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dragonthusiast · 3 years ago

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Sorry, totally forgot about you reblogging this 😅 Here's the paper, if you still wanna read it. It's not very good I don't think but eh. Apologies in advance.

Food-tagging: Analysing the Functions of Hashtags Used by Food Brands on Twitter

This seminar paper aims to analyse the way hashtags are used by official brands on Twitter to interact with their followers, and the functions those hashtags serve, specifically focusing on accounts belonging to famous food brands. Finally, the way brands use hashtags in their posts relating to their marketing strategies and how much marketing plays a role in the choice of hashtags is analysed as well. The theory behind linguistic functions of hashtags is based on the work of M. Zappavigna, and her article Searchable talk: the linguistic functions of hashtags.

Food brand accounts were chosen as they are often very active on social media, and they are all a similar kind of account, as they are selling similar products, which makes them easier to compare because it makes individual differences easier to spot. The brand Twitter accounts selected for this research are Coca Cola, Pepsi, Burger King, KFC, McDonald’s, and Snickers. From each of these accounts, at least five tweets containing one or more hashtags have been selected, with the total amount of posts being 34, and the total amount of hashtags being 49.

Firstly, the frequency of how often hashtags were used by each of the six Twitter accounts was compared. While the Snickers and Pepsi accounts seem to use hashtags relatively frequently (around every second or third Tweet, and sometimes more than one hashtag at a time), the Burger King, Coca Cola, and McDonald’s accounts use them very rarely, ranging from only once or twice a month to even less often than that, with KFC falling somewhere in the middle. Overall, hashtags appeared much less often than originally anticipated.

Interestingly, there seems to be no distinct correlation with hashtag use and the kind of product the account is made to promote. The two most directly comparable brands included in the corpus are Coca Cola and Pepsi, who are direct competitors, but their Twitter strategy seems to be completely opposite, with Pepsi constantly using hashtags and posting almost every day, while Coca Cola uses them rarely and posts less often in general in comparison.

Of the 49 hashtags analysed, the most common was the experiential function, most of which were used to mark a topic that would otherwise not always be immediately obvious from the tweet itself, appearing either at the end of a post, or in the middle, functioning as a word within a sentence.

The best thing to happen to your mouth since fried chicken is not having to wait for it. #QuickPickUp

#NationalCandyDay should be on Halloween. Whoever decided it’s today…maybe you just need a SNICKERS.

The second most frequent were hashtags with the textual function, though oftentimes both the textual and experiential functions were to be found in a single hashtag, as they often used to identify what was being talked about, while also helping organize posts, so they can be easily found, particularly when it came to marketing, which seems to be very frequent with brand Twitter accounts:

Bumping our head to the beat. Tag a rising hip-hop star below that should apply for #PepsiMusicLab.

it’s almost the start of #MariahMenu season and I already have butterflies

The least frequent was the interpersonal function with only three hashtags with that particular function in the entire corpus. This relatively low number of hashtags using the interpersonal function was somewhat surprising, given how often brands talk in the first person and try to connect with people and entertain them. Many hashtags that at first seemed as though they might carry the interpersonal function (such as #QuickPickup) were in fact marketing slogans or names of services offered, however, which seemed to be the reason behind the very few instances of the interpersonal function:

New can. New Formula. Introducing the new and improved Coke Zero Sugar. Now more delicious. #BestCokeEver

When the time changes but your alarm doesn’t, you know what to do. #EatASNICKERS

Finally, it is also interesting to note how often and how many hashtags were used for the purpose of marketing the products a brand sells, some of which seemed to be hashtags directly created for the purpose of marketing on social media, as a hashtag can be used to go viral. For example, one of the Tweets that the Snickers account posted contained nothing except the hashtag #SNICKERSSatisfies five times, and other Twitter users used the hashtag to talk about how eating a Snickers bar has made them feel, spreading the use of the hashtag beyond the actual Snicker brand account.

However, Snickers was not the only brand that did this, and, in fact, it seems to be a general phenomenon that all of the brand Twitter accounts analysed have in common. 29 hashtags in total across all of the brand accounts were used to discuss their products with the intention of promoting them, with varying levels of directness to them. For example, Burger King was the least direct out of the six brands with Tweets such as “we heard it’s #NationalSandwichDay and all we got to say is whopper”. This post uses the hashtag #NationalSandwichDay to promote a product (the Whopper burger sold at Burger King, in this case), but it does not tell the account’s followers to buy it, merely pointing out its existence in a way that might confuse someone who does not know what a Whopper is.

On the other hand, Snickers, in general, was the most direct with the hashtags used for their advertising, with posts such as “When the time changes but your alarm doesn’t, you know what to do. #EatSNICKERS”. In fact, most of their hashtag use was comprised of either telling their followers to eat a Snickers candy bar, or using popular hashtags (such as #SadKeanu, referring to a picture of the actor Keanu Reeves that has become a meme on the internet) to get across the same meaning, effectively using hashtags to make their posts noticeable, and their messaging very direct.

Similarly, Pepsi was also very direct with their posts. For example, the Tweet “Score big with an exclusive Pepsi soccer jersey signed by Chicharito @CH14. Follow @Pepsi on Twitter + Quote Retweet with #PepsiSoccerSweepstakes + tag a friend for your chance to win”. In this case, the account is directly telling its followers to do something that will advertise the brand, using a specific hashtag for their followers to use to do it, and using a prize to entice them, which is a common promotional tactic.

However, seeing brands using hashtags, and posts in general, to promote themselves is not at all surprising, as a brand’s Twitter account is usually primarily a marketing tool used to increase sales, and as such is generally used for that purpose only.

In conclusion, using a corpus of Twitter posts from six different food brand accounts containing in total 49 hashtags, several phenomena were discovered. Firstly, the amount of hashtags used and tweets posted varied wildly between the six brands, with some brands using them as little as once a month, and others using hashtags almost every day. Secondly, the majority of hashtags used contained the experiential and textual function, oftentimes both at once, while the least used function was the interpersonal function. Lastly, it was also discovered that more than half of the tweets contained in the corpus had been posted in an effort to market a product or service, with the hashtags usually playing an important role in how this type of marketing is shared across social media, not only by the brand account itself but also other users of Twitter.

References: Zappavigna, M. (2015). Searchable talk: The linguistic functions of hashtags. Social Semiotics, 25(3), 274-291

Some internet language things I really like:

Phrases like “that’s certainly a thing”, “it’s so shaped”, or “one of the most animals” (is there a name for this?)

when people write with little to no punctuation like they are just so done

More specifically, asking questions without punctuation i.e. ‘what’ or ‘why’. It’s like, you want to know but also you are resigned to the answer?

When people capitalise The Thing for emphasis - particularly if they add a trademark symbol to really drive The Point™ home

How we use both bold and italic text for emphasis, but they convey it in different ways and I can’t quite explain how

Responding to things exclusively with punctuation, because sometimes words fail you and all you can say is !!!

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