You may want to watch what you're hashtagging because, as it turns out, you might not be doing much good.
Putting hashtags on your tweets may actually be "damaging" to your chances at a wider awareness of your postings, according to Daniel Victor, a social media staff editor at the New York Times.
"Too many people use it, so no one goes there," is the way Victor puts it (in noted homage to Yogi Berra) via an article for Harvard's Neiman Journalism Lab.
Although most of us use hashtags to attempt drawing a larger crowd to our tweets, it's "unlikely" that Twitter is doing its job in allowing hashtags to really make a difference, Victor suggests, "especially for the most popular hashtags. There are many useful exceptions, but hashtags for big news stories are particularly vulnerable to mathematical futility."
Victor points to the fact that the hashtag #SuperBowl was employed three million times over a five-hour period on Super Bowl Sunday, and yet it's obvious that not all three million (or more) tweets were read by every single person looking up "#SuperBowl" on Twitter.
"Though there were peaks and valleys, three million tweets over five hours comes out to an average of 167 tweets per second," Victor calculates. "To say that someone would have to search for '#SuperBowl' in the split-second you sent it would actually be a little generous; assuming they'll notice your tweet if it's in the most recent 10 tweets, users would have a window of 1/17 of a second to find you."
It's especially easy to see how so many hashtags about the same darn popular thing might be meaningless considering the fact we all know that quantity doesn't exactly tend to trigger quality these days. After the 30th disappointing tweet about #SuperBowl, it's likely the Twitter folks would give up and search for a new hashtag.
Perhaps #BestDip.
If so many of the same worthless hashtags are a problem, now think about the way Twitter itself filters the wheat from the digital chaff. Smartly for Twitter, the most "relevant" tweets from those with a large clocked "following" get prioritized as "Top" tweets on the site. But those with large followings mean Justin Bieber, Ashton Kutcher and their ilk. Not you. Every time the Biebs gets mad at a new journalist, his tweet will receive better presence on Twitter than yours no matter what the hashtag because, well, he's Justin Bieber and you're simply not (which these days may actually be a good thing).
Some tweets get brought up via search that don't even employ the hashtag people might be searching for in the first place. Victor has found this to be true with "#socialmedia," funnily enough. You could use the hashtag if you want, but apparently it won't matter much.
"Does this mean the millions of Twitter users who deploy such hashtags to increase their reach are all wrong? Well...yes," Victor says.
Although Victor agrees hashtags (like a lot of things these days) can be effective in more intimate/local circumstances (say, a conference), they just don't make sense in a larger forum.
The more looming problem is, in Victor's opinion, that aside from the fact that hashtags might not be helpful: they're also very unsightly. Victor feels that a tweet cluttered with useless hashtags makes your post hard to look at. The easier it is to read, the more likely your post will be retweeted, and thus it might actually be more effective to leave your post hashtag-free.
"We need not banish the hashtag," Victor concludes, "but let's start putting more thought into when we're using it."
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Read more: What The Heck Is Wrong With Twitter?
