It seems that Facebook believes that “it’s better late than never” with their introduction of the ability to use clickable hastags in posts and comments.
This new change has been designed to allow users to add extra context to posts and to link their posts with hashtags to conversations that are occurring all over Facebook on the same topic.
In their press release Facebook’s PR masters easily summed up their intentions by stating that:
“When you click on a hashtag in Facebook, you’ll see a feed of what other people and Pages are saying about that event or topic.
Now you can:
• Search for a specific hashtag from your search bar. For example, #NBAFinals.
• Click on hashtags that originate on other services, such as Instagram.
• Compose posts directly from the hashtag feed and search results.”
This comes after other sites such as Twitter, Tumblr, Instagram and Pinterest have succesfully used hastags to link conversations and posts for the last few years. It will be interesting to see how you can begin to utilise this in your social media strategies and analyses.
Either way this is something that you need to learn how to use if you are using Facebook as part of your social media strategy and fast.
