#teamgrimmy vs #teammoyles hashtag battles!!

So today was Nick Grimshaw’s first radio 1 breakfast show, taking over from Chris Moyles in a move by Radio 1 to try and attract a younger demographic. In the run up to todays show, the marketing and promotion heavily involved the use of the hashtag #teamgrimmy  allowing people to show their support for the new show. Using this hashtag they got some of Grimmy’s famous friends to show their support including the likes of Justin Bieber, Alexa Chung, Rita Ora and Harry Styles. Not all my cup of tea but they have some big followings on twitter.

With Chris Moyles having a large and loyal following, the hashtag #teammoyles started for his fans to show that Chris Moyles may be gone, but he’s definitely not forgotten. Using Topsy to compare the number of tweets both the hashtags were getting, it looks like #teammoyles may have come out on top!

Topsy only measures tweets that includes links and tweets which get retweeted to try and not include tweets by bots, so there will be a lot of tweets by people that didn’t include  links and didn’t get retweets, but this applies to both hashtags so should be pretty representative of how both hashtags did overall.

This is another good example of how when using a hashtag, you have to really think ahead to how people are going to interact with it. There are plenty of examples of where hashtags get hijacked and ripped to shreds and recently the Waitrose hashtag #waitrosereasons was taken over by people taking the mick out of the up-market retailer and although no real harm was done to Waitrose’ reputation (they actually dealt with it pretty well, acknowledging how funny some of the tweets were), it goes to show that marketers really need to be careful when unleashing the power of the hashtag.  I have no doubt that once Grimmy has been going for a while #teammoyles will quieten down and #teamgrimmy will be a good way for fans of the new show to find each other but today, the #teammoyles supporters have definitely made their point on twitter.