The Hashtag for years on end, remained that button on your telephone that served little to no purpose. But with the Twitter taking it off the way it did, the hashtag was reborn, serving as a portal to conversations that transcended various time zones across the globe. The Twitter hashtag still remains relevant, more often than not, highlighted amongst the most trending topics of the world.
A few years after Twitter’s meteorical rise, a relatively unknown App called Instagram entered the Social sphere. At the time, this app could only take photos and apply filters to make them look more appealing. Not many gave it a second thought, but soon enough the number of users grew exponentially and soon, they were a force to reckon with.
What Instagram did with the already revitalized hashtag can be deemed as revolutionary. It was a time where the hashtag was devoid of any sort of emotion, used only to discuss topics of relevance. Instagram simply took an already influential component of Social Media, gave it an emotional touch and just let it do it’s own thing. A picture is worth a thousand words. Instagram changed the old adage to “A picture and a word is worth a million words.”
By using hashtags to express emotions, Instagram’s popularity shot through the proverbial roof. In months, the number of Instagram users had multiplied tenfold with over a 500 million images being posted on a weekly basis. With hashtags echoing the user’s feelings, Instagram brought people across continents closer than Facebook or Twitter ever had.
It allowed the use of multiple hashtags, without compromising on text. This worked wonders for Instagram as their users went hashtag crazy in the open environment it encouraged. One of Instagram’s biggest advantages is that it is so open and the hashtag took users places that one would have deemed impossible in the past.
As of December 2014, the most popular hashtags in the world included:
Source: http://top-hashtags.com/instagram/
What Instagram also did was render the emoticon and text messaging irrelevant. People realized that the hashtag felt more personal and helped portray what they truly felt better than a yellow smiley could.
Today, Instagram rubs shoulders with some of the biggest names in Social Media, completely capable of holding it’s own. Brands have seen it’s potential and have jumped on the bandwagon to varying degrees of success. Now we’ll just have to wait and see what path it pursues next.