Hashtag Spam on Twitter is a Real Problem

"Hashtags are worthless" ... for businesses trying to use generic keywords to drive engagement.

Who'da thunk it!

Yes, the content of `#marketing` is full of rubbish - go do the same search on Google and you'll see it is mostly SEO'd links.

But take a look at #RobotWars or #GBBO when those shows are on. It's a channel of like-minded individuals all participating in a shared experience. The same for a smallish conference. The event is a social object and the hashtag is the manifestation of people's delight.

Sure, you get the occasional spammer intruding, and a few companies fruitlessly trying to inject themselves into the conversation - but mostly it's just a global stream of consciousness. And I think that's very worthwhile.

I have a bit of an issue with their definition of a "Questionable" account. I mostly use twitter as a way to aggregate a stream of news from people I think are interesting and as such my following/follower ratio is about 10:1.

When the author says Questionable accounts had "4.2x more accounts than were following them" that's not that surprising as that was part of their (flawed?) classification to begin with but I don't think it says anything about them being a bot.

I'm not an heavy Twitter user, but seems like the problem here is with the generic tags. How were #music or #sales supposed to be useful, even if they were spam-free?

Hashtags seem to be useful when they are specific (such as for grouping conversations around a specific event that's currently happening) or as annotations/side-notes, often describing state of mind.

TL;DR

Generic hashtags get spammed. Most people expect this, except marketeers, who seem to think their brethren will not practicing their profession in their home turf.

How do people usually consume hashtags? My Twitter usage is going to the homepage and looking at my feed, which is just posts from people I follow. I don't see how having certain hashtags would make it more likely for me to see a post.