FWIW - my personal experience has been that hashtags are most useful for appearing in search results. So in general, they are most effective for big “events” - such as elections, conferences, policy initiatives, holidays, etc. If it’s not something you would search for - it’s probably not something others would either. The idea of hashtagging general topics (like the general #Animals vs. more specific #SavePetey) is what I think people have been turned off by. I rarely find myself going to Twitter to see “what’s going on with animals” - but going to Twitter to find out about the Save Petey effort (as one fake example) is something we are increasingly accustom to doing.

It might be helpful to start documenting some of these best practices on Meta-Wiki so people submitting tweets for retweet have something of a checklist to look over before submitting them.

-greg


On Oct 29, 2015, at 12:11 PM, Jeff Elder <jelder@wikimedia.org> wrote:

There was a study a couple years ago that showed people are less likely to click on tweets with hashtags in them. But I think most people agree that well-used ones are helpful. One, MAYBE two per tweet. 

On Thursday, October 29, 2015, Joe Sutherland <jsutherland@wikimedia.org> wrote:
I'm by no means an expert, but I'd probably recommend a maximum of two hashtags in a tweet. I think the vague ones don't work as well as the more specific ones here. But Jeff is your guy for these kinds of things :)

Joe

On 29 October 2015 at 04:11, Pine W <wiki.pine@gmail.com> wrote:

In general, are there optimum numbers and kinds of hashtags? I imagine that there is research on this somewhere. (Agreed that hashtag soup causes cognitive load which may cause people to skip trying to understand what's being said.)

Pine


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