other sites. So the better you understand how hashtags work, the more effectively you can reach out to communities and grow your follower base. So let me show you some tips on how to do it. So let me show you an example of how we can use hashtags and at handles to really reach a target audience. So what I have here is a recent wired article that was posted onto my Twitter page, and it's about a 773 million record breech, and it's something that I think would be of interest to my readers. So I want to tell them about it and I want to let them know that I found this great article on wired. Now, you might say whether you'll see it important to actually emphasize it more to get maximum reach. So what I want to do here is I want to go out, and here is the actual article. So as you notice, it has a huge address. I don't want to have that big of an address in my tweets or to put it onto LinkedIn, so I'm going to shorten it and also track it. So I copy that, I go get is good, do the drop-down, click on the Log statistic, and actually paste in the address. So I now have the pasted address. Now, I can create a custom tailored one. If this is on safety and privacy, call it MassivePrivacyBreach2019, I then click on Shorten. So now let's go on. It has created this shortened link that I can use. So I'm going to go over to Twitter, and I'm going to click on Retweet, but I'm actually going to do a comment tweet. So I'm going to say something like @wired to give them the credit. Has a great article on, and so I'm going to put in the hashtag here. So let's put in a consumer privacy and see if that is something that people are using. Now, as you see it is on dataprivacy. So there's the term dataprivacy and datasecurity. So as you see as I type these in, I'm actually going to reach out to anyone who's searching on those terms to read it. So I've set the dataprivacy, datasecurity on a databreach. There we go. Databreach of 773 million emails. Let me double check to make sure Equifax, so I can put that in there. So notice I'm using an at handle. We'll say add Equifax, read about it. I'll make it even more, I'll say yesterday, read about it. Now, I'll copy and paste in. Now I can put in some other ones like for example, GDPR is the privacy legislation happening in Europe, so they might be interested in reading this. I'll just put it in privacy. I wouldn't tell for example, students that are on my social media, social marketing site so I'll talk to them, I'll talk to media of students. So what I can do is I can use ad handles and I could use ContentStrategy. So what I'm going to do is I'm going to send this out. If you take a look at this, I've given credit to wired, I've put in some terms that are going to be of importance to my readership, I've cited Equifax, I put in the actual article link now I can track that, and then I put in some other hashtag terms so that are other community. So if you're searching for CMOs and since this is a marketing article or marketing issue, I can put that in. So the key is that for this one investment of time, I'm taking an article that I wanted to filter and focus on, and I wanted to take it out to my community, and what I've done is I've used a lot of hashtags to reach out to communities well beyond wired, an important interests in this particular topic. I'm also reaching out to different communities that I think might be interested in what I found. So it's a way of amplifying the work of wired, giving out curated content, and doing it in a way that is really interesting to the readership and to really get to as many followers as I can, but also to grow my follower base as much as I want. So in summary, your audiences are looking for information, but they want reliable information, so they're going to seek out an influencer and expert who could give them the relevant timely information that they need. So what I'm suggesting is you become an influencer by connecting up with the communities of interest to your target market. So what I suggest you is to learn the language of social, use hashtags liberally in your tweets to identify topics and themes of interests to your particular community. You also want to use at handles because they identify individuals, companies, and communities that are important and there will be looking for information on this particular topic. It's a part of give to get. If you want to get a lot of followers, you need to give credit to the communities and to the individuals who are supplying you information. So what you want to do is find content that's relevant and timely to your target audience, it doesn't have to be something you create, vet it to make sure it's really useful and good for them, determine if you want to have a tracking link but you don't have to, but tracking links lets you see what's happening with that particular tweet or that particular communication, for Twitter, craft a message with as many hashtags as feasible, remember you can put them in at the end of your message as well as in the message, add at handles for relevant groups or to give credit to the individual where you got the information, posts a tweet with a comment, and you can do the same thing using other relevant social systems. For example, you can not only do this Twitter, but you didn't do it on LinkedIn, you can do it on Instagram, they all use hashtags to identify important topics. For example, LinkedIn uses the at handle to identify individuals, companies, and communities. So these are universal ways of building a follower base very easily. If you have any questions, please let me know. Email me, or you can find me on Twitter, RANDY.HLAVAC.