Hashtag and Marketing Campaign on Twitter: From the Spectrum of Smartphone Industry Perspective

Social media has completely revolutionized how companies promote their products and engage with their target audience. Traditionally, platforms like X (formerly Twitter) were used for advertisement and promotion of products and brands. Today these platforms are used to run marketing campaigns, known as ‘Hashtag Campaign’. The focus is essentially on the propagation of the brand message and promises and engaging the target audience with the brand story and narrative. In this context, the present research focused on sentiment analysis of Indian Smartphone brands’ engagement on Twitter with the help of a hashtag marketing campaign. The five major smartphone brands were selected based on the level of customer engagement on Twitter. The data was collected by developing a Twitter account and mining tweets with R language. After the collection of tweets, sentiment analysis was done with the Microsoft Azure Machine Learning tool. The findings were derived from an analysis of nearly 18000 tweets and 87 hashtags. Based on the results it was suggested that the brands need to engage directly with the consumers to build strong brand salience and equity. The brands fetching negative sentiments must focus more on streamlining the delivery of high-quality and feature-loaded products and related services. Here creativity and innovations play crucial roles with the right brand narrative.