Why Twitter #Hashtags Are Worthless [Infographic]

Twitter is a fantastic tool for disseminating information to an audience in real-time. It’s absolutely no surprise that companies, celebrities, and authority figures more and more respond to the public using this medium. Because of that, media organizations are constantly citing posts on Twitter as an almost immediate news source. Twitter isn’t limited to news purposes however as users engage in conversations, link sharing, and posting interesting content since inception.

Spammers have also discovered Twitter as a tool to blast out their messages, often interrupting real information with plugs for their unrelated causes. It’s been estimated that about 5% of Twitter users are fake and although Twitter attempts to crack down on these users, they continue to pop up. Automated tweets also adds another level of complexity to the Twitter ecosystem. The technology has it’s purpose, for example automatically tweeting one of your recent blog posts to your followers, but it also provides ample opportunity to turn a real person into a robot. Another example of a frustrating practice is thanking your recent followers with a generic automated DM, as it adds no real value.

As a side, because of all of these fake accounts I regularly attempt to scrub my fake followers with free tools like CrowdFire, where I remove followers who haven’t been active for more than 6 months.

Now let’s talk about how #hashtags fit into this story.

Hashtags are a great tool to group tweets together among a large number of users. They can effectively combine posts for an event or topic, providing an easy way to follow the conversation. But the problem occurs when spammers target hashtags in an attempt insert themselves.

I recently discovered an infographic by VENNGAGE, which is a company that provides everything you need to create and publish infographics for free. They created an infographic titled “Why Twitter #Hashtags Are Worthless,” and in this infographic they state that “while hashtags used to be one of the most exciting parts of Twitter, bots and spammers now target popular hashtags in their tweets, likes and shares.” Feel free to review the full infographic below:

Hashtag Spam | Infographics

Source: B2C