The Evolution of Hashtags PDF

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Last essay we did. It is about modern trends, I choose the evolution of hashtags in today's social media....

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The Evolution of Hashtags

Fabiola Diaz CHSS, Grand Canyon University ENG 105: Freshman Composition I Dr. Goodman April 9, 2021

2 The Evolution of Hashtags Is it not awesome to be able to identify a topic of interest with just typing one simple word? Everyday there are millions of events being posted in social media, and it is hard to keep up with every single one. However, as technology has been evolving, a system named hashtag was created to facilitate the search of topics with just a simple word or phrase preceded by a hash mark. Since 2007, this simple social symbol is now used over 9 million times a day across social media (Doctor, 2019). For the most part, hashtags are used to find trending topics, but it could be used to search organizations, celebrities, events. With just typing a keyword for that specific topic, it will direct you to all post from that social media that contains that same hashtag. Hashtags are a trend because it was first used as a content curating strategy, then it began to work as a community building mechanism, and now it appears as an awareness building approach. Curating Strategy Hashtags were first used as content curating strategies to gathering information relevant to a particular topic. A content curating strategy is a system that can help address a problem, it will help you find and search the best content for what one is searching for. The hashtag was originally used to group together topics and create groups, but it faced some problems when first launched. The use of hashtags was going so fast that all social platforms were constantly updating, and feeds were posted every second that it was providing a problem to group-together posts and making them searchable (Doctor, 2019). Over the years, hashtags became hyperlinked to allow immediate searches for related posts. People were so obsessed with the use of hashtags that the users began to but emotions to their posts by expressing their feelings throughout the hashtags. Community Building

3 After hashtags were appearing as a curating strategy for topics, people started using them as a community building mechanism to display their own businesses and organizations. Many businesses and organizations were benefiting by hashtags as its use was popularizing. Organizations were using hashtags as a form of advertising their company by adding slogans and quotes to hook people into entering their websites and feeds. For example, Google+ was created with hashtags as an original feature, and later one it made YouTube compatible with hashtags until 2011 (Geboers & Wiele, 2020). As businesses were seeing how convenient it was, they started creating a system where a user could tweet a brand’s hashtag and it connected the user to the brand’s website. This system would subscribe the users to the brand’s website login them in through the email that was associated with their Twitter account (Doctor, 2019). This new system helped businesses gain millions of subscribers, and they were taking advantage by emailing promotions and advertisements to hook users to buy their products. Awareness Building Now hashtags are not just to gather information and promote community, but it is now an awareness building approach to exhibit certain events and broadcast awareness of the situation. Hashtags have been recently used as a form to communicate awareness around the world. Building awareness is important for the community to spread consciousness of the events happening in our world. We use social media half of the day, and as technology has been growing, social media has a big effect on our daily lives. There are many events around the world that we are unaware of, and social media is a phenomenal tool for building awareness of those events. Unfortunately, not all events are justified and in certain situations, it would be good to display such event to the world to gain attention and maybe people could take action towards that event. For example, when the event Black Lives Matter emerged, people were using

4 hashtags as a form of spreading awareness towards that situation. As millions of people were using and seeing this hashtag, it builds a sense of justice, and people were thinking of acting toward the situation. In June 2020, a march was done by millions of people around the world to spread awareness of situation (Fraasch, 2019). The hashtag was used daily in posts and feeds in those months with the Black Live Matters phrase. Cause and Consequences The use of hashtags has become such a daily use symbol in our daily lives. It has become such an advantageous tool in social media, that we never really see the causes and consequences that the hashtags have on certain people. Hashtags are very beneficial when collecting donations. As one is trying to collect donations for a certain cause, they will provide a direct link to the donation page when using the hashtags on their social media. As millions of follower comment or share that same hashtag, the link will now be passed to billions of social media, which will increment the probability of collecting more money than expected (Fraasch, 2019). Another example would be how hashtags are great to generate more followers and to start a movement. It is beneficial when you are trying to increase your subscribers. It is also beneficial when trying to increment the power in some communities by bringing awareness to social voids and turn ideas into massive movements. Hashtags really do not have consequences to people, but in another hand, it does for businesses. One of the biggest disadvantages of hashtags is that they are site specific, meaning that it will only let you see the hashtags provided in website it is used. This problem creates a big headache to social media networkers as they need to manage separate marketing streams for each social media channel (Fraasch, 2019).

Conclusion

5 I have used the hashtags thousands of times, and in my opinion, it is a beneficial system that facilitates social media. It is so surprising to me how it all started as a way of searching for groups and topics, but now its being use as a way of building awareness. I actually partake in one movement that was exhibited in social medias with the hashtags. It was a Feminism movement in Mexico where some female students were being discriminated by a professor. The movement was a way of taking action to remove the professor from his position. In the end, he was just changed of department and he was on probation. Even though it seems like it was not much of an effect, it still was a great help to those students that wanted to peruse a proper education. That is why I really do think that the use of hashtags can be beneficial in certain situations. It is a really good system that facilitated searches and I know that it is beneficial to many businesses, but it is also a great system helps our surroundings. That is why I really encourage others to use hashtags whenever you are in need of donation, want to start a movement, or you are just simply want to promote your small business. It is a really good system that will help you start with something, so you have nothing to lose with just taking advantage of it.

6 References Geboers, A., & Wiele, C. (2020). Machine Vision and Social Media Images: Why Hashtags Matter. https://eds-b-ebscohost-com.lopes.idm.oclc.org/eds/detail/detail? vid=3&sid=74c36eee-f92e-4055-bec6-5b787d980ee7%40pdc-vsessmgr02&bdata=JnNpdGU9ZWRzLWxpdmUmc2NvcGU9c2l0ZQ%3D %3D#AN=edsdoj.47d11881e8fe45fb92b671261037dca2&db=edsdoj. Fraasch, B. (2019, January 30). The Power of Hashtags on Social Media. SEED SPOT. https://seedspot.org/power-hashtags-social-media/. Doctor, V. (2019). Hashtag History: When and What Started It? Hashtags.org. https://www.hashtags.org/featured/hashtag-history-when-and-what-started-it/....