#AskGaryVee Episode 68: Optimizing Hashtags, Recycling Old Content & Bookstore Marketing

#QOTD: What animal scares the crap out of you?

#Timestamps:
0:00 Intro
1:24 – How do you optimize the use of hashtags for campaigns?
4:18 – You’ve talked before about ‘recycling’ a tweet, but what about other content such as a blog post? How often do you pull a piece from the archives to dust it off and republish?
6:39 – If you were going to market for a brick-and-mortar bookshop, where would you start?
10:03 – How do I overcome my people pleasing nature?
11:18 – As a b2b manufacturer of building products, how much time/$$ should we spend on marketing to consumers vs customers?

#LINKS
One Is Greater Than Zero: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4fsYWXrGGcE
GaryVee Loves Twitter Video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SUy45S2eTZs
Ask a question: https://www.garyvaynerchuk.com/what-youll-need-to-get-garyvee-945936926.html
http://instagram.com/joshguilar/

Hashtag culture is very important, especially to Instagram and Twitter. Those are really the two places that it massively over-indexes. It’s an incredible way to get discovered.

If you’re asking “How do I get my hashtag going”, you might be in for a surprise with my reply. I have the #AskGaryVee hashtag, but it’s really a way for me to gather questions, as well as create a community that people can talk to each other on. For a campaign, it’s different. You need to understand two things. One, hashtags are not ownable. Maybe some of you didn’t get it, so I’ll say it again: hashtags are not ownable. It is insane to me that people in 2015 still think you can own a hashtag. I walk into a lot of brand meetings where people will say things like “Let’s own the #GetEm hashtag.” My usual response is: what the hell are you talking about?

First and foremost, any hashtag you create could be taken tomorrow by someone else and used differently. If you can remember all the way back to 2009, Skittles put out a hashtag and ended up with a lot of really crude things on their hashtag. Even worse, Skittles made their homepage a feed of that hashtag, where everything that was posted using it showed up. Yikes. It still happens today.

So, how do you optimize hashtags for a campaign?

Flip it. Instead of trying to own or establish a hashtag for a campaign, look at hashtags that are trending and very popular on the two main platforms already and try to figure out how to reverse into them by putting out your piece of content, storytelling. Ride the wave. Be creative.


Gary Vaynerchuk builds businesses. Fresh out of college he took his family wine business and grew it from a $3M to a $60M business in just five years. Now he runs VaynerMedia, one of the world’s hottest digital agencies. Along the way he became a prolific angel investor and venture capitalist, investing in companies like Facebook, Twitter, Tumblr, Uber, and Birchbox before eventually co-founding VaynerRSE, a $25M angel fund.

The #AskGaryVee Show is Gary’s way of providing as much value value as possible by taking your questions about social media, entrepreneurship, startups, and family businesses and giving you his answers based on a lifetime of building successful, multi-million dollar companies.

Gary is also a prolific public speaker, delivering keynotes at events like Le Web, and SXSW, which you can watch right here on this channel.

Find Gary here:

Website: http://garyvaynerchuk.com
Wine Library: http://winelibrary.com
Facebook: http://facebook.com/gary
Twitter: http://twitter.com/garyvee
Instagram: http://instagram.com/garyvee
Medium: http://medium.com/@garyvee

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