Hashtag marketing and Indian brands – sentiment exploration

Abstract

Social Media continues to impact the marketing campaign in a big way, and Indian brands are not an exception. One of the influential yet understudied tools for social media is a hashtag, which in recent times created a valuable and spellbound marketing impression. Still, less research has been done on how hashtag creates such a magnificent consumer engagement. The paper aims to answer this unfolded query by evaluating the use of the hashtag by Indian brands through sentiment analysis. There are two ways Indian brands use the hashtag – Campaign hashtag and Brand hashtag. This research is based on brand hashtags and infers quite an interesting outcome. As an experiment, we executed the hashtags for top Indian brands to identify the overall sentiment polarity of the hashtag. The outcomes were divided into two parts, wherein, in the first part, we evaluated sentiments polarities (divided into positive and negative) and computed Conversation to Engagement (C/E) Ratio and Engagement to Reach (E/R) Ratio to identify the prominence of each hashtag. In the second part of the analysis, we analyzed the responses based on demographic analysis including gender, age, interests, and occupations, which gives a clear idea of hashtag exploration. Overall, we collected 5611 texts and 154472 tokens between 01/08/2019 and 30/09/2019 from the selected brands..