On helping broadcasters to promote TV-shows through hashtags

Television is no longer the king of the living room: 86% of people watch TV with a second screen in the nearby and more than 30% of the attention time is given to the second device to perform social activities. Therefore, the television industry is facing a new challenge: find a way to re-catch viewers’ attention. A recent and popular approach considers the use of official hashtags to implement a cross-media strategy that will connect different contents across multiple media. Since the simple proposition of official hashtags is not sufficient to guarantee the success of a cross media strategy, in this paper, we analyze how official hashtags are used and we propose a model to write tweets effectively. The model is based on the analysis of more than 250,000 tweets that talk about TV-shows. In particular, (i) we analyze the availability and visibility of official hashtags, (ii) we study the tweets characteristics written by the most retweeted authors, and (iii) we build a network of hashtags in order to understand how users use official hashtags. The obtained results allowed us to define guidelines to help broadcasters in the promotion of TV-shows and in the engagement of viewers.