Hashtags are supposed to make it easy for people to join in conversations on popular topics on Twitter. By looking for the hashtag, you can follow what people are saying about any given topic. You can see the "trending topics" on your Twitter account and on some sites that specialize in following hashtags, which means that hashtags which are showing a quick gain in interest can snowball into a phenomenon quickly.
Looking at the trending topics right now, it's not surprising on the day of his memorial service to see that Michael Jackson is on top. Other popular topics include the Iran election and discussions about iPhones.
But what happens when a site games the system by bribing Twtterers to bump their hashtags to the top of the most popular list?
According to ITProPortal's article, Moonfruit Hash Tag Attack Shows Potential Weakness Of Twitter, the sweepstakes was very successful for the company. The article says that Moonfruit, which is an online website builder, saw an 8x jump in traffic, double the number of trial users, and huge growth in their number of Twitter followers.
Another website builder had a similar idea. Squarespace's Twitter Contest gave one entry for every Tweet that used the #squarespace hashtag into a giveaway for a chance to win a $199 Apple gift card every day.
They changed their rules partially through the giveaway because of the huge flood of off-topic hashtags using their name. After the rule change, a single Tweet with the hashtag entered you for the rest of the daily giveaways.
Twitter contests that use hashtags to enter are fun and easy -- at first. But once every one of your Tweeple starts adding an off-topic hashtag to every post, it starts to get a little annoying.
And if more companies do this, it won't take long before the Trending Topics are nothing but one big sales pitch, instead of a way to get involved in conversations. That would be a real shame for Twitter users.
What would I do? I'd restrict entries to a maximum of one Tweet per day (a single entry would be better), and add the requirement that the Tweet must be about the company or the sweepstakes. I think this would be fair both for the companies sponsoring the sweepstakes and for the general Twitter population.
Have you entered -- or been annoyed by! -- the #Moonfruit sweepstakes? Share your thoughts by clicking on the "Comments" link below.
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Comments
Perhaps Twitter could have categories for the Hashtag topics and tweets. Let tweeple choose which tags to follow or not follow.
I entered the moonfruit and it was interesting reading the entries.
The #moonfruit trend was horribly annoying. People on my list were spamming me with #moonfruit just so they could enter, and I had no idea what #moonfruit even was until I looked it up. I do think “one entry per person” would be a fairer deal and avoid the annoyance of spamming for contest entries.
We run a sweeptstake at twrivia.com, which we hope doesn’t create too much Twitter spam, because we limit the entries that require users to re-tweet our message, to just one per entrant per day.
We believe this is a responsible way to run a contest on Twitter and our users seem to like it.