What's the point of the Super League Hashtags?

#SLWidWak, #SLSalCas, #Nonsense?

Well it's that time of the year again. Excitement and anticipation is steadily growing for the new Super League season. As has become more common over the last couple of years, people are putting their opinions all over Twitter. It's worth saying at this point that if you are unfamiliar with Twitter, this blog probably isn't for you. I'll be using terms that Twitter users will understand but that will sound like utter nonsense if you're not a user.

This year, the RFL has decided to release its own set of specific in-game hashtags. See, if you're not a Tweeter, you're already scratching your head. Anyway, here's a link to the article. The aim is to try and get Twitter users to try and use these specific hashtags when chatting about games. However, this being Rugby League, there has been a good amount of scepticism. The question I most commonly hear is this one,

What's the point? Why don't we just carry on using #rugbyleague? 

This is of course a valid question but hopefully I will go some way to explaining the reasons why the specific hashtags are better than #rugbyleague. The first thing to point out is that using the specific hashtags has two distinct aims. Firstly, it is to improve discussion around individual games and secondly it is to enable the game to trend more often. 

Improving Discussion

As ever with most good ideas, they have been borrowed from somewhere else. In this case Australia took the lead, firstly with Aussie Rules, then the NRL and finally the A-League.  They now all use them as standard during games and enjoy the backing of the media and official organisations. The best of these examples when comparing it to the Super League is of course the NRL. On the RLFans discussion on this topic, a user involved in the NRL campaign (nko11) had this to say about it,

"The main reasoning behind match specific hashtags is that it presents a live stream which can be very handy for someone who can't get any other form of commentary."

The same is true in the UK. At the back end of last season, during the playoffs, these match specific hashtags were trialled and many people enjoyed using them. The reality is that whilst many people enjoy using #rugbyleague for general tweets, they rarely apply it to in game matches and when they do it gets lost in the multitude of other RL related tweets. If you are trying to follow discussion around a specific game this can make it difficult to do. Most tweets about the games have no easy way of being found through a search or they are mixed in with a variety of other tweets from other parts of the world. Game specific tags don't just clean this up but they help to create more discussion around the games. 

Getting the Sport Trending

The use of game specific hashtags has been a huge success in Australia and the games will regularly trend worldwide. Here are a couple of examples where this has happened,

Now the biggest criticism I hear around this subject is that RL is not as big in the UK as in Australia and is less likely to trend. This is of course true. It is then suggested that we should be pooling our tweets into #rugbyleague to give it a better chance of trending. This is not true.

The biggest misconception about trending on twitter is that it is the most popular topics that trend. It is in fact topics that enjoy a spike in popularity that trend. If this wasn't the case then Justin Beiber, One Direction and the days of the week would constantly trend. Put another way, Buzzfeed explained it that,

"Twitter favors novelty over popularity."

This is the same explanation for why #rugbyleague never trends but Steve Ganson, Widnes, Rangi Chase and Darren Lockyer have all trended in this country and worldwide. The #rugbyleague hashtag has a constant level of use and would therefore need a massive spike to ever trend. The same is not true for game specific tags and this is why they trend in Australia instead of the more generic and widely used #NRL. 

Don't They Sound Silly?

At first glance yes they do. However, as with in Australia it is all about standardisation. The hope is that in time people will be able to easily figure out what the hashtag will be as it will be SL plus the two sky shortened names. Some have suggested that people will not understand what they mean. I once again refer to nko11 from Australia,

"The amount of people who were asking what #NRL....... meant, was incredible. As fans of the Greatest Game of All we have the ability and the duty to give something back."

As we can see, if it trends people will click on it and in doing so this exposes our game to a potential audience that would not usually be interested. 

Getting Going

As I stated earlier, this was trialled in the UK at the end of last season with mixed results. League Express newspaper backed a fan led campaign that had a number of media and clubs on board. For the games that they were used people enjoyed them and it briefly managed to trend. Unfortunately due to a mix up the RFL then released their own and this halted much of the momentum, creating a great deal of confusion. League Express have again decided to continue with the tags and importantly the RFL are using the same tags, so everybody is on the page with official support.

It may take some time for people to use them extensively but I am confident that it will pick up pace the more it is used. Hopefully we would then be able to get Sky involved and this would boost our chances even more. So go on, if you're tweeting at the weekend add #SLWidWak or #SLSalCas at the end of your tweets, you might even enjoy it.