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<\/p>\nIt\u2019s been 10 years since the hashtag first appeared on Twitter, created by Chris Messina, a developer at Google at the time. It was his idea to use the # US pound sign as a way to aggregate tweets around a particular topic, which he first published within a tweet on 23 August, 2007.<\/p>\n
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Some of the most memorable hashtags have been #FollowFriday (or #FF), which over the past 10 years has been used more than half a billion times, and #NowPlaying is another all-time favourite that\u2019s been tweeted more than one\u00a0billion times. Unsurprisingly, #Election2016 was the most widely used political hashtag last year, and while Twitter users publicly mourned mass-casualty attacks, hashtags such as #PrayForOrlando<\/a>\u00a0and\u00a0#PrayForNice<\/a> made it into the top 10 in 2016. Social movements such as #BlackLivesMatter, and #jesuischarlie in the aftermath of the attack on satirical magazine Charlie Hebdo, were also brought to prominence through the power of the hashtag.<\/p>\n Twitter UK\u2019s managing director Dara Nasr said: \u201cFrom their first use 10 years ago, hashtags have grown to be part of everyday language across the globe, with 125 million used every day on Twitter.\u201d<\/p>\n The hashtag has become so popular that it\u2019s extended to other social platforms such as Facebook and Instagram, and is now used conversationally within text messages, for example. It has arguably become one of the most widely used and recognisable characters of the digital age. But it hasn\u2019t always been this way and within the marketing world it\u2019s fair to say that hashtags took a while to gain proper traction, and were misunderstood or misused for quite some time. There have also been plenty of examples over the past 10 years when Twitter uses have used hashtags to publicly shame a brand or expose a mistake that they\u2019ve made: the hashtag #fail itself is pretty well used.<\/p>\n A memorable example from the hashtag archives is when Aussie airline Qantas, not particularly known for its quality of service, asked customers to share their #QantasLuxury experiences just a day after the airline had grounded its fleet and locked out staff for 48 hours over a union pay dispute. Unsurprisingly, disgruntled customers and staff seized the opportunity to air their grievances via the campaign hashtag, and a Twitter firestorm ensued. At the peak of the campaign, the airline was receiving 51 tweets per minute abusing or making fun of the hashtag. It\u2019s fair to say that the brand has never lived this #PRfail down.<\/p>\n One of the funniest hashtag fails that goes down in Twitter history involved a McDonald\u2019s campaign, where the fast food giant attempted to get more personal with customers by asking them to share their favourite #McDStories. Unfortunately for McDonald\u2019s, the campaign didn\u2019t quite go to plan, and thousands of unfavourable stories about the brand were unleashed across Twitter, via the hashtag, which continues to this day despite the fact that the campaign itself was pulled within two hours of going live.<\/p>\n \n Get exclusive insights into digital ![\"\"](\"https:\/\/www.dacgroup.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2024\/12\/2.jpg\")
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