The Twitter hashtag was born exactly 10 years ago when Chris Messina, a former Google designer, suggested using the pound symbol for representing and organising discussion groups for a specific topic.
A decade later, an average of 125 million hashtags are used on the platform daily, according to Twitter. The top hashtag of 2017 was reportedly used over 300 million times while the debut hashtag '#NowPlaying' was tweeted more than a billion times since 2007.
#FollowFriday was tweeted more than half a billion times since 2009 while #ThrowbackThursday has recorded a total of 120 million tweets.
With so much buzz surrounding brands, celebrities, and influential personalities around the globe, Twitter has been the mass accumulator of content driven by authoritative hashtags.
A few of the most influential hashtags used in the last decade include the following: #MTVHottest, #MTVStars, #AmIRight, #KCA, #iHeartAwards and #FanArmy. The combined use of these hashtags apparently exceeds 3 billion tweets, thanks to the fans catching up with the awards season.
For instance, some hashtags that represent fan-chosen awards such as #EMABiggestFansJustinBieber have been making waves on Twitter for a long time.
On the occasion of celebrating the hashtag's 10th anniversary, Twitter has launched a new one called '#Hashtag10' along with an emoji.
Such a ubiquitous little symbol has evolved into 'the icon of social media', often influencing the public, as comedians, politicians, and media companies exploited and abused it for marketing content or their own personal interests.
The humble origins of Twitter hashtag date back to that eventful day of August 23 in 2007, when Chris Messina reportedly suggested an idea to her colleague and Twitter co-founder Biz Stone at the company's Silicon Valley office.
The proposal received an instant approval from Stone and thus began the journey of hashtags on the world's most popular micro-blogging platform, exactly 10 years ago.
Here is the screenshot of the first ever hashtag that was tweeted by its founder on August 24, 2007:
Despite its humble origins, hashtags have been generating revenues in the range of $200,000 to as much as $1million on trending topics for promoted trends on Twitter.
The first branded hashtag emoji was bought by Coca-Cola in 2015 for its #ShareACoke campaign and received 169,000 mentions and 620 million impressions.
Later on, Wendy's bought the #NuggsForCarter and won around 3.7 million retweets or shares for messages accompanying this hashtag. The company's hashtag was driven by a fan's challenge to receive free chicken nuggets for a year and it became the most retweeted tweet in the history of Twitter.
The fan has been identified as 'Carter Wilkerson' who had requested for retweets within his network of friends and followers. He went on to become the creator of the first, most-influential tweet in history.
