Presenter(s): Franziska Roth
Co Presenter(s): Sterling Baraquio, Emily Gonzalez
Faculty Mentor(s): Dave Markowitz
Poster 141
Session: Social Sciences & Humanities
In this research project, we evaluated the effect of hashtag frequency on musicians’ Twitter engagement. Our project specifically analyzed musicians with albums from the Billboard Top 200 list who actively posted on Twitter in 2017. In total, we scraped Twitter timelines from 93 musicians, including a sample of 53,299 Tweets using a software for statistical computing called R. The program allowed us to observe all 53,299 tweets at once, including metadata (username, engagements, date posted, etc.) Drawing on prior work that suggests that excessive hashtag use may be perceived as inauthentic (e.g., the concept of wear-out from marketing; Danaher, 1996), we found support for the idea that artists with more hashtags per post (as a proportion of their followers) had significantly fewer Twitter engagements. Therefore, the more hashtags an artist uses, the fewer engagements they will receive on their Tweets and this negative relationship was robust across musicians. Our findings emphasize the importance of using digital media traces to form perceptions about people and musicians online. We anticipate that this information can have reputational and financial impacts on artists as brands and change how social media strategy is pursued in the music settings.