Discussing Hashtag Marketing Mistakes with RiteKit CEO, Saul Fleischman

Yes. Osaka.

Half my life, 26 years.

Used to be. Now, I mainly speak in English.

Philadelphia.

My last year at Penn State, first semester, I did something called Semester at Sea around the world on a ship. I’d never traveled before, and I loved it, and I decided I’m not going to work in Philadelphia. So as soon as I graduated with a BA in film, thought I was going to be a director. I came back to Japan and off and on, I’ve lived here.

It’s just my sister, me, my parents. And parents were artists—strange, zero logic in my experience, which is really tough when I’m dealing with developers. I’m kind of like learning logic as a whole new language.

I guess the most poignant thing I could say is, my father was a pretty accomplished artist. People would see skill, ability, and he never sold a single painting. He would take these expensive trips—we didn’t have a car—and he would go to New York City trying to get his stuff taken on consignment in galleries, and it never happened for him. The reason I say this is poignant is that what he wanted was a lot of what we want with our products, because we’re a self-funded startup, 100% repping it. He didn’t expect to earn a living from his work, but what he wanted was that sign of approval when somebody opens their wallet and actually pays money for something. We’re the same way. It’s proof of our value proposition. When someone actually pays for something, that’s a big day, right?

All thanks to my dad, yeah. Or if someone applies for one of our internships—they’re unpaid—and when they hear our backstory, towards the end of it, I mention I did my second unpaid internship when I was 43. Yeah, I wanted to get a foot in the door at a startup, and I couldn’t find a job, so I did one for the experience. It’s things like that, true stories, and sort of finding them as you go along, then using them because they resonate with people.

I had to figure it out. Yeah. So I worked for Japanese manufacturers mainly, and it was mostly business development and working with overseas distributors or customers. I was useful for the Japanese companies because their English is generally terrible. They could have 200 employees, none of them speak English. I can communicate in the office, but then dealing with the world, they’re relying on my English. And then it’s just do what you can type of situation. So I didn’t study marketing per se in school, so I did that hands on, and then with our team. Yes, I do a lot of the hands-on marketing stuff. I do all of our social, every bit of it myself. Wow, well, we’ll talk about that. It’s mostly automatically generated. Saves me time, but yeah, there’s that, and then it’s mostly just business development, working with partners and enterprise-level business that I do.

So there was a huge earthquake and tsunami. You might remember: Fukushima, nuclear reactors on fire. I was here at that time, and I found that the Japanese government didn’t want us to know everything that was going on—culpability, bad, bad choices—and the truth is coming out in Twitter. So I was kind of glued to Twitter, but what I noticed is that people are adding 234 hashtags to the same tweet that looked like they mean semantically the same thing: JP, quake, Japan earthquake, Fukushima. And I thought, it looks like they’re just guessing which hashtag is going to have an audience, which one are people clicking on, or which one are they tracking, like in a column in Hootsuite or TweetDeck, something like that.

So yeah, that’s why I came up with the concept for Tag Bag. That’s what I first called it: Tag Bag. You’re gonna find what looks like evidence that this is the right tag and save it in a bag for using later—a group of hashtags. I found a developer in Japan, an English guy, John Waller. He built a one-page website and promptly got hired somewhere. I lost my team after that, so I went back, did that internship I was telling you about, yeah, worked with a guy at Ideas Watch, learned a bit from that. And I said to him, what if we built something that could actually be self-sustainable economically?

We threw around ideas. We picked up Tag Bag, and he said, are you in love with the name? I said, oh no, oh no. And we came up with Right Tag. This was our first product, and it was a matter of looking at your topic, suggesting hashtags, and giving you whatever evidence we could for positive outcomes. I left it open to what that could mean. So a lot of people want to know, if I use this hashtag, will people follow me and we continue to say, never suggest that we are a follower growth tool with Right Tag or any of our products. People may find they tend to get followed, but it’s not really cause and effect, so we don’t make that claim.

But we started with Right Tag. People wanted more. They wanted also publishing, and they wanted the ability to advertise on URLs they share. So we added more and more to Right Tag, and then people said to us, you know, I like paying Sendible or Buffer for publishing; how much of this price is going for stuff that’s duplicative with what you’re offering? So we broke up Right Tag into the publishing and social post creation tool, right? Forge the automation tool, right? Boost the thing for advertising on URLs that you share, similar to Sniply. We have Rightly and Right Tag, and then we built each of them further and continue to.

So at that time, Right Tag in its inception was a matter of typing a hashtag, and we would give you analytics, and you’re supposed to deduce what you didn’t deduce. Most people, you know, marketing. So you would look at, well, there’s this many unique tweets that contain this hashtag versus these are my positive outcomes. There’s a big differential there. That’s a good thing. People didn’t understand it, so we gave them color grading. Michal Huda—check our CTO—came up with the concept, the first visualization of what a hashtag could be expected to get you.

So we started that color grading, and we gave that as well if you wanted some numerical analytics. What Right Tag does now is hashtag generation for text or for image. So rather than doing research, it’s just tap or click on an image and get your hashtags. This is the main thing.

Well, you’re working, so we have to stay out of your way, though. Okay, so we are out of your way. So what you would do is just write—if you’re using the browser extension, you right-click on the image and then choose the context menu. Us laypeople, non-developers, call it the mouse right-click menu, but I do. Then you get the Generate Hashtags option, and instead of going to a website and doing five, six minutes of research, it’s 1.8 seconds. And you have your hashtags, and you can also, if you want to dig into data, compare them, open a page showing numerical analytics, or you could just say, yep, looks good, copy, paste.

I think there are some that believe in sticking to a small group and really pounding on them. I believe in looking at the post or the text of the post, or the image, or both. What are they about? Because that’s a single piece of content. If it’s a Facebook post, an update, or a LinkedIn update, or it’s a tweet, it’s that one thing, and that one thing can be what people are looking at. So your hashtags should be relevant for that post, not just about you. What is Shane Barker’s organization about? You’re going to have that collectively over a whole body of tweets, but really it’s about that post. Look at that image. Do the hashtags appropriately for that text and image post. That’s what I believe in. And it also means you’re reaching wide, because there’ll be some elements of that image. Our machine looks into that image field. I mean, we can even find the time of day based on the light. Is it morning? Is it evening based on the light? Things like that.

Sure. We’re looking at positive outcomes, which is basically the impressions that posts, tweets, Instagram posts are getting. We’re looking semantically—what is your text post about? Are there operative words in there? What if we push two of them together? We do that as well. Then we look at what the hashtag should be. But if those hashtags aren’t getting people anything, we don’t suggest them. So it’s really drilled down to ones that are getting positive outcomes.

I think in general, we started with Right Tag. This is our ninth year. I’ve done a lot of experimentation, as have others on the team. What I can tell you is over a body of posts in any social network—not just one single post, but over a whole body, 100 of them, maybe several hundred—use hashtags strategically, put a little thought into them. Whether you’re spending five minutes of research like the blog posts say, or you use a quality hashtag generation tool, either way, you’re going to get a bit more from hashtags, which is why you should spend next to no time on them.

You should just use hashtag generation, and then we help. We have other tools that will take a post and do the hashtags for them. Write, Forge, and Write Boost do that, but with Right Tag, it’s, “Give me my hashtags,” deselect one or two you don’t like, copy, paste, and get on with your day.

Yeah, in our About page, we have a tiny section in the SEC, in the center manifesto, and one of the elements says nothing about social media because we’re not in love with social media. This is what we’re about. We want to do meaningful work, and we assume our customers do as well. Our lives are limited. When you do worthwhile stuff, automate what can be automated. Save yourself, save time. So we want to save ourselves time. We want to save our customers time. That’s what it’s actually about.

Generally, those that are the most successful don’t talk about it.

Yeah. I have people telling me Saul, good news, bad news. I’m not telling anyone about RiteTag, and the reason why I like to keep it as my secret weapon is that if I start looking, for example, at who’s following us in Instagram, who’s following us in Twitter, it makes sense for that type of person if you look at what they’re about. So there’s plenty of random-looking accounts. You get some of them, but you also get more and more of the ones that make sense, that they would follow because of what they do. That’s heartwarming to see. That works, but it’s—I wouldn’t say masses of them. People do get more, but it’s also more engagement. Something got someone’s attention, like I was saying before, that individual piece of content and the hashtags were right for it, and that reached other people. You didn’t even think about the wooden table in your image, but that’s what got someone’s attention. They’re also interested in what Shane Barker does—yeah, okay—but that’s what got them over. That’s the beauty of hashtags, right?

Yeah, one thing I would say is, rather than using our tool, it’s use a hashtag generator. Compare them. Try, and there are others out there. If you search in the app stores, there are those. I just did an article on comparing hashtag generators. So look for something that gives you one account for both mobile and desktop. Look for something that’s doing hashtag generation for text as well as for images, images, right? And look for something that’s affordable and worth the money. Companies doing it well—I’m not really noticing them a whole lot. So we’re a tiny team. We’re a team of three.

Yes. And an API with 13 solutions for enterprise. We’ve had many more people working on the team, off and on. So there’s over 100 people who have contributed to what we have. A lot of them have moved on. Some have gone to Google, Amazon, Facebook, Snap after us. It’s been a jumping-off point for a heck of a lot of people. They’ve cut their teeth, proven what they can do with us, and moved on. But we’re currently three people.

When you’re asking me about looking at what companies are doing particularly badly, I would just say, I don’t like to see when someone believes in sticking with, “I’m in content marketing, so I should use content marketing, content strategy, digital strategy,” six hashtags, and just pound on those. Yes, you’re coming up for those. But your content—that individual tweet I was talking about—it’s got this image, it’s got this going on, and the text is about this unique thing, and you’re going to be relevant when you’re getting hashtags for that, but you’re also reaching out, casting a wide net in a relevant way. So that’s what I like to see.