Almost 200 billion tweets are sent per year. But for hashtags to go viral on Twitter, it often takes a combination of relevancy, a strong call to action and a little help from a small sample of the nearly 300 million global Twitter users.
It’s no different for those used by the global development community. We’ve laughed along with the rest of the community at hashtags used to collect and share the daily predicaments and conundrums of being a development professional.
But we’ve also seen hashtags harnessed in incredible ways, from creating global solidarity around the Ebola crisis, encouraging an outpouring of donations to victims of the Nepal earthquake and spurring public debate on the treatment of refugees and migrants.
Here are four of the most impactful global development hashtags we followed in 2015:
About the author
Carine Umuhumuza@CarineUmu
Carine Umuhumuza is the Associate Director of Communications at Devex. She has launched over a dozen major campaigns in partnership with leading communicators from a range of development agencies, major corporations, NGOs, and social enterprises. Her passion for connecting people and creating impact through stories is homegrown, inherited from her father — a journalist at one of the leading newspapers in Rwanda. Carine got her journalism and storytelling chops at Syracuse University's Newhouse School and moved to D.C. to start her career in social media and digital strategy. Starting her career at the cusp of the social media boom, Carine has a digital-first approach for storytelling and content curation. As the resident social media guru, she's often an early adopter of new tools and techniques for storytelling, mastering them and teaching others how to use them too.