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Hashtags and followers

An experimental study of the online social network Twitter

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Abstract

We have conducted an analysis of data from 502,891 Twitter users and focused on investigating the potential correlation between hashtags and the increase of followers to determine whether the addition of hashtags to tweets produces new followers. We have designed an experiment with two groups of users: one tweeting with random hashtags and one tweeting without hashtags. The results showed that there is a correlation between hashtags and followers: on average, users tweeting with hashtags increased their followers by 2.88, while users tweeting without hashtags increased 0.88 followers. We present a simple, reproducible approach to extract and analyze Twitter user data for this and similar purposes.

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Notes

  1. http://support.twitter.com/articles/166337-the-twitter-glossary.

  2. https://support.twitter.com/articles/166337-the-twitter-glossary#m.

  3. https://dev.twitter.com/.

  4. https://dev.twitter.com/docs/auth/oauth.

  5. https://github.com/ryanmcgrath/twython.

  6. https://github.com/evek2/tw-hashtags.

  7. https://blog.bufferapp.com/a-scientific-guide-to-hashtags-which-ones-work-when-and-how-many.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Blekinge Institute of Technology, Karlskrona, Sweden

    Eva García Martín & Niklas Lavesson

  2. Twitter Inc., San Francisco, USA

    Mina Doroud

Authors
  1. Eva García Martín
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  2. Niklas Lavesson
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  3. Mina Doroud
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Corresponding author

Correspondence to Eva García Martín.

Additional information

This work is part of the research project “Scalable resource-efficient systems for big data analytics” funded by the Knowledge Foundation (Grant: 20140032) in Sweden.

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Martín, E.G., Lavesson, N. & Doroud, M. Hashtags and followers. Soc. Netw. Anal. Min. 6, 12 (2016). https://doi.org/10.1007/s13278-016-0320-6

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