As the internet celebrates 12th birthday of the hashtag on Friday, Twitter has unveiled the top five hashtags that dominated conversations on the platform in the first half of the year 2019 in India.
When something happens in the world, it happens mostly on Twitter and hashtags have inspired some of the most important moments in the past. The Top Hashtag Trend reflected the rise of regional entertainment on Twitter, with Tamil action-drama film #Viswasam landing the top spot.
This was followed by conversations around politics and governance. Throughout the campaign period for the #LokSabhaElections2019, politicians and political parties used Twitter to communicate with Indian citizens in the country and across the world, while citizens took to the platform to address their queries directly to contesting leaders. As cricket fans from all over the world came to Twitter to talk about winning moments, shocking upsets, classic catches, and unique to this World Cup - the memes about the rain, #CWC19 became the top 3rd hashtag this year. Entertainment continued making trends, with the Indian Telugu-language action drama film #Maharshi grabbing the fourth spot. #NewProfilePic encouraged visual content on the platform as users Tweeted about updating their profile pictures, becoming the 5th most commonly Tweeted Hashtag of the year.
Additionally, Twitter launched an emoji to celebrate the symbol that connects communities and unifies conversations. The specially designed emoji is a hashtag symbol stamped on a heart, translating it into a beautiful interpretation of how the hashtag has transformed the nature of communication online, thus becoming a powerful way to aggregate global conversations and movements.
The emoji will be live for the day and will be available in English and Hindi. Users across the globe can participate in the conversations and celebrate by hashtag-ing their conversations on #HashtagDayand #हैशटैगदिवस.
The hashtag (#) was born on Twitter 12 years ago and has become one of the most recognisable and widely used symbols of our time.
Here are ways how users can make their hashtag game strong:
● Hashtags can actually help categorise Tweets - just use the symbol (#) before a relevant keyword or phrase in a Tweet
● To access all the conversations on a particular theme - just click on the hashtagged word in any message and all the Tweets with the similar hashtag will come-up on your timeline
● Popular hashtags often emerge as Trending Topics on Twitter
● A hashtag will not work properly if there are spaces or punctuations in it
● If a user Tweets with a hashtag on a public account, anyone who does a search for that hashtag may find their Tweet
