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Facebook introduces Hashtags, but #TwitterAlreadyDidIt

Facebook HashtagsAfter years of people using hashtags on Facebook whether they had a purpose or not, the website announced today that they will officially be bringing #hashtags to users.

The move is part of their attempts to better link discussions across the web. Since Facebook is not as open as Twitter, Pinterest or Instagram, it is difficult right now to get the full picture of how information is trending through the social media giant. Hashtags will allow public topics to link to one another to see a more thorough view of what people are saying.

However, it isn’t going to work in exactly the same way as other websites. Facebook is still, by its very nature, private. While you can allow strangers to see your profile, most people choose not to. Facebook itself discourages people from leaving their profiles open to the world. Hence why their security options are some of the most commonly updated features on the site.

You will be able to individually control who sees hashtags in the same way you would status updates. Hashtags originating on other services, such as Twitter, are now clickable when shared through Facebook. You can search for specific tags from your search bar. As for composing status updates, you can now do so from the hashtag feed.

It will be interesting to see how this works out. Personally, I don’t see the point in adding hashtags to Facebook. It just doesn’t use the same algorithm type of other social networks that require this kind of post grouping. Sure, people still use hashtags sometimes on the site. But it is to add context to a comment, and usually used satirically or sarcastically.

In the end, this seems more like a move for the analytics crowd, rather than the individual user. Using hashtags could have some cool implications for those being used on open discussions, and especially on Pages. But the ability to see trending topics on a larger scale on Facebook is really going to be exciting for the average social media marketer that has had to rely on smaller scale tools in the past to do their job.

This isn’t the only search-based tool Facebook is launching. They have also presented Graph Search, which lets you search locally for people who share your interests, restaurants, clubs, bands, ect. Every search result is unique, set to the privacy settings of the person doing the search and what people have shared between one another.

I guess we will just have to see how both features fare in coming months.

Source: Facebook Newsroom

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