Have you ever wondered about the history of hashtags? Where did they come from, what were they for, who created them? We took a look back to answer all of your questions about them!
The History of Hashtags begins in 2007
When Twitter was nothing more than a baby social network used by only a small group of people, those people started asking for a way to group things together. They wanted to only talk to a certain set of people at a time, with opportunity for others interested in the same thing to be able to chime in. Chris Messina, the inventor of the hashtag, saw this and decided to fix the problem.
Chris found a way to group things into channels, and help people find those channels using the hashtag. He used Jaiku for a good example at the time. On August 23rd, 2007 he pitched his idea to Twitter, only to be told that the idea was too nerdy and would never catch on.
Chris had to fight for his idea. After using his friends and #sandiegofire to get people started on hashtags, the idea caught on. Twitter added a way to search hashtags in 2009. Instagram had hashtag use at launch in 2010, and Facebook followed in 2013 adding the use of hashtags.
The history of hashtags may be short but it is powerful. With a past of things like #MeToo and #BlackLivesMatter, the history of hashtags is fraught with controversy in some cases.
Hashtags can also be used to help give context to ambiguous posts without changing the content too much. For example if you tweet “So sad today”, you could use a hashtag after the tweet to describe whats wrong.
Mr. Chris Messina never made any money off of his idea to use hashtags, despite how widespread their usage is. According to him, he wanted anyone who had internet access to be able to use hashtags and see channels.
History of Hashtags to the Present: Tips for better hashtagging
Seeing the history of hashtags should give us a pretty good idea of how to use them, and luckily for us CNBC had some statistics already available for us.
Posts with one to two hashtags on it had engagement increase 21%. That’s really great, except most people think the more hashtags the better. Unfortunately, three or more hashtagged posts actually had a 17% drop in engagement.
The best thing you can do when hashtagging a post is ask yourself: will anyone gain anything from all these hashtags? If the answer is no, maybe rethink the amount of them you intend to use and just stick to the top two.
