There are plenty of hashtags floating around on social media so there is bound to be some competition. Yours should spark an interest with your audience so that they want to join the conversation. Spend some time researching so that you know what else is being used in your industry. Try to avoid using words or phrases that can become muddled with your competition.

2. # The 3 S’s. Short Sweet & Simple.

Remember, your followers only have 140 characters on Twitter. You need to make sure that your hashtag doesn’t stop people from including their own great content. The shorter it is the better and potentially more memorable. I recommend keeping it between 8 and 10 characters. Don’t’ complicate it with too many words. Keep it short, sweet and simple.

# Make it Relevant to your industry topic

If you manage to create a # that incorporates your industry phrase or topic then you really do have a winner. With this, you can encourage people to stay on topic and any newcomers immediately know what is being discussed.

# Easy on the eye

The best way to avoid confusion, when creating a hashtag, is to make sure that it’s readable. If you combine too many words you risk forcing the audience to decipher your tag and they may lose interest. Time is of the essence and you want to get as many of your followers on board as possible. Nike is very good at this, take a look at any of their campaigns, their hashtags are always between 2-3 words.

# No Space for Misinterpretation

This is the one thing that could literally make or break your hashtag. Clarity is everything. The difference can be seeing a completely different word to the one you imagined. Take the Black Hat eBook, for example, when translated to a hashtag it became the #BlackHateBook. A PR disaster in the making. You have to make sure your hashtag reads well and that your audience immediately understands the conversation that they’re joining.

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Digitrock is one of the best SMO company in India providing social media marketing services and other digital marketing services.

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The reports come from Adobe and Kenshoo Social, which are both part of Facebook’s Strategic Preferred Marketing Developer program, meaning they drive “outstanding positive impact in [Facebook’s] marketing developer ecosystem.”

The first annual Social Media Intelligence report released Monday by Adobe found that Facebook’s ad clicks, ad impressions and advertisers’ return on investment were all higher in 2013 than in 2012. According to the study, which took into account more than 131 billion Facebook ad impressions and 4.3 billion social engagements, Facebook ads were clicked 29% more often in 2013, and the return to investors was 58% higher than last year.

Other advertising metrics like cost-per-click were lower (by 40%), meaning advertising on Facebook is becoming cheaper and more effective, according to Tamara Gaffney, principal analyst of Adobe’s Digital Index. In some cases, Gaffney said, Facebook and other social platforms like Twitter and Pinterest are being undervalued by marketers using the last click model.

The last click model means that users may see an ad for an item they like on Facebook, then buy it online at a later date without going through Facebook to the retailer’s website. The purchase is still driven by the Facebook ad, but Facebook doesn’t always get the credit.

A separate study by Kenshoo Social found many of the same ad metric improvements for the company’s Q3 over Q2. According to Kenshoo’s data, which incorporates info from 85 million Facebook ads, ad clicks were up 14%, cost-per-click was down 9% and advertisers’ returns were 3 times higher than the same figures last quarter.

These improvements were similar to Kenshoo’s findings for Facebook ads last quarter. It appears that marketers can expect similar improvements moving ahead into the future.

“Part of the reason Facebook seems to accelerate each quarter is because of adoption,” said Aaron Goldman, Kenshoo CMO. “As more and more advertisers use it, they get more and more signals about how they can improve their ad delivery.”

In other words, the ads are growing more effective over time, according to Goldman.

Facebook is not alone in its social ad success. Adobe’s report found that both Twitter and Pinterest made significant ground on Facebook in terms of referral traffic to retail sites. Facebook still holds the top spot, but Twitter’s share of referral traffic grew more than 250% last year.

“I had thought that Facebook was running away with the game,” Gaffney said. “What’s coming out of our data set is that Twitter, Pinterest and Tumblr are all making inroads themselves in a marketplace that I thought was already [dominated].”

Have something to add to this story? Share it in the comments.

Image: Facebook(Let), Flickr

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The company did not immediately respond to our request for comment on the cause or extent of the outage, but Downrightnow.com shows there has been a “likely service disruption” for the better part an hour. LinkedIn acknowledged that it is “currently experiencing some issues” in a statement provided to Mashable and in the tweet below:

Our site is currently experiencing some issues. Our team is actively working on it. We’ll keep you updated here. Thanks for your patience.

— LinkedIn Help (@LinkedInHelp) October 23, 2013

LinkedIn isn’t the only social network to experience problems this week. Facebook suffered a prolonged outage on Monday morning, which prevented users from posting and engaging with posts on the site.

Image: Creative Commons, Nan Palmero

The post LinkedIn’s Website Goes Down for Some – Digital News appeared first on Digitrock.

But in this Sunday Comic, our friends Nitrozac and Snaggy at The Joy of Tech show that Google CEO Larry Page doesn’t agree. Should Page fear a Facebook OS?

Comic illustration provided by The Joy of Tech. All rights reserved.

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