You can open up X, formally known as Twitter, and see millions of short messages posted by people across the world. X has long been known as a social media platform where users can converse and share posts they find relevant or interesting, but it can also be used professionally to gain and grow a following.
One way professionals or organizations spread their messages on X are using hashtags. They help group tweets based on the word or short phrase so people can easily find multiple posts about a topic. Using hashtags that are trending, or very popular, can bring in a wide audience to your content. The trending hashtags can be focused on big stories in news and pop culture or other various topics that people are talking about.
As a journalist, I’ve always used X to promote my content and one way to further do this is by using twitter analytics and hashtags. Twitter analytics help users make better decisions about their posts to reach a certain goal. The analytics track how tweets are performing and how other users are responding, while also showing you what posts users are most drawn to. X allows you to view your analytics at any time, but applications like SproutSocial give more information on the way hashtags and keywords can help an account grow.
SproutSocial has a feature called “Twitter Keyword Report” that allows you to look at certain hashtags and see how often they are used with the history of the hashtag’s popularity. I looked into five hashtags relating to the journalism industry to learn how using certain hashtags could help improve my content reach. All the data is based off the usage of the hashtags since January 1, 2024.
#Breaking News
SproutSocial shows that #BreakingNews gets used in around 25,000 tweets a day. Considering there are at least 5 million tweets posted a day, this number is low, but it’s niche to the news market. Reporters and news organizations use this phrase often to grab a viewer’s attention and tell them that this is something important to know about. Based on the data, it seems this hashtag is used more on a day where something significant is happening that is making national or international headlines. It’s also getting used more now than before 2024, with a 40% growth trend.
#Breaking
#Breaking is used even more commonly than #BreakingNews. This may be because it is shorter and still grabs the audience’s attention. It is used an average of 832,000 times a day and is getting more popular. Even though this hashtag is used more than #BreakingNews, its growth trend is lower.
Here’s an example of a tweet using #Breaking. It’s used to intrigue the viewer, especially since it is the first word in the tweet.
#News
This is the most widely used hashtag I researched, with over 3 million tweets using #News a day. It’s used by accounts of all sizes and not all of them are related to journalism. Not only is it the most used hashtag, it has the highest total volume and views. Surprisingly, this hashtag is on a slight downward trend.
Since #Breaking and #News are the most popular hashtags I looked into, I compared the two. This graph from SproutSocial shows that #News has been more popular this year, with a significantly higher usage.
#Journalism
#Journalism is used by a very specific group of users who generally work in journalism or are commenting on something a journalist or organization has done. It gets used in about 42,000 tweets a day and is trending up this year.
#Connecticut
This final hashtag I researched is for my personal professional purposes. I work as a journalist in Connecticut and focus mostly on news happening in the state. SproutSocial shows that it is featured in about 4,700 tweets a day and is getting used more now than before. The growth trend is up over 30%. This hashtag is used by far the least out of the others because it is only relevant to a certain audience, but using it will help that audience see related content. Since less people are tweeting about Connecticut, a user would be able to find a tweet using this hashtag more easily.
Here’s an example of a tweet using #Connecticut and also a hashtag for the town where this news happened. Both of these hashtags brings this tweet to the audience of people who live there and are interested in their local news.
Insights
Based on this data, it is clear that some hashtags are used far more than others. This graph shows that #News and #Breaking are used so much more often. This is because the hashtag is general and can be applied to a wide variety of content.
The share of volume, or amount of people talking about a hashtag and responding to it, also shows that #News and #Breaking are far more popular. When all the hashtags are compared, they make the other hashtags look like they are not being used at all.
Based on the SproutSocial data, using these two popular hashtags will give a user the widest reach. They are short action words that can be used with all different topics of tweets. If I were a journalist or news organization trying to grow my X platform, I would start implementing these hashtags in my content.
Although #Connecticut is used the least, it is still important to use to get more people from the state to view content. Using a hashtag to group news about one location is a smart idea for news organizations as well.
Resources
Twitter analytics: How to analyze and improve your Twitter data. Sprout Social. (2024, January 31). https://sproutsocial.com/insights/twitter-analytics/
Zote, J. (2023, November 10). How to find popular hashtags on Twitter. Sprout Social. https://sproutsocial.com/insights/twitter-hashtags/
Katie Coen 
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