Culture and social media: the relationship between cultural values and hashtagging styles

ABSTRACT

Many social media users include #-signs before particular terms on social media – which is termed hashtagging. Recent research indicates that people tend to use the pound key for uncommon words, including ‘artistic’ words that are unlikely to serve functional purposes, and that cultural differences in hashtagging styles exist. The current study examines characteristics of hashtags and the impact of individual cultural values on hashtagging behaviour. Findings reveal four dimensions of hashtags, concluding that hashtags can be inspirational, structural, entertaining, and artistic. Second, findings show that hashtags are used to structure content equally independent of cultural values. However, inspirational hashtags are common among users with collectivistic, uncertainty avoidant, and masculine cultural values. Moreover, collectivistic and masculine values are also associated with artistic hashtags – whereas uncertainty avoidance is related to entertaining hashtags. In addition, findings show that cultural values associated with power distance relate to a higher hashtagging intensity.

KEYWORDS:

• Hashtag
• route
• characteristics
• cultural values
• social media

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

1 We created this list as follows: First, we reviewed qualitative comments of a prior, unpublished, dataset in which 71 American students expressed their hashtagging style in open-ended questions in an online survey. Second, we ensured that the pool of items consisted of items that are conceptually linked to the relevant motivations studied in Sheldon et al. (2017). Third, we pre-tested the questionnaire among 34 students who did not express any concerns except few minor changes on the wording.

2 The authors of this research have addressed this call themselves. It resulted in a separate article, which builds on this study’s findings. The results of this follow-up study has been accepted for publication while the current study was still under review. See Rauschnabel, Sheldon, and Herzfeldt (2019), in which we reference to the current study.