The Use of Hashtags in TV-Shows: Analysis and Guidelines

People watch TV with a second screen nearby and more than 30% of the time is used to perform social activities. This is why broadcasters are trying to exploit hashtags: they want people to talk about TV-shows in the social scenario. In this paper, we investigate how broadcasters use hashtags to promote their TV-shows. Indeed, we focus on 15 different TV-shows and we perform two different types of analyses: one investigates if broadcasters propose official hashtags and analyzes how these hashtags are promoted, the other investigates the characteristics of the Twitter conversations held around the considered TV-shows. Results show that broadcasters do not have a clear strategy in the social scenario: most of them do not exploit the synergy that can be created by linking the TV scenario to social and Web platforms. However, from the analysis of the Twitter conversations, we identified a successful case, whose analysis allowed us to outline some clear guidelines that broadcasters should employ when using hashtags to promote their TV-shows