Death of a Hashtag - The Case of the Missing Hashtag Impressions

It’s a question I hear all the time.

“My hashtagged tweet was re-tweeted like a bazillion times. Something is wrong here! What happened to all my impressions?!”

It usually goes like this:

1. PersonA Tweets with a hashtag *at the end of the tweet*
2. PersonB Old School RT’s (Re Tweets) the tweet. There’s still just barely room for the hashtag but now no extra characters
3. Person C RT’s Person B’s tweet but their name is longer , and now there are three names in the re-tweet chain. The message gets truncated because it is over 140 characters. BAM! The hashtag at the end gets the guillotine. Cut off in its prime!

Throughout the next four hours we may go all the way through the alphabet with the chain of RT’s, but the hashtag ain’t in em. It’s the case of the missing hashtag impressions.

Person A is probably excited about the play that their hashtagged tweet got, but when it comes to hashtag impressions, the RT’s are meaningless. There is no re-attaching the hashtag to the tweet once it’s been lopped of. All subsequent retweeted messages are no longer associated with the hashtag and will not show up in a count of impressions on the hashtag. Also sad - the retweeted messages and tweeters who are retweeting, will not show up in the search or report for that hashtag. They are now disassociated from the conversation. The tagless retweets float alone in cyberspace like lonely hashtagless horsemen.

Has this already happened to you?

Follow these simple tips to avoid having your own “Dude! Where’s my impressions?!” panic attack.

• Keep your initial tweets SUPER short
• Consider using a hashtag towards the beginning of a tweet (bonus points if you use it in context)
• Keep your hashtags themselves super short. Less characters are less characters
• Be mindful of platforms that auto insert the hashtag at the end of the tweet for you.

There are things you can do to prevent this tragedy of lost impressions from happening to your hashtagged campaigns!