Which is better for marketing: an original hashtag or one that is well-used?

Well, Citibank has chosen a hashtag — #wellplayed — that was already in circulation for its most recent, summer-infused marketing effort, which began this month to promote its mobile banking.

Here’s the bank’s latest #wellplayed tweet:

Summer’s heating up, but you’ve got it made in the shade w/the Citi Mobile App. #WellPlayed http://t.co/wASHUOIzQX pic.twitter.com/EdcvLUem8C

— Citibank (@Citibank) June 26, 2015

The marketing efforts points to the URL http://www.citi.com/easierbanking.

According to Hashtracking.com, since June 21 #wellplayed has been used on 1,340 occasions, including 458 original tweets and 620 retweets. Obviously, much of that is not from Citi. As of this writing, Citi’s #wellplayed tweets and retweets comprises only 7% of the overall activity of the hashtag.

#Wellplayed seems to be used most in sports commentary, generally in both a serious and ironic light (and often relating to the game of cricket, oddly enough). But the phrase is flexible, and can be applied in many different ways to punctuate a point. Citi has shown this side of #wellplayed, as it has used the hashtag four times before its most recent tweet to advertise the Citibank Mobile app. Two of the tweets have also mentioned Popmoney, the Fiserv peer-to-peer money transfer system that Citi offers.

However, the flexibility of the hashtag means that Citi can base an entire Twitter ad campaign around it without ha4ving to stretch too far to unite its messages under one banner.

The reach of #wellplayed, that is, the amount of people who have the opportunity to see the hashtag on Twitter — meaning that it was in their Twitter timeline — is currently at 4.3 million, according to Hashtracking.com. How many of these have actually seen the hashtag is impossible to know. If 7% of overall activity for #wellplayed has been generated by Citibank’s Twitter account, then around 300,000 people have seen Citi’s marketing content.