Not too long ago, the hashtag was merely a button on a phone. Then it appeared on the internet in the titles of IRC (Interenet Relay Chat) channels. However it only truly became viral after Twitter adopted it. For a while, hash-tagging was a Point-of-Difference for Twitter compared to other social platforms. It was the perfect way for people to see what others were posting regarding a topic, from politics to music to even things like pictures of hot girls.
However, it did not take long for other social platforms to also start incorporating hash-tagging. Shortly after, Facebook, LinkedIn and Flickr all brought in hash-tagging to their system.However, I think Twitter benefited the most from the hash-tagging system. As the SWOT concept would say it, they were accurate in identifying their strengths and opportunities. The hash-tagging system was suitable as it played on Twitter’s strength being a mainly mobile platform, making use of the fact that tweeting was something very casual and hence people tweeted many times a day, unlike Facebook where people only posted a few times each day. Hence incorporating hash-tagging brought a huge opportunity to them known as the firehose, public data that can be sold.
Sources:
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-24397472
http://www.copypress.com/blog/the-hashtag-a-history-deeper-than-twitter/