Facebook recently introduced a few new features, Hashtags (#) being the starring one. Hashtags will help users and promoters to find a hotspot for a specific subject and /or event. By inserting a hashtag before a keyword the users will be able to have large group discussions on it.
Why Facebook introduced hashtags support?
As other sites have speculated, Facebook (empowered by its acquisition of Storylane) could possibly announce on June 20 a revamp of notes or some other kind of blogging service that would serve as a Tumblr competitor. Users might be able to sort through posts and notes searchable by hashtags.
The hashtags have repeatedly proven very successful till now for various social networking sites such as- Twitter, Tumblr and Pinterest. On Facebook, the users simply have to put the # sign before the keyword and then it becomes clickable to reveal a bunch of Facebook conversations for that particular keyword. The hashtags will provide users a simple way to see what’s happening or trending globally. Hashtags will make it easier for clients and fans to talk about or to interact with their favorite companies or brands.
Millions of people share their thoughts on Facebook and many of them even make the posts private but it isn’t always clear to everyone what is being discussed. Someone may mistake the TV series to be about a game or book or something else entirely, leading to off-topic comments and many unnecessary arguments. Hashtags will go a long way to solve this problem. When the user will click on the tag, it will take them to that page and so there will no longer be any confusion about what is being discussed.
However, Facebook post’s are private and only for a select group of friends to see unless the post is public, unlike twitter which is public and available for everyone to see. So it is rather difficult to predict if hashtags on Facebook will achieve the same levels of activity and success as it does in Twitter. The hastags in Facebook may inspire users to make their posts public for everyone to see and comment on. It may also inspire other social networking systems to update themselves and enable hashtags. But one thing is sure that Facebook hashtags will engage potential customers with relevant conversations.
Facebook is planning to launch more advanced features in coming months which will make it easy for large corporates and small businesses to figure out how to use the new Facebook features for search engine optimization (SEO) purposes.