The Most Popular Twitter Hashtags in New York, London, S.F., L.A., and D.C.

It’s easy to spot the unique features of many cities. New York and London are financial centers, San Francisco’s increasingly dominated by tech, and L.A. is a hub for entertainment. Paris is famous for its culture and cuisine, D.C. is populated by policy wonks, and Miami centers on nightlife and fitness. But can social media—and sites like Twitter in particular—also offer insight into the more nuanced culture and mindset of individual cities?

To parse out how Twitter data might apply to cities, I enlisted the help of two graduate students who have been researching Twitter at the Geographic Information Science degree program at California State University, Long Beach: Wesley DeWitt and Therese Norman (who is also a doctoral candidate at the Jönköping International Business School, where she works with my colleague Charlotta Mellander). DeWitt and Norman identified the most frequently-used hashtags in five large superstar cities: New York, London, L.A., San Francisco, and Washington, D.C. They then collected the top 150 hashtags from each of these five cities for the first two weeks of November 2015. Finally, they developed word clouds for each of the five cities based on their research. Because we wanted to focus on unique terms, they filtered out common words and phrases such as “retail,” “sales,” “hospitality,” “hiring”, “job(s),” and “healthcare,” which tended to be among the most popular across all five cities.