A new perspective on Twitter hashtag use: Diffusion of innovation theory

Abstract

Twitter is a fast growing real-time social media tool. As Twitter evolves, more and more people are partaking in sharing what is happening around the world through various Twitter applications. Hashtag use has become a unique tagging convention to help associate Twitter messages with certain events or contexts. Prefixed by a # symbol with a keyword, a Twitter hashtag serves as a bottom-up userproposed tagging convention. It also embodies user participation in the process of hashtag innovation, especially as it pertains to information organization tasks. Diffusion of innovation (DoI) is a theory that helps to explain the adoption process of an innovation by modeling its entire life cycle according to the aspects of communications and human information interactions. Hence, diffusion theory offers valuable insights into interface design that supports Twitter hashtag use and access. It also assists in evaluating hashtag life cycles and thus offering information required for decision-making, in regard to hashtag management.

Strategies for Growing User Popularity through Retweet: An Empirical Study

“…Therefore, we agree and confirm what Page [32] and Chang [33] mentioned, where HT is a necessary key that achieves visibility, becoming a search term for those users interested in tweets about the subject. The results of their analysis also demonstrate that HT is used to reach more people as a means of a search term.…”

Twitter as a Platform for an Israeli Community of Information Science Professionals

“…Professionals use Twitter to stay informed on current trends relevant to their practices and to simultaneously communicate with other team members (Zhao & Rosson, 2009) or colleagues, and to acquire conference and publish updates (Reinhardt et al, 2009). Therefore, the role of Twitter in professional settings is more as a platform for real-time content sharing than for social networking (Chang, 2010).…”

“…The distribution of these types follows standard deviations in a bell curve: from innovators (2.5%) and early adopters (13.5%), through early (34%) and late majority (34%), to laggards (16%). Diffusion of Innovation Theory offers valuable insights regarding the adoption of an innovation by modeling its entire life cycle (Chang, 2010).…”

“…These patterns of adoption are similar to those of another relatively small Israeli professional community practicing Educational Technologies on Twitter (Blau & Neuthal, 2012). Diffusion of Innovation Theory offers valuable insight modeling an entire life cycle of the innovation adoption (Chang, 2010). It seems that moving existing small professional communities of practice on Twitter takes about five years and at the time of writing this paper we are approaching the end of this process.…”

Navigating the massive world of reddit: using backbone networks to map user interests in social media

“…Social media users typically organize themselves around specific interests, such as a sports team or hobby, which facilitates interactions with other users who share similar interests. For example, Facebook users subscribe to topic-specific "pages" (Strand, 2011), Twitter users classify their tweets using topic-specific "hashtags" (Chang, 2010), Del.ici.ous users bookmark links with topic-specific tags (Golder & Huberman, 2006;Halpin, Robu & Shepherd, 2007), and reddit users post and subscribe to topic-specific sub-forums called "subreddits" (Gilbert, 2013).…”