{"id":7104,"date":"2016-08-24T13:48:41","date_gmt":"2016-08-24T17:48:41","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/venngage.com\/blog\/?p=7104"},"modified":"2025-09-09T07:12:48","modified_gmt":"2025-09-09T11:12:48","slug":"hashtags-are-worthless","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/venngage.com\/blog\/hashtags-are-worthless\/","title":{"rendered":"We Looked At 137,052 Tweets & Found Out Hashtags Are Worthless"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"Hashrags<\/a> When Twitter started it had so much promise to change the way we communicate. But now it has been ruined by the amount of garbage and hate we have to wade through. It\u2019s like that polluted beach that all the swimmers have to use at the Olympics, in more than one way. Both are examples of the possibility of new tech changing everything, but now are full of literal and figurative sewage. While hashtags were actually one of the most exciting parts of Twitter when it was first announced, they have also fed into the rise of the spam problem<\/a>. And it continues to go unchecked by the platform, because even less-than-reputable growth is still growth.<\/span> Instead of throwing a wide net to catch only a few people, spammers can key in on terms to manipulate anything they want. It could be as simple as sharing or favoriting anything with the #Marketing hashtag. Or they could use hashtags to target people who are looking for guidance and push them towards harmful sites. The infographic below highlights what I discovered from my research.<\/span> \"Infographics: Embed this infographic by copying and pasting the text below:<\/em><\/p>\n

<img class=\"aligncenter\" src=\"https:\/\/venngage-wordpress.s3.amazonaws.com\/uploads\/2016\/08\/cef8a68a-241d-4301-bdbe-6d0f796ee3a6-2.png\" alt=\"Infographics: Hashtag Spam\" \/>\nSee this <a href=\"https:\/\/venngage.com\/blog\/hashtags-are-worthless\/\">infographic on Venngage<\/a>.<\/pre>\n
Either way, spamming hashtags is one thing that I hate most about the internet. And as a former tech journalist that focused on startups and innovation, I dealt with this on a sometimes hourly basis. But after being driven to the point of closing my account it piqued my interest to find how much spam and bots that some hashtags attract, especially related to marketing and tech. <\/span> Because if I can learn how to avoid this social media mistake<\/a> and thrive on Twitter, you can too. <\/span> Now, I am aware that hashtags are insanely powerful<\/a> when it comes to promoting events, facilitating live chats<\/a> and publicizing social movements. On the other hand, for businesses, they are more trouble than they are worth. And honestly, at this point, they look unprofessional. <\/span> Also, just as a teaser, we found that the those exploiting hashtags drive BILLIONS of false notifications per month.<\/strong> And that is on the low end of the estimate.<\/p>\n
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Part 1: Hashtags Don\u2019t Work For Businesses<\/h2>\n
First, let\u2019s look at our sample of data, which included 137,052 tweets over a seven day period. We keyed in on tweets that featured some of the most popular hashtags in the business world. They are:<\/span> \"We<\/a> Finding the hashtags was the easy part; we still had to categorize more tweets than I have ever seen in my life. To start, we gave each of the accounts a designation based on the number of accounts they followed and the number of accounts who followed them. To bump up their numbers, bots and the less savory users of Twitter will follow massive amounts of people, hoping to get a few followers in return. So the first test we used to spot potential spam accounts was to see if their following count largely outnumbered their follower count. <\/span> The second test to confirm or deny whether an account was a spam account was to count the number of tweets they liked and the number of tweets they shared. <\/span>With many of the spam accounts that number was either exactly the same or off by only a handful. That gave us confirmation that these accounts were using bots or auto favorite\/RT tools to look like they are a real account. Another final check was to look at the age of these accounts, with a lot of the questionable ones being less than a six months old and the real ones being more than 2 years old.<\/span>  The designations can be seen below:<\/span><\/p>\n