Summary The database will be a collection information on trending hashtags on Twitter. We will be focusing on the hashtags used on the Starbucks account @Starbucks and Microsoft account @Microsoft, and hashtags in the Entertainment category. We will use the data gathered on the hashtags used in these three spaces, and reference it with events and products promoted in the tweets. We will perform data analysis on the engagement and performance of the hashtags such as recording the lifespan of the hashtag, any repeating patterns and level of interaction. The database will serve as a resource for businesses and individuals who are looking to promote their product or service and how they can replicate successful hashtags for promotion.
Problem Statement In the 11 months into 2019, over $560 billion US dollars has been spent on advertisement. This number is expected to only increase in the coming years at a rate of 5% per year. That is an increase in $28 billion annually. The reason behind the large sum invested in advertisement is that advertisement is the critical driver of foot traffic - a major definer to a company’s success. This has been demonstrated by many leading companies, whose advertisement accounts for the majority of the companies’ total revenue. For example, advertisement accounted to 70.9% of Google’s total revenue. That amounts to over $136.2 billion US dollars.
This project proposes to replace advertisement agencies and allow companies to directly reach the consumers. All of this can be achieved with no cost. This means that $560 billion dollars can be reallocated to improve other products and services. The outcome of this project would put smaller companies, that may not have the resources to spend on advertisement, on the same playing field as titans like Google and Facebook.
Goals We aim to discover any patterns or similarities across successful hashtags to achieve our goal of learning about the qualities of trending tweets in order to recreate the event for future product or service promotion.
Scope Our business space is on the Twitter platform. We found that businesses are able to promote their product with little to no additional cost by creating popular hashtags. A successful example is Popeyes: they used Twitter to promote their new chicken burger using the hashtag #ChickenWars. People were using their hashtag and retweeting Popeyes’ tweets to the point in which their burger had sold out nation-wide.
Seeing the power of trending hashtags, we decided to study the lifecycle of tweets: this includes retweets, replies, hearts, and trending hashtags. We will focus on businesses that are trying to raise awareness or promote their service online. We decided to focus on Microsoft and Starbucks because both companies are active users on Twitter and consistently use hashtags to reference their products. This will allow us to collect data on their products quickly and easily, as it has already been laid out in hashtag form. We will then compare their sales of the products to the lifecycle of the hashtags to uncover features of what makes successful tweets and hashtags. With our database, other businesses can study the data behind viral hashtags and replicate this event with their own product.
We decided to focus on the Entertainment category as our third metric because often there are many events and products being promoted on Twitter. For example, the hashtag “GrammyAwards” trends annually during the winter between the time of the nomination and the ceremony. By collecting data on this event over the course of 10 years, we can see the career projection of nominated and award-winning artists, the level of user engagement over time, popular categories and more. An application of this could be for future nominated artists to study how previously nominated artists used their Twitter platform to gain votes and win the award.
Key Stakeholders Starbucks Starbucks is one of the main stakeholders in this project. They would like to know what their most successful Twitter hashtags are. Qualities that made them successful and so they can replicate the event for all their products. Microsoft Microsoft is another main stakeholder in this project. They stand to gain similar results from Starbucks in that they can see their most successful Twitter hashtags to replicate the event for their future products. Entertainment Industry Specifically the PR teams in the entertainment industry stand to gain from this project. By collecting successful hashtags across all entertainment categories: music, films, dance, art and more, they can broaden their marketing techniques to apply to all products that they release. Other Businesses Other businesses also gain a tremendous amount of insightful data because they can study from large companies, like Starbucks and Microsoft, how their Twitter hashtags reached the level of engagement and success that is did and what makes hashtag from those big companies fail. Especially for small businesses or start ups, in which funding may be limited, using Twitter to promote their services is almost free in that users will engage with their tweets without needing to be paid to if it is successful.
Constraints
Due to the limitation of the disk space required to compile the data on Twitter, we will only be focusing on trends in the following categories: The United States. Within the last 2 years. Non-promotional tweets.
References Lopez, J. (2019). Popeyes Spicy Chicken Sandwich to Make Its Triumphant Return. [online] 107.7 the end radio. Available at: https://1077theend.radio.com/articles/radiocom/popeyes-spicy-chicken-sandwich-make-its-triumphant-return [Accessed 4 Nov. 2019].