Hashtag is type of tag used on the web, but especially social, as a thematic aggregator of content. It, in fact, allows users to find all the content that has been published related to a particular topic.
It is created by placing the “hashtag” symbol (#) before the term or phrase we want to use as a topic. Using Hashtags, when creating posts and social content, is important to give them visibility in the news feed.
Although today it is used in many social platforms, from Twitter to Facebook and Instagram, its popularity is due to Twitter itself: here it was introduced to focus users’ attention on certain keywords and topics.
Hashtags are said to have been first used in 2007 by Chris Messina, a San Francisco lawyer. A more structural use, however, can be traced back to Nate Ritter, who used hashtags in numerous Twitter posts reporting updates on the wildfires that hit San Diego County that year.
However, the popularity of hashtags can be traced back to their use within the Twitter platform. Here in 2009, since there was no mode that allowed users to group content, hyperlinks to hashtags were inserted: in essence, the user, by clicking on them, has the ability to filter all posts containing that specific tag.
This mode was later taken up on other platforms such as Facebook and Instagram, where content search is often done by hashtag.
