Hashtags on Facebook

Facebook is a people-driven activity. You follow what your friends do, what they think, what they listen to, what they watch etc., You know the people appearing in your feed and you often have a real-life connection with the ones you’re communicating with. This is–or at least has been–the nature of the network.

On Twitter, on the other hand, the communication is more topic-driven. You don’t have to actually know the people you’re following and you often follow a discussion rather than people. These discussions are defined and organized by #hashtags.

Since Facebook previously hasn’t used hashtags, or any other system to monitor discussions on a larger scale, there hasn’t been a way for people or businesses to easily partake in the buzz connected with large sport events, breaking news, popular TV shows etc.

But this doesn’t mean there’s no buzz on Facebook – on the contrary.

“The recent “Red Wedding” episode of Game of Thrones, received over 1.5 million mentions on Facebook, representing a significant portion of the 5.2 million people who watched the show. And this year’s Oscars buzz reached an all-time high on Facebook with over 66.5 million interactions, including likes, comments, and posts,” says Greg Lindey, Product Manager at Facebook.

To bring discussions to the forefront and to make Facebook a place where you can follow an event as well as your friends, the site is now introducing hashtags. When you search for a hashtag in the regular search field, you’ll see the most popular posts around the topic right now.

Below, you see the first posts for #BreakingBad

How Facebook Hashtags Work

• When you write a hashtag in a post, this creates a new URL for that specific tag or get linked to the existing URL for that hashtag.

• When you click on a hashtag, you’re directed to the hashtag feed.

• You can compose posts directly in the hashtag feed and instantly partake in the discussion around the topic.

• When searching for a hashtag, your recommended with more hashtags connected with the topic.

Five Points for Marketers Using Hashtags

Since a lot of people are using Facebook for business, both for driving converting traffic and brand building, hashtags is interesting to take a closer look at. As always when it comes to social media, clever usage of new functions has the potential of driving traffic and spark discussions.

1. Hashtag for a reason: If you are randomly creating hashtags, and include a tag in every post just because you’re supposed to, it won’t work. For a hashtag to be effective, there must be a reason for other people to use it and want to be part of the discussion.

2. Join the right discussions: When you’re writing a hashtag, chances are that it already is created, and instead of writing something new you become a part of an already existing conversation. Make sure you find out what that discussion is about. It could be something you don’t want to connect your brand with.

3. Promote thoughts: Often when you try to create a social-media buzz, your opinion is what’s interesting. When there’s a lot of buzz around something – whether it’s a release of a new TV show or a presidental election – you need to say something interesting, funny or informative to get picked up and talked about.

4. Be unconventional: If you want to make your voice heard and a hashtag truly powerful, try to look at topics from new angles. Is it possible to give an entirely new view on the issue or can you find a way to look at the topic from a broader perspective?

5. It can be hijacked: Remember that everybody is free to use your hashtag. So before you release it, think about if there’s a risk that people will use it in ways that are bad for your business. Say that you are a weapons manufacturer, a hashtag saying #MakingTheWorldABetterPlace may backfire. If you produce potatoe chips, #HealthyLiving may be a bad idea.

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Will Facebook Hashtags Affect Your Privacy?

#Finally. The arrival of hashtags to Facebook has finally been officially announced on Facebook's newsroom.

This critical missing element has caused a lack of communication between users that discourages networking and public conversations. As Facebook attempts to catch up to competitors who have evolved their platforms around networking and open discussion, we are left with the question: but what about privacy?

In comparison to Google+ and Twitter, I have always primarily used Facebook as a personal networking tool to keep up with friends and family. However, when Facebook unleashes hashtags it makes me raise a brow. It seems to be a reoccuring trend that any time Facebook releases updates to it's platform, privacy settings congruently evolve as well. 

Online privacy is an ongoing issues in social media, and here are a few questions that Facebook hashtags have brought to mind:

• Will Facebook posts including hashtags be viewable to the public through the graph search tool?
• Will old Facebook statuses including hashtags be converted in to clickable, searchable hashtags?
• How will users with security-tight profiles be affected by the use of hashtags?
• Will the hashtag updates automatically alter Facebook privacy settings?

A Facebook spokesperson commented saying that from a privacy perspective, "hashtags will work similarly to graph search," which also leaves me wondering if the use of hashtags will promote a greater sense of openness and an increase in public posting if individuals want to jump in conversations. 

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How Facebook Hashtags Will Affect Advertisers

So yet another bit of news from the social giant: this time it’s that they’re looking into bringing the old Twitter favorite, the hashtag, onto the site. Now, aside from the inevitable onslaught of ‘Twitter vs. Facebook’ rhetoric that will be (and is being) bandied about, this move could be a big deal for the people Facebook loves the most: the advertisers.

Currently, advertising on Facebook can be a bit of a minefield. We at Silicon Beach conducted a survey into views on Facebook advertising and the results are largely quite damning.

We asked ‘Does advertising interfere with your Facebook experience?’ and these were the results:

An overwhelming number of those who responded said advertising interfered at least sometimes.

So would hashtags make any kind of difference to advertising strategies on the site? Would they interfere more or less than current ads? Well, let’s take look at the potential impact.

Paid Promotion of Hashtags

Probably the most obvious (and simple) way in which hashtags could be employed for advertising purposes on Facebook is to promote them in a similar way to the current promoted/sponsored posts.

Say a company is running a competition. They could promote their hashtag, #suchandsuchcomp, in posts that would appear in the newsfeed. How is that different to the current system of paid promotion? Well, clicking on the hashtag will reveal anyone using it in conversation, therefore providing a great tracking feature for advertisers and making it easier for users to find all associated info.

More importantly though, it means being able to tap into a previously untouched group who may not have liked the brand or have friends who like it, without the impersonality of the ‘old’ style promoted post.

Campaigns

This then leads into using hashtags for full campaigns, as happens perpetually on Twitter. With enough user uptake and promotion, combined with a clever strategy and a dash of luck, hashtags could be a great way for brands to improve exposure on Facebook. 

If a hashtag goes viral, it means being exposed to an enormous captive audience that even Twitter can’t boast. The significant word there though is if! The potential impact a successful campaign could have is huge but there also needs to be some thought put in.

There has been significant backlash to sponsored stories and promoted posts and it wouldn’t be too far a stretch to imagine the same happening for promoted hashtag campaigns.

In our survey we asked ‘If a sponsored story annoyed you, what action would you take?’ and these were the results:

As you can see 35% of people asked would report an ‘annoying’ sponsored story as spam and another 21% would leave a (presumably negative) comment on the company page or on the post itself. If this active negativity was to transfer into hashtag ads, the concept may not work as well as Facebook might hope.

So is there any other way they could monetize the hashtag element without inviting the same level of disdain as current ads?

Ads on Hashtag Aggregation Pages

This is one possible solution to the problem of negative perception towards ads (although that negative perception has never stopped Facebook before). When a user searches for a hashtag, let’s say #MUFC, they will be directed to a separate page that lists any conversations containing that hashtag. Adverts then could be placed on these pages, and even targeted so that they are relevant to hashtag.

So if someone searches for #MUFC they could find an ad on the aggregation page for a vintage Man. Utd replica shirt seller, or whatever it may be.

At first glance this would appear less invasive and more relevant to the user. The real question is though, if Facebook’s main concern was the user, would they even be considering hashtags? 

The hashtag symbol is also known as the pound symbol in some quarters. That sounds about right for Facebook. 

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