HOW COMMUNITIES FORM USING HASHTAGS
Kate McCarthy, Illinois State University
#RedbirdFootball #FutureRedbird
Introduction
To be a community the members must share particular
social traits and common identification. (Humphreys,
2016) Online communities can be formed in many
different ways, like using hashtags to connect with
others. People use social media for different reasons but
one of the biggest reasons if to connect with members of
a community that they otherwise can’t find in real life.
(Caylor, 2015) Using social media in higher education
and be tough to get students to interact. But universities
are trying to utilize hashtags to promote their accounts as
well as forming communities for them. Some
characteristics of strong and successful communities
include many different voices, have a sense of culture,
and an overall goal for their community. (Imogen, 2016)
I chose these two hashtags because they both represent
different, large sections of campus that could show a big
social media presence. #FutureRedbird is used by the
Office of Admissions and is posted by future students of
ISU. #RedbirdFootball is used for the Football Team at
ISU and is posted by fans, the ISU football account, and
many more.
Objectives
As a public relations major, in my future job I may be
asked to research different hashtags and see how well it
does with interaction and usage. Seeing how
communities form with the different hashtags can be
significant for seeing what is popular. I plan to research
these too different hashtags to see how communities
form and answer my two objectives.
1. Measure the communities based on how often they
are used in a 30-day time period.
2. Measure amount of sentiment for each hashtag and
why that happens
RQ: Do hashtags help the communities form within
these specific hashtags?
Results Conclusions
To conclude, the #RedbirdFootball hashtag had more
media exposure so it, in turn, had a bigger community
within. This group of people would be defined as a
community of practice. “A group that is informally
bound together by shared expertise and passion for a
Amount of Sentiment joint enterprise.” (Humphreys, 2016) The social reach is
(positive vs. negative feelings)
also must greater with this hashtag which represents a
larger community that has been created. Because of the
number of viewers of the hashtag, there is a possibility
#FutureRedbird
#FutureRedbird #RedbirdFootball of a bigger community being formed. Most of the
neutral sentiment categorized tweets were from news
accounts that were just reporting the data of the games,
that’s why there was no certain positive or negative
Media Exposure:
How largely the hashtag
feeling towards them. The tweets are largely dispersed
is used by the media between news outlets, fans, as well as ISU affiliated
accounts. With the #FutureRedbird hashtag, the results
#RedbirdFootball were smaller compared to the other, but still significant.
I think rather than a community forming, this shows
people forming over a shared interest. These people
showed more positive sentiment but did have smaller
media exposure. The hashtag was used mostly by the
ISU Admissions account and not as much as future
students as I expected. The account using the hashtag is
still strong and had a lot of mentions throughout the 30-
day time period that was measured. Future possible
research could be looked into on other social media
platforms for like Instagram which can represent a
different population anyways.
#FutureRedbird #RedbirdFootball
Social Reach:
The # of potential viewers that may
have seen this and the potential size
of the audience viewing
Meltwater. (2014) Computer Program.
References
Methods Humphreys, A. (2016) Social Media: Enduring Principles. Oxford University Press.
Caylor, B. (2015) #Hashtags: Your social media secret weapon. CaylorSolutions.
I collected data primarily from Meltwater to see the different statistical interactions. I Bauer, E. (2017) How social media connects underrepresented students to college. EBA.
first researched #FutureRedbird and created some graphs from that data, and then Ebner, M., Beham, G., Costa, C., & Reinhardt, W. (2009). How people are using Twitter during conferences. In
Proceedings of 5. Edumedia Conference.
researched #RedbirdFootball and did the same. After I put the two together and had Foubert. J, Grainger. L. (2006) Effects of involvement in clubs and organizations on the psychosocial development of
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is simply a bigger and more used hashtag than #FutureRedbird so it became difficult Imogen. (2016) Social media- A new fan club community. SMMS Trending Talkable TV.
to read the data. Kane, G. (2018) How social media influences communication on college campuses. MIT Slogan Management Review.
Kuffner, J. (2013) Great social media idea: acceptance letter hashtag. Nonprofit Insiders.