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Last week’s High Tide Alert highlighted the spike in online mentions of ocean acidification following NOAA chief Jane Lubchenco’s characterization of it as “osteoporosis of the sea” and “climate change’s equally evil twin.” Just for good measure, we even compared it to online mentions of the Kardashians, a subject we expanded on in our blog.

But we were curious about something. Just how are people communicating about the subject. On Twitter, the words “ocean acidification” and the hashtag #oceanacidification use up a lot of characters, leaving little room to say much about it other than “is really bad and I’m against it.” Does that work against it, and are people finding other ways to talk about it online?

Twitter mentions of Upwell’s Ocean Acidification keyword group, that included (green) or did not include (green) one or more of the top ocean acidification hashtags. (May 15th - July 15th, 2012)

 

Looking at the data for the past two months shows that the majority of people talking about ocean acidification aren’t using hashtags. (Since hashtags are primarily a Twitter convention, in this post we’ll be looking at monitoring data for Twitter only.)

 

Out of nearly 10,000 tweets related to ocean acidification, only 13.1% referred to the issue with a hashtag.

 

Twitter mentions of the four most popular ocean acidification hashtags appearing in tweets monitored by Upwell’s Ocean Acidification keyword group. (May 15th - July 15th, 2012) 

 

Of those tweets that used tags, by far the most popular one was #oceanacidification, which appeared nearly half of the time, or 45.2%. In descending order of popularity, the top four ocean acidification hashtags are:

 

1. #oceanacidification (568 tweets - 45.2%)
2. #ocean (324 tweets - 25.8%)
3. #acidification (228 tweets - 18.2%)
4. #ocean #acidification (136 tweets - 10.8%)

 

It’s worth nothing that one of these—#ocean—isn’t a very good hashtag at all, at least not for grouping together content specifically related to ocean acidification. And yet we saw many tweets where the author had written “#ocean acidification”.

 

Twitter mentions of the #oceanacidification hashtag appearing in tweets monitored by Upwell’s Ocean Acidification keyword group. (May 15th - July 15th, 2012)

 

Hashtag use is becoming more common in the ocean acidification conversation online. #Oceanacidification increasingly appears to be the preferred choice, having received two significant spikes in the past sixty days. If you're tweeting about OA, we reccomend that you use it too.