Mind Your Manners: Social Media Hashtag Etiquette [Infographic]

I remember learning about Twitter hashtags back in 2009, and after they became popular, the former ‘pound sign’ was never the same again. Now that Facebook supports hashtags, and users are using them on other sites too, hashtags have become an integral part of the whole social media experience. If hashtags are misused though, it can be annoying for your friends, fans and followers. You can mind your manners by learning about hashtag etiquette.

This infographic called Hashtag Etiquette by Gremln will catch you up to date on all the proper dos and don’ts when it comes to using hashtags. That way, you can mind your manners and play nice. You won’t come across as a spammer or someone who doesn’t know what’s up. My favorite use of hashtags is when I seem them put into a tweet to add a little sarcastic humor. Some of the best social media one-liners I’ve seen are those embedded into a hashtag.

We’ve mentioned before that when hashtags began on Twitter, they were originally user generated. As it turns out, the story of the first hashtag is very interesting, and it’s now a detail that will go down in social media history forever. According to Gremln’s blog…

“The first hashtag was introduced in August 2007 by Chris Messina, an open source and open standards advocate, as a means to identify a certain group (#BarCamp). Messina hoped to create a way for a group of individuals to participate in an online chat and view what others are sharing on a particular topic. He quipped, ‘I’m more interested in simply having a better eavesdropping experience on Twitter.'”

You can visit his blog post here on Factory City where he talks about his original idea and how it formed. Remember, back then, there was no such thing as hashtags like we know them today. What a claim to fame that must be. So, as you see, the now famous social media hashtag has had a long journey from inception to where it is today. Mind your manners and make sure you use them correctly.