- Write a tweet.
- Leave some room at the end.
- Then keep typing hashtags until you reach 140 characters.
You will probably get more impressions, but the bigger question is: are those impressions worth anything… or are you just attracting spam accounts? Furthermore, are you turning off your legitimate follower-base by using a slew of spammy-looking hashtags?
Since hashtags just celebrated their ninth birthday (check out the first-ever use of a Twitter hashtag here), a lot has changed. What went from being a valuable organizing tool in communication swung across the pendulum to spam and is now finding a balance somewhere in the middle.
Search Engine Journal’s Experiment
In an age where major entertainment marketing campaigns are abandoning Twitter, it’s time to seriously reconsider strategy. A recent infographic from Search Engine Journal, “Why Twitter Hashtags Are Worthless,” puts the contemporary use of hashtags under a critical eye. (We’ve reposted the full infographic below.)
Here’s what Search Engine Journal’s research found in evaluating 137,052 Tweets over a seven-day period:
- 9% of Twitter accounts were “Questionable” (meaning they had a high follower/following count and odd liking/sharing habits)
- 5% of Twitter accounts were “Real” (meaning they had organic following, sharing and liking habits)
- 6% of Twitter accounts were “ZeroSpam” (retweet farms)
ZeroSpam Twitter Accounts…
- Tend to be less than 8 months old
- Follow 0 people and have fewer than 10 followers
- Tweet and Like 5k+ times in less than six months
- Average 6,691 likes and 17,025 shares/retweets
- Total 19.22M false likes and 48.9M shares in less than a year
Accounts identified as “Questionable” follow 4.2x more accounts than are following them. Generally, they use business-related hashtags, most often these:
- #advertising
- #business
- #contentmarketing
- #design
- #digitalmarketing
- #emailmarketing
- #entrepreneur
- #growthhacking
- #inboundmarketing
- #influencermarketing
- #marketing
- #mobilemarketing
- #onlinemarketing
- #pr
- #sales
- #seo
- #socialmedia
- #startup
How Does It Affect Me?
Well, if you use these hashtags for business, then Twitter spam, which brings bad or incomplete data into your analytics, could end up misdirecting your social strategy. Spam of this nature is a growing problem on Twitter; the company reports:
- 5% of the 300M+ monthly users are spam
- 15M monthly spam users spam tweet and like 1,000x/month
- 95B false notifications are generated per month
So, Should You Use Twitter Hashtags?
Hashtags in and of themselves are not bad. However, we have noticed with many of our BuzzPlant clients that conversational Twitter behavior generates much higher rates of impression, engagement and overall value than “broadcast” Tweets.
Do you use hashtags on Twitter? If so, how? If not, why not? Tell us in the comments below.
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