It can be hard to keep up with Facebook’s ever changing, ever growing platform and features with the latest update being the addition of clickable hashtags. Hashtags (i.e. the “#” symbol) were integrated into social media in 2007 with Twitter where they were used for categorizing tweets and conversations. Since then Instagram, Pinterest, and Google+ have adopted the trend. More recently, hashtags were showing up in consumer’s Facebook posts before they had any use or were active. It is our assumption that these specific consumers are also heavy Twitter and/or Instagram users and were familiar with using the tags so they brought them over to Facebook tongue-in-cheek.
In their official announcement Facebook says they will “continue to roll out more features in the coming weeks and months, including trending hashtags and deeper insights.”
So what does this mean for marketers?
With the current features, it works in pretty much the same fashion as Twitter. When you click on a tag it brings up a feed of posts that all include that specific tag. Big difference here though is with all of Facebook’s privacy settings you will only see brands and people in your circle or the select few who have their pages set to public view whereas on Twitter most all posts are public.
While that seems like a small sub-set, there is a chance for marketers, if they use hashtags in their Facebook ads, that they will get their content in front of people who otherwise would not have seen it because they are now in a larger social conversation and feed. Sounds great but initial reports suggest it will not have a substantial increase on new fans.
A word of caution before jumping into the new feature. Brands should be careful when thinking of tying hashtags into their Sweepstakes or Contests as they still need to abide by Facebook Promotion Guidelines. Current guidelines do not allow entries to be granted based on a consumer using a Facebook feature – for example liking a post or including a hashtag in a post. This is also a major difference between the features on Twitter versus Facebook.
The industry will have to keep an eye on Facebook Pages Terms to see if they make any revisions to their guidelines to specially address hashtags and promotions.
We will leave you with some tips for testing out the new feature in your social conversations:
- Limit # of hashtags per post
- Only use them if it makes sense
- Make them relevant to your content while tapping in on current trending tags
#HappyTagging!
