Noor Kamaludeen

Hashtag #

Methodology of Research

Presented by : Noor Nabeel Kamaludeen

Submitted To Dr. Lubna Bassam

Abstract

The purpose of the research is to clarify the meaning of the hashtag and will deal with its
use on Twitter in particular because the first platform from which it was launched is Twitter.
Dealing with the hashtag requires high accuracy and intelligence in use and at the same time, it is
considered a weapon in the war because it affects the role of users in the country's economic,
social and even cultural conditions.

Through my research, I found that this tool is irreplaceable. It has become a key to any
word written on networks of all kinds. It was developed and directed for many purposes. It
became one of our cultures, and she even appeared on TV as a slogan of incitement or
promotion. The research included several examples of the interaction of this tool and its
importance in some areas.

It did not take much to spread this tool, but it may require an effort to remove it, and it
may not go away because, as I said, it was included in the culture, war and other fields. It
became one of the basics of virtual life then real life.

This phenomenon emerged on "Twitter" more than ten years ago, and since then it has
expanded to almost all social media sites, and this phenomenon has gained a lot of popularity
until the "#" sign has been expressed in short words about many and significant meanings. The
hashtag or hashtag is a window mark followed by anything, be it a word, slogan, moving phrase,
or number. In marketing reality, hashtags are used to classify content, promote awareness-raising
and increase social shares.

Writing hashtags in the annotations of your posts on social media merges your posts with
a set of similar content that users explicitly search for
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Hashtag

Introduction

A hashtag is a tool that is used on some social networking sites such as Twitter and other
communication sites, and the hashtag symbol is the square icon at the top of the keyboard #, and
through this tool, the word that has been created has become a keyword, can be accessed by
other users.

On the left of the "Twitter" page, there is a list of the hashtags that are most frequently
discussed on the site, and they deal with political, social and other issues. Many news websites
and news agencies were quick to monitor these interactive tags, and publish the news and reports
they carry, but the question arises: How does the tag come out after it was just an idea in the
mind of persons? The hashtag is a phrase or word denoted by the #, used for first time in website
"Twitter", and the tag is used to create a dialogue with multiple perspectives on a specific topic.
It is a successful tag because it is brief and direct, means something important to many and
affects their lives, and avoids using more than one tag in a Tweet. It indicates that the most
successful tags are those that consist of a maximum of one or two words, provided that each
word does not exceed six letters.

Usually ten people start writing about a certain topic, provided that they have many
followers, or so-called influencers, before the tags begins to circulate widely. Then the tag tops
the list of tweeters on the site. The spread of the tag is sometimes planned, and sometimes it does
not require advance planning, so the tweets are quick to write on a tag that carries a certain story.
But it appears on Twitter and tags do not carry societal value, but they achieve a great spread on
Twitter, and it is ridiculous and humorous.

The tags that carry a humanitarian issue are more influential and widespread because the
tweeters believe that there is a responsibility on their shoulders on this issue, while the tags that
are devoid of a message will cease to have effect as soon as they retract and leave no trace. The
effective marking is not limited to the borders of the virtual world but extends to reality.

Literature review

Hashtag

The use of hashtags was introduced on Twitter as how to classify messages (tweets) consistent
with the subject , thus allowing users to simply look for specific content and share information
associated with it. Social designer Chris Messina is credited to possess produced the very first
Twitter hashtag, when, back in August 2007, he posted a tweet reading: “how does one feel
about using # (pound) for groups. A hashtag typically consists during a string of characters
(possibly including numerical digits) preceded by the pound symbol # it's called hash. this mix is
a label for the message itself and is linked to an enquiry for those characters which allows the
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Hashtag

retrieval of all tweets handling the labeled topic.By making it easier for users to find tweets
related to a specific subject, hashtags are no longer simply used as a categorization method, but
they are specifically created by individual online users to comment on, praise or criticize ideas
(#democracyisbetter) or people (#celochiedebeppe), to promote brands (Coca Cola,
#AmericaIsBeautiful) or events (#Wimbledon), to spread and provide updates on breaking news
items (#hearthquake), they are created by several social media experts, educators, institutions
and major companies from all around the world to bring in more followers and keep them
involved. For these reasons, hashtags show up continuously on Twitter, together with the
evolving stream of content. Some of them have success and propagate, while others die
immediately after birth and are restricted to a few messages. (Caleffi, 2015)

Twitter

Since 2006, the social media platform, Twitter, known as a so-called micro-blogging site, has
displayed dramatic growth. Through the use of only 140 characters, users have the opportunity to
send short ‘tweets’ out into the world. In the use of Twitter, an important communication
medium had been discovered, which especially as far as the distribution of news is concerned,
changed the world on a variety of levels. For example, this platform played an influential role in
political events, such as the Arab Spring, as well as the two most recent American presidential
elections. Social media is also increasingly changing the dynamics of the existing work
environment.

A good example of this can be found in journalism as a career with news being conveyed
much faster by means of so-called public journalism. As an illustration of this, the tweet that was
sent 10 hours before the first news reports appeared by Sohaib Athar (@ReallyVirtual) regarding
the secret operation during which Osama bin Laden was killed by American special forces, can
be mentioned. (van den Berg, 2014)

Characteristics of Twitter hashtags

Twitter did not have a hashtag feature at first. The user could only share messages with a specific
person by pre-cursing a name or Twitter ID with the symbol (@), some users thought that
Twitter needed to support a tagging function. An early Twitter user, Mr. Chris Messina,
suggested hashtag use by adopting the Internet Relay Chat convention in 2007, which became
accepted as the Twitter tagging feature. Hashtags, words or phrases, are the primary way in
which Twitter users organize the information they tweet. The hashtags that are currently most
widely used appear in the Twitter sidebar as trending topics. This enables tweets on a specific
subject to be found more easily by searching for their common hashtag than by searching for the
full text of specific tweets.

Hashtags are quite useful in the context of conferences or events, provided that the
hashtags have been announced or promoted, all event-related information can be tagged in the
same way and shared by the participants. A Twitter hashtag archive is the result of a collective
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Hashtag

effort because the posts can be aggregated into a single stream with the common #hashtag.
Twitter hashtags still suffer from their fragmentary and redundant nature, as do other
collaborative tagging applications. Twitter hashtags and tags created by other tagging
applications differ in the way in which they are created and shared, but probably not in kind.
(Chang, 2010)

Evaluation metrics

Twitter has no special support for marking and adding a hash icon to the front of the word adds a
new tag. Although hashtags can be used for personal categorization, it is in many cases the
intention of people to introduce new hashtags to turn them into symbols used by the user
community interested in a particular topic and discussing a particular topic, The aim of these
hashtags is to find and summarize messages related to that theme. This is similar to the role of a
(common) URI in the Semantic Web. There are many good criteria that a hashtag should perform
in this role, similar to a "cool URI" that differentiates it from a bad URI. In the following, some
of these features are formulated. There is some method we use for retrieval of user concerned
information from the #hash tag.

Frequency: The frequency of hashtag, we can measure a community user by number user
or the number messages send, with this we correlate frequency both way. Specificity: hashtag
always deviates the meaning of a word used in a twitter trend, for example: #panama, in real
Panama, is a country but here its deviates and address to Panama offshore companies' revelation.
Consistency: The different users used the same hashtag in different messages, show the same
topic. (Sajjad, 2017)

Classifying Hashtags

To understand the types of hashtags advocacy organizations are using, the study took an
inductive approach to see what categories of hashtags might help patient advocacy organizations
deliver more effective messages to their target audiences. To develop the coding scheme, a
random sample of 1,000 of the 75,934 tweets was analyzed. Of these tweets, 226 were retweeted
messages or messages sent by other organizations that the organizations in our sample decided to
re-post. Given that the intentionality of hashtag use in such retweeted messages was less clear,
the researchers decided to concentrate hand-coding efforts on the 774 original tweets out of the
random sample of 1,000 (83 of the 99 organizations are represented in this sample of 774
tweets). Of these 774 tweets, 264 did not contain a hashtag, while 510 contained.

Based on the inductive coding of data, the 8-category coding scheme for hashtags
presented in Table 1 was developed. The table also shows how frequently each hashtag type
occurred within this random sample of tweets. The most prevalent category is termed Public
Education hashtags, which includes three types (medical condition, knowledge base, and policy)
and account for half of the hashtags (50.4%). The second type of hashtag is the Event hashtag
(19.3%), which often reflects fundraising and awareness-raising events. The third type of hashtag
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Hashtag

(3.2%) is the Call-to-Action hashtag. These hashtags can be used to mobilize audiences for
collective action, whether to engage in direct online or offline action or simply to assist in further
disseminating its public education messages. Tags that reflect the organization’s Values and
Goals (9.0% of hashtags) are a fourth category of hashtags. Values and Goals hashtags help the
organization differentiate itself from others in a way that helps serve to strengthen the
organization’s brand. They are related to the fifth category of hashtags, called Branding.
Branding hashtags (7.2%) employ some variant of the organization’s name, its programs, or
slogans unique to the organization. (Saxton, et al. 2015)
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Hashtag

In 2009 Twitter, for example, changed the phrase by means of which users were
encouraged to tweet news, from the original ‘What are you doing?’ to ‘What’s happening?’
(Crystal 2011:11). Through the use of this altered question format, users are now encouraged to
formulate tweets that are focused more in an outward direction, on events in the environment,
rather than on more personal aspects. Another significant development that would permanently
change the social media landscape was the evolution and use of the hashtag. The documented
research in this article will now focus in more detail on tracing the origin, use and meaning of the
hashtag in the social media environment, with particular reference to the Twitter platform. 02

Born on Twitter, the use of hashtags has now spread to other social media sites, like
Instagram and Google+ in 2001, or Facebook in 2013, and it is largely and regularly employed
by millions of social media users. What is more, hashtags are no longer restricted to the online
world, since they are now starting to appear also in the linguistic landscape and in a variety of
offline contexts, such as advertising boards, commercial shop signs, street manifestation posters
and banners, television spots and commercials, printed magazines and newspaper headlines,
political slogans and speeches, to mention but a few. (Caleffi, 2015)

I've mentioned in the introduction that the number of words used in one hashtag consists
of a maximum of one or two words, provided that each word does not exceed six letters. The
idea will be more clear through this table:

A new word or a new rule?

At the beginning of 2014, the destructive effect of the so-called #NekNominate challenge
on the social media platforms Facebook and Twitter caused a sensation. By way of background
information, the following explanation pertaining to this craze can be cited: “Known as
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Hashtag

‘NekNomination’, the game involves filming someone finishing a whole bottle of hard liquor in
one sitting, and sharing the feat on social media with the hashtag #NekNominate challenging
others to do the same”. Initially, the #NekNominate challenge was merely aimed at daring people
to consume as much alcohol as possible and to film the event, and then place it on the social
media along with a challenge to others to do the same. However, after this challenge led to the
tragic death of two persons in Ireland.

Another challenge by giving food to a poor man, filming this event, and posting the video
clip on the social media platform, YouTube. In his introduction to the video clip on YouTube,
viewed early March 2014 by approximately 192,000 people, owner of the idea wrote: “Downing
a can of Castle Light is easy ... Imagine if we all harnessed the power of social media to make a
real difference in people’s lives”. After the placement of this video on YouTube and through the
creation of the hashtag #ChangeOneThing (2014) on Twitter, the number of owner of this idea
followers on the Twitter platform not only increased dramatically, but an initially destructive
challenge was imbued with new content through the use of the hashtag #ChangeOneThing. The
important contribution of the hashtag as indicated in the previous example is facilitated through
the functions of labelling a specific theme and aligning it with other posts seeking parallel
voices. (van den Berg, 2014)

Research questions

This study aims to answer questions about, What is the hashtag? how did Twitter handle it? and
how did you find it? Why hashtags affect the thinking of a social media user? How effective is it
and how is it used?

I am searched for several points that caught my attention about hashtags like: Characteristics on
Twitter in particular. Classifications divided into, according to the interest of users. Is hashtag
just a word, or has it become an indispensable electronic tool?

Finding and analysis

1. The hashtags are a very useful way to reach users who are not following your pages on
social media.
2. On Twitter, the hashtag golden number is 2.
3. Increasing the number of hashtags on Instagram is a good way to secure interaction with
your audience hashtags will not help you enough on Facebook, Pinterest and Google +,
but they can still be used.
4. The hashtag includes a logo for a specific brand, or the name of a new marketing
campaign, and helps you unify your image in front of all kinds of audiences.
5. Focus on more appropriate content hashtags to get more engagement on your posts on
your social media pages.
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Hashtag

6. Do not participate in common hashtags unless you have something important to add so
that you are not blocked. Tools like Hashtagify, Tagboard, RiteTag, and Twitanalyzer can
tell you which of the appropriate hashtags you can use.
7. Always remember to keep your hashtags as short as possible, suitable for your brand and
expressing what you offer the public.

Conclusion

Hashtag can contribute and to making many changes in several societies, stressing that many
issues are not known to some parties and are known only after the emergence of the hashtags
around them on social media, and this method requires some parties to reconsider their handling
mechanism with the issues and with what appears to have problems so that they are immediately
remedied without waiting until the owners of these issues resort to social media, although some
of the issues raised today in social media, some of them lack credibility.

Social media in general and (hashtag) in particular have also become a distinct source of
income and an investment project for some entities and stakeholders. Many marketing and
material offers have emerged that can bring up any issue regardless of its authenticity or reality
to become a public opinion issue and everyone trades through means Communication, which
causes some entities to issue a statement, either by denying it or working to verify it. Social
media has become an important role in shaping public opinion about ideas and trends and has
also provided the opportunity for expression and opinion. Therefore, whoever has the keys to
controlling these social sites has the ability to control public opinion.
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Hashtag

Reference

Caleffi, P.-M. (2015). The ‘hashtag’: A new word or a new rule. Skase Journal of Theoretical
Linguistics, 12, 01–02.
Chang, H. C. (2010). A new perspective on Twitter hashtag use: Diffusion of innovation theory.
Proceedings of the ASIST Annual Meeting, 47(November 2010), 03–04.
Sajjad, Y. (2017). Making Sense of # hashtag in Twitter Making Sense of # hashtag in Twitter.
(October), 2.
Saxton, G. D., Niyirora, J. N., Guo, C., & Waters, R. D. (2015). #AdvocatingForChange: The
Strategic Use of Hashtags in Social Media Advocacy. Advances in Social Work, 16, 07.
van den Berg, J. A. (2014). The story of the hashtag(#): A practical theological tracing of the
hashtag(#) symbol on twitter. HTS Teologiese Studies / Theological Studies, 70, 1,3.