Where Did Hashtag Come From?

Image by Ognian Mladenov

If you’re new to social media, you’d probably notice that many of your friends use the “#” symbol in most of their social media posts.

Hashtags are so common that many people today use hashtags like nobody’s business.

When someone goes out to have dinner, they would probably say “This is the best burger on earth! #BurgerRamlee” or even “This restaurant sucks! #RestaurantOfDeath”

So what is a hashtag anyway?

Hashtag is a symbol that looks like this “#” and is mostly used vastly in social media today, predominantly Twitter.

It is commonly used to highlight special or specific things easier such as in terms of food or activities.

Companies also utilize this by making customers use the hashtag with their company name for advertising purposes.

For example, if KAMIRA Event Management wants to promote an event they’re making like “Ike Danketsu 2015”, making the participants use the hashtag would give the event more recognition.

Just imagine, if you have like 5 friends saying something on Facebook with #IkeDanketsu2015, wouldn’t you be curious and want to find out more?

I bet my granma’s fake teeth you would!

Hence the vast use of Hashtags.

However, using hashtags wasn’t actually as widespread as today…

How hashtags came to life

Like many great discoveries, Hashtags were also discovered by accident.

Back in 2007, Chris Messina made a random tweet…

“how do you feel about using # (pound) for groups. As in #barcamp [msg]?”

That was the FIRST ever hashtag ever to appear on earth and Messina was only looking for a way to gather discussions and online exchanges in regards to Barcamp.

What he didn’t realize is that soon after, everyone started using hashtags on their Tweets, so much so that the Founder of Twitter himself Evan Williams approached Chris to personally thank him for making a Twitter trend.

The Hashtag fever today

As you know now that the creation of hashtags was actually meant for research and work purposes, I don’t have to tell you how widely used it is today.

Sure companies do make use of the hashtag for promotion purposes, but as we can see today, many more people are using it for social and entertainment.

You can actually track the amount of Hashtags being used by people through Hashtag Analytics.

Now that you know the power of Hashtags, let me give you one advice about hashtags… #TRY!

For more information on using social media for business, check out my review of Wealthy Affiliate here.

Riaz Shah