There will always be a time in your life when your emotions are best expressed not by words but by emojis.
So Instagram decided to make your life a lot easier by finally allowing you to hashtag your beloved emojis.
In case you didn’t know it yet: from yesterday on forward, Instagram users may now use emojis not only to express how they feel at the moment but also to make their posts more visible to the audience who feel the same way— by using them as hashtags as well.
Emoji hashtags can be used by typing in the usual ‘hashtag sign’ (#) followed by an emoji, or multiple emojis. Emoji hashtags will also work even when combined with a text.
In a statement released to the Daily Mail, Instagram said:
“Over the past few years, emoji have become part of a universal visual language.”
“From today, on Instagram emoji will now work within hashtags, so you can add them to your posts, search for them on the Explore page, and tap on them in captions.”
Emojis are highly popular in almost every platform of smartphones, and emoji users use the tiny icons in almost all of their interactions on their smartphones— be it messages, comments, or social media posts.
The tiny little icons— which has proven itself effective in extending aid to its human users by helping them express exactly how they feel— is popular on leading social media platforms like Facebook and Twitter, but it is reportedly most used on the photo sharing app Instagram, where it is estimated that about half of the posts submitted on the site contain the tiny emojis.
Now that Instagram has started enabling emoji hashtags, Facebook and Twitter are expected to follow suit.
Apart from enabling the emoji hashtag feature, Instagram’s latest update also contains new photo filters that users can choose from. It can be observed that most Instagram users resort to third-party applications like VSCO and Snapseed to edit out their photos and add filters, but Instagram has since been working on improving its photo-editing tools in-app.
Prior to its latest update, Instagram has already added many features that lets users edit out their images on Instagram itself, so they wouldn’t have to resort to other photo-editing apps. The latest Instagram app now has two new filters in addition to the existing ones. According to the company:
“Filters have been synonymous with Instagram from day one, to help people capture and share photos that looked and felt as beautiful as they did in real life.”
“The enthusiasm from the community has been fantastic, with filters Ludwig and Crema becoming the most popular filters on Instagram overall.”