The rumours are true! Today, Facebook announced it would support clickable hashtags. That’s right, folks – your hashtag usage on Facebook is no longer ironic.
Following in the footsteps of many social networks, Facebook’s hashtags will allow users to see what conversations are happening around a specific topic on the site. For users, especially those who have grown accustomed to using hashtags on other platforms, this will likely be a welcome change.
How hashtags will work on Facebook:
Users can:
- Search for a specific hashtag from the search bar.
- Click on hashtags from other services, like on photos coming from Instagram
- Compose posts directly from the hashtag feed and search results (this means there’s going to be a dedicated hashtag feed – cool!)
It’ll look like this:
It sounds like Facebook is making this as intuitive as possible and is also leveraging the behaviour that already exists across other platforms. Essentially, Facebook is making itself the hub for all other content, filling in the gap they previously had where hashtags were dead.
My questions:
- Will you be able to use your own hashtags or will they pre-populate to preferred real-conversation tags? From the Instagram comment, it sounds like it’ll be a mix.
- Will the content curate differently than on Twitter or Instagram?
- Will posts have to be public to include a hashtag? Will friend groups be able to use dedicated conversation tags with privacy settings?
For brands, this change will mean that campaigns are suddenly able to be more consistently social than ever. Hashtags will likely become even more ubiquitous in advertising now that brands are able to use them consistently across all social networks.
Clickable hashtags will begin rolling out on Facebook’s desktop site starting today, with all users projected to have the capability in the coming weeks.
I’m really excited to see how this works – how about you?
