Topicality and Impact in Social MediaDiverse Messages, Focused

Messengers

By: Catherine Booth

BackgroundO “We have a limited understanding of

the factors that make people influential and certain topics popular in Social Media.” (Weng, 2015)

O Hash tags on Twitter have become one of the most well known ways to tie together whatever word/phrase/brand.etc you choose on Social Media.

BackgroundO By simply putting the hash tag (#)

symbol, you have created a world where everyone who uses the same hash tag as you can go explore one another's tweets, knowing and seeing that your hash tag ideas were the same.

O Some choose to randomly put together fifteen words that are of no importance into a hash tag? Why

BackgroundO Others choose to use the hash tag

for a specific reason such as branding and creating a place for everyone interested in the brand to explore by using that hash tag

O Is there a reason for every hash tag, or only some?

Concept 1 (Social Media)

O Social Media has gone from something that barely existed, let alone was anything people spent their time on for fun, to something that has completely enveloped constant time and attention from billions of people.

O Getting on phones and computers almost by habit just to get on Social Media for the heck of it has taken over.

Concept 1 (Social Media)

O Hash tag popularity has been examined from various perspectives, including their innate attractiveness, user behavior, and the role of influential along with their adoption patterns.

O The social network topology is determined by how people are connected.

Concept 1 (Social Media)

O Each individual is represented as a node and each following relationship is an edge linking a pair of users.

O Hash tags spread among people through these social connections and can be mapped into a semantic space, in which each node is a tag and similar ones are coupled forming clusters.

Concept 1 (Social Media)

O Sites have been created to match you with your own common interests and just for a second, you become a picture others can choose to interact with.

Concept 2 (Hash Tag)O In 2014, the destructive effect of the

#NekNominate challenge of social media platforms like Facebook and Twitter caused a sensation.

O The game involved filming someone finishing a whole bottle of hard liquor in one sitting, and sharing it on social media with the hash tag #NekNominate, and it challenged others to do the same

Concept 2 (Hash tag)O It soon became outlandishly popular

and reached millions.

O Lindeque responded to the challenge by filming the event and posting the video clip on the social media platform YouTube.

Concept 2 (Hash Tag)O After the placement of the video and

through the creation of the hash tag #ChangeOneThing on Twitter, the number of Lindeque’s followers on the Twitter platform not only increased dramatically, but an initially destructive challenge was imbued with new content through the use of the hash tag #ChangeOneThing.

Concept 2 (Hash Tag)O The important contribution of the

hash tag as indicated is facilitated through the function of labeling a specific theme and aligning it with other posts seeking parallel voices

O That is how it all started.

Concept 2 (Hash tag)O By simply putting a hash tag in front

of an important message, it became a way to connect with other posts seeking the same message, and it has been that way ever since and will be for years to come

Concept 3 (Twitter hash tag popularity)

O “Because of Twitter’s popularity and the viral nature of information dissemination on Twitter, Predicting which Twitter topics will become popular in the future becomes a task of considerable economic importance.”(Ma, Sun, and Cong, 2013)

Concept 3 (Twitter hash tag popularity)

O Many Twitter topics are annotated by hash tags.

O Twitter is a popular micro blogging service that allows users to post short messages called “tweets.”

Concept 3 (Twitter hash tag popularity)

O Twitter also provides social networking features that allow users to follow other users, to re-tweet (or report) their received tweets, and to reply to user’s tweets.

O Hash tags are widely used in Twitter to define shared context for specific events, topics, or memes.

Concept 3 (Twitter hash tag popularity)

O Newly created hash tags are frequently used to annotate emerging topics or events.

O The popularity of a hash tag is defined as the number of users who post at least one tweet containing the hash tag within the given time period.

Concept 3 (Twitter hash tag popularity)

O Twitter is now one of the most popular platforms for discussing current events from web users.

O After visiting the Nodexl Graph Gallery, I wanted to experiment what happened if I typed in a hash tag that was actually for a certain reason.

Concept 3 (Twitter hash tag popularity)

O I used #milk4kids to do the research.

O I wanted to use this hash tag, as it is something we have focused a lot of attention on in class.

O Perfect example to use because their campaign is so successful, and the way they went about spreading awareness for the campaign worked nicely.

Concept 3 (Twitter hash tag popularity)

O The hash tag itself reached so many on Twitter that the campaign raised almost 2,000 dollars in one day at a grocery store.

O Like all brands, the best way to gain awareness and interest for it is Social Media.

Concept 3 (Twitter hash tag popularity)

O By looking at their Twitter page, I can see all of the awareness it gained and how successful it was.

O Kiss FM radio used their Twitter page to tweet “Stop by Bakers grocery in #Omaha tomorrow to help raise milk for #milk4kids,” and then used the hash tag.

Concept 3 (Twitter hash tag popularity)

O By tweeting something as simple as that, the radio station is spreading awareness of the event to their 1,500 followers.

Wrap-upO “The purpose of the hash tag was

incented as a label for groups and topics in IRC chat.” (Mitchell)

O By adding the # sign before a string of text, users made that string east to find in a search.

O But the hash tag went mainstream thanks to Twitter.

Wrap-upO Twitter had realized what an ingenious

trick its users ad invented, so it began to turn hash tags into links.

When a Twitter user clicks on a hash tag, it goes to the stream of tweets containing the hash tag

O Hash tags that became popular quickly would shoot to the top.

What do you all think?O 1. Do general subjects on Twitter

tend to be more popular than specific ones?

O 2. Do general Twitter hash tags such as #lol tent to be more or less popular than novel ones such as #instantlyinlove?