- The first hashtag in history was #barcamp, used by a Twitter user in 2007.
- International Hashtag Day has commemorated this event since 2018, eleven years after its first use.
- The record for the most uses of a hashtag on Twitter in a 24-hour period was set in 2019, when #TwitterBestFandom accumulated more than 60 million uses in a single day.
Every 23 August, Hashtag Day is celebrated to commemorate this phenomenon closely linked to social media. Coincidentally, this date also coincides with Internaut Day, which marks a milestone in the history of the Internet with the first public connection to the World Wide Web in 1991.
But back to International Hashtag Day, which emerged in 2018, eleven years after a user of what was then known as Twitter, Chris Messina, posted: ‘How do you feel about using # (pound) for groups. As in #barcamp [msg]?’.
Interestingly, since the user left this social network in 2023, the post in which the hashtag first appeared is no longer available.
Without realising it, this product designer and Internet consultant had turned #barcamp into the first hashtag in history.
Hashtag: what is it?
The term hashtag, an Anglicism for which the word label can also be used, is defined as a clickable keyword that groups terms together using the simple method of adding a hash symbol immediately before the word.
The use of hashtags became popular in 2010 when the social network Twitter included TT (trending topics) to highlight the most relevant conversations on this network, which has now been renamed X.
Most popular hashtags
As the list of the most popular hashtags could cover many possible classifications and/or cases, we are going to compile some of those that have been awarded the ‘official’ title by the Guinness Book of Records.
2011: first selfie with a hashtag on Instagram
Four years after the birth of the hashtag, on 27 January 2011, Instagram introduced them as a feature on its network.
On that day, an American woman named Jennifer Lee added the tag #selfie to a photo she had uploaded to the social network eleven days earlier, thus becoming the first selfie tagged as such on IG.
2017: most popular hashtag on Instagram
Continuing with the same social network, according to the Guinness Book of Records, the most popular tag is #love, according to data from December 2017, followed by #fashion, #photooftheday, #photography and #art.
2018: the biggest hashtag… made by humans
Jumping from the digital to the physical, we come across a curiosity: the largest image of the hashtag symbol made by humans.
1,927 people composed this image on 11 March 2018 in Dubai, United Arab Emirates, although the number of participants in the action – not just in the hashtag – rose to 5,000 to construct both the tag and the letters GTP (for Global Teacher Prize).
2019: most used hashtag on Twitter in 24 hours
The social network where the hashtag was born has its own record: the most used tag on the platform in a 24-hour period.
Between 16 and 17 March 2019, the hashtag #TwitterBestFandom exceeded 60 million uses, 60,055,339 to be precise.
This hashtag was used to allow the general public to vote in the 14th edition of the Soompi Awards, one of the longest-running and most important international awards recognising the best in South Korean television and music.
