What is the point in #hashtags?

By Jess Reid

 

I am admittedly a social network lover. Twitter is my particular favourite as I feel comfortable often 'tweeting' what I'm doing with my day and how I'm feeling in the hope that one of my 'followers' who are my friends will take an interest – like most teenagers do. However the use of the hashtag and how it's come about has baffled me to say the least; even more now it's become so popular that now it's used on other websites such as Instagram, Tumblr and most recently as even progressed onto Facebook. I just want to know why people can't just write a tweet without using a hashtag? Do they want to get their hashtag 'trending'? Does it automatically make their tweet better? What is the point in hashtags?

 

The hashtag did start as a part of Internet language. It was first commonly used on Internet chat websites (ICR) to indicate which chat was for a particular topic. But Twitter soon took over the hashtag. People would involve a hashtagged word or phrase within their post, for example 'can't wait for #MIC later!' or they can be placed before or after a tweet, e.g. 'The only reasons Mondays are good #MIC' -MIC being an abbreviation of the TV show Made in Chelsea. These tweets will obviously only appeal to people who watch the programme and understand the abbreviation, therefore people who are interested in the topic #MIC can click on the hashtagged abbreviation (because it turns into a link once the hashtag is used as a prefix) and other tweets from people using the same hashtag will appear, the top few being the most popular tweets (this is judged by the amount of 'Retweets' and 'favourites' a tweet has.) So in a way, the hashtag is quite useful for people to find either opinions, facts or possibly further links other people have posted to find out more information on a topic they're interested in. Also once a hashtag has been used so much it can end up 'trending' on Twitter, therefore the latest news on current events can easily be found out once people sign in onto their timeline.

 

Since 2010 television programmes on particular channels have latched onto this idea of the trending hashtags on Twitter and now use them on the programme to get people talking about it online. This has managed to get programmes like Made in Chelsea and Britain's Got Talent more viewers by people using these hashtags, which promote the television show.

 

This promotion idea has had a positive effect for most companies, however others have tried it and it has backfired badly. McDonald's created a hashtag #McDStories in January 2012, for people to tweet positive things about the most popular international restaurant, but only two hours later McDonald's cancelled this marketing plan as the feedback posted was extremely negative towards the major fast food company. Although I still think promotion by hashtags is a great way to gain. Any publicity is

 

But, that is where the usefulness of using a hashtags ends for me. It's when Twitter users starting using the hashtag to gain popularity and a 'Twitter famous' status for themselves. Young people now from the young age of 10 to 20 years old find comfort in themselves when they have a huge number of followers, and get lost in a world of fiction online. By gaining these followers or getting huge number of retweets they hashtage.g. #f4f #RT #Follow. And not just one hashtag alone, people feel the need to use several of these hashtags that use up the whole 140 characters that can be used in a tweet. Unfortunatelyit seems to work for them; therefore my Twitter newsfeed is constantly overwhelmed with hashtags. That's not what I want, therefore those people will be getting an unfollow from me. This popularity problem growing upon the current generation has caused the begging hashtags to spread. Now in the phone app Instagram people post a photo and amongst the caption will involve maybe ten to hundreds of hashtags. #Boy #girl #love #nomakeup #follow #lfl #instadaily #ootd #selfie – there seems to be no end to it.

 

Why do people, mainly teenagers feel happier and more secure if they have 145 likes on their photos or 1000 retweets on their tweet? Why can't they just post information about themselves, or a caption that is actually relevant to their photo of their cat rather than #followback? Other than this fault of the hashtag, to me I do think it is useful to an extent for finding information or promoting a business. It's been created by the internet and now belongs on social networking sites along with retweets, followers, trends, favourites, likes – the list goes on.

 

It's crazy how rapidly Internet language is expanding. I'm part of this new generation and even I can't keep up.

 

#RT if you agree!