Our latest whitepaper has revealed that Twitter is the most widely used channel for investor-related material. Although in spite of this, the channel is not being used for direct dialogue between investors and companies but rather more like an efficient channel to disseminate information and to provide context to investors interested in their market and business.

This may change in the future, as more investors begin to engage companies through Twitter. So in anticipation of this, there are some effective ways that companies can use hashtags to help get the attention of potential investors on Twitter.

Hashtags are essentially a simple way to catalogue and connect tweets about a specific topic. They make it easier for users to find additional tweets on a particular subject, while filtering out the incidental tweets that may just coincidentally contain the same keyword.

For example, hashtags can be used by companies to increase the discoverability of a certain message by affiliating keywords that are relevant to their business.  Such as New Gold who appends a lot of their tweets with #gold, #miners and #engineers:

Hashtags can also be used to contribute to a specific event, for example a company’s annual meeting, analyst day or to live-tweet their earnings call such as eBay. Using one hashtag that is clearly related to an event, such as a specific quarterly, like eBay does, helps increase the likelihood that people will discover that event:

Ebay also makes it easy for followers to find the tweets surrounding their earnings as they use a similar hashtag from one quarter to the next i.e.  eBayQ209 for the first quarter of 2009 and for their second quarter of this year: eBayQ210.  Using a consistent hashtag around a recurring event like an earnings call helps the company monitor the conversation and creates a public dialogue around the business.

Additionally, companies who use hashtags to live-tweet an earnings call allows other people on Twitter to ask questions by simply appending the same tag to their tweet. This way everyone who is following that hashtag will see the question.  This may help increase awareness for a company who live-tweets, as a person (who may not be following the company on Twitter at the moment), could happen to see a particular hashtag feed of someone they are following and become interested in the live-tweet stream (and subsequently begin following the company).

The increased popularity of hashtags on Twitter has also led to a number of services which allow people to easily follow conversations around hashtags, one such service is whatthehashtag which enables tweeters to do a search on trending hashtags.  The value of this service is enormous, as it compiles the feed and archives it, so anyone who was not able to follow along or participate in the “live” chat can read the transcript at their convenience.

No one can predict whether Twitter will become a forum where investors and companies engage in dialogue.  But companies can increase the chance that the company will be discovered by potential investors, particularly if they consistently use the same hashtag surrounding a recurring company event like a quarterly call or annual meeting or affiliate their tweets with keywords that are relevant to their business.

Related posts:

1. Best practices for live-tweeting investor events
2. The Use of Social Networks to Engage Investors During the Quarterly Reporting Period
3. SAP: Social Media is a cost effective & timely way to reach investors
4. A Discussion of the Risks and Compliance Issues Associated with Using Twitter
5. Effective Use of Social Media with your IR Website

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