#ANALYSIS

I decided for my last official project for my emerging media class to research the hashtag and synthesize the data into a visually pleasing infographic. I researched three major areas on the hashtag. First, 3 main types of marketing strategies of the hashtag, to-do’s and not to-do’s with your hashtags, and finally 5 factors to keep in mind when coming up with hashtags. I chose to do further research on the hashtag because it was something that can be very powerful in its ability to increase the visibility of my social media content. Over the semester I worked on creating professional tweets that focused on emerging media. From this assignment I saw how powerful a tool the hashtag is. I also saw how much more I needed to develop my hashtaging skills. Over the semester I was able to get much better at finding relevant content and captions to tweet about, however, I felt I still needed to work on my hashtaging ability. This is why I came up with the idea to further research how to successfully use hashtags. Below is the infographic I created with my synthesized research.

Testing the Research

After reading "Social media adoption: The role of media needs and innovation characteristics" by Izzal Asnira Zolkepli and Yusniza Kamarulzaman from the Journal of Computers in Human Behavior published on November 22, 2014 I became interested in exactly why the people closest to me used the social media they choose to be the most important to them. This lead to me to do a little experiment of my own to get some insight on why people use the social media they use the most. For my mini faux-experiment I designed a questionnaire for my 25 closest friends to fill out. The first question was, "What is your favorite social media platform (i.e. Facebook, Twitter, Snapchat)?" Then I asked "What is the strongest reason you use it for?" I gave them five reasons for why they use the particular platform of social media. The five reasons came from the five social media needs we discussed in class from Zolkepli's and Kamarulzaman's reading. Specifically they are, cognitive needs, affective needs, tension release needs, personal integrative needs, and social integrative needs. However, to take out the jargon I boiled each reason down to a simple definition of each social media need this transferred to:

1. Cognitive needs: To stay informed
2. Affective needs: For pleasure, emotions and affirmations
3. Tension release needs: As an escape
4. Personal integrative needs: To find out more about myself and other people like me
5. Social integrative needs: to connect with family, friends, and the world. Build my social circle

To ensure people would not be swayed from the actual social media needs terms I took out the social media term out an only used the simplified definition. The final survey looked like this. Afterwards I totaled all the results and created an inforgraphic to make the data easier to read. This is what I've come up with:

From the infographic one can easily grasp that out of my friends, Facebook is the most popular social media platform. One can also see that most of my friends are using their favorite social media platform because of their affirmative social media needs and social integrative needs being a close second. 

Although reading empirical scientific research articles can be very helpful for a better understanding of wide spread trends I was curious to see what is going on closest to me, particular in my own social circle. I discovered that most of my friends use Facebook because of the social media need for affirmation. This data is particularly interesting to me because it represents a small segment of one of the largest consumers of social media. As one can see from this poll women in college ages 18-24 are the largest consumers of most social media platforms.

Even though I only surveyed a few of my closest friends, which represents a minute portion of the overall population, it is comprised of one of the largest segments of those who use social media. If I were developing a new social media platform I would look at focusing my product to fill the affirmative and social integrative social media needs of the consumer as many of the people who use social media the most find these needs the main reasons they continue to use it.