Hashtags on Facebook: What brands need to know

Hashtags have officially made their way onto Facebook, allowing all users to add hashtags to their Facebook status updates and comments. What’s even more exciting is that they are both clickable and searchable.

We saw the birth of the hashtag on Twitter in 2007 by some twist of fate, or rather, a twist-of-keyboard. When Twitter officialised #hashtags by making them clickable, they gained a badge of honour and quickly became a globally trending phenomenon. The symbol traditionally only seen on phones and sheet music was then seen on all other social networks, namely Instagram, Tumblr and Pinterest. Obviously, we all began to wonder when Facebook would follow suit.

The beauty of the hashtag lies in the novelty of how concisely they can aid expression. It allows one to summarise, describe, identify and categorise one’s thoughts or sentiments in a most succinct form. Hashtags went on to become not only a social-media sensation, used to start and engage in topics of conversation, viral jokes, contests and other digital phenomena.

Thomas Jestin (@thomasjestin) is co-founder of Facebook marketing agency KRDS.

Just like journalists who coin phrases and try to popularise them, hashtag addicts seek their fame by trying to invent a viral hashtag, such as the popular #firstworldproblems. Often an amalgamation of creativity, humour and wit, hashtags have garnered quite the burgeoning following and strong endorsement from social-media savants.

So what’s new?

One can argue that most users didn’t wait for Facebook's approval to compulsively hashtag their posts. By mimicking the Twittersphere’s ongoing practice, and thanks to Instagram photos being instantly republished on Facebook along with their hashtags, the symbol has been around on Facebook for a while. [Those who included them were sometimes mocked in the internet's favourite captioned-photo format, as seen in the examples below. Ed]

The change now is that hashtags on Facebook are now active. Adding the prefix ‘#’ to a word or phrase now makes it clickable and is used to amass all the conversations surrounding a certain topic, when posted on public mode, into a public collective box. Social conversations are larger and content is more accessible, even far beyond one’s circle of friends.

Facebook has not yet implemented a trending topics feature (highlighting topics that are tagged at a greater rate than other tags), although this hashtag-related feature is in high demand. 

Speaking of trending topics, we’re reminded once again of the brilliance of searchable hashtags and keywords when trying to gather information on a topic. We all remember the recent haze situation in Singapore. Just with a simple search of the hashtagged phrase, #sghaze, one was privy to a plethora of information and posts about the haze situation and could be kept current with the updates regarding the haze. Therefore proving that hashtags have a far bigger role in society than smartphone-addicted teenagers posting photos and statuses with tags like #swaglife or #firstworldproblems.

Facebook versus Twitter

One of the reasons Facebook decided to jump on the hashtag bandwagon was so it could compete with Twitter in the area of measuring TV audiences. It is a safe bet that far more people use Facebook than Twitter to live-follow TV programmes. Thus, Facebook would definitely benefit from posting 'trending topics' specific to each country.

Twitter has a substantial advantage over Facebook in the way that all Tweets are public: it is a great avenue for developers to have open access to a large chunk of conversations, analyse them, spot trends and gauge the online community’s pulse.

Unlike Twitter, Facebook postings are drastically limited by privacy settings: users will only be able to see posts and content that are public or made visible to them by friends. Thus, developers can’t access topics freely. Facebook itself, however, is capable of using its 'big data' capabilities to perform state-of-the-art analyses, such as it did with the 'Peace' project, which cross-references and displays the number of friendships between Palestinians and Israelis.

For publicly posted articles, developers can search for them through the Graph API, but they must do so using specific keywords as they have no access to Facebook’s 'fire hose'—the 'raw flows' of all public Facebook posts. Theoretically a developer could build an application to track specific words regardless of the hashtag prefix. The latest internal test runs at Facebook marketing agency KRDS, however, show that API can retrieve only a small part of available data and not all the results in real time. Developers, of course, would always welcome greater openness. However, this publicly posted content still represents a very small percentage of the total and brings back the fundamental dilemma that Facebook faces: Either the leading social network embraces its socialising mission as a site where one connects primarily with a private circle of acquaintances (and some brands), or it becomes a collective public space boldly inspired by Twitter.

In my opinion, it is almost impossible to easily marry the two modes of functioning. To do so would require the ability to switch from one mode to another in a way that it is clear to a billion users—a true challenge for ergonomics. I can already see how too many users could get lost along the way. Sensitive information could be made public accidentally. Bad publicity, broken marriages and people being made redundant because of privacy intrusion are just a few example outcomes. In short, Facebook had better think twice before opening Pandora's box.

Ironically, it is precisely the private aspect of Facebook that could unleash the full potential of the hashtags. Some would say that the best way to drown in content on Twitter is just with hashtags! For example, during the 2013 Super Bowl, 167 tweets per minute were tweeted with the hashtag “#superbowl”. How does one cope with all that information? On Twitter one can sort by 'Top', 'All' or 'People you follow', but it's a little sketchy to say the least. Facebook, on the other hand, operates algorithms that allow us to follow the threads on a given topic with our closest friends. Currently, one can only expand the chronological thread of the subject of the hashtagged publications. This stream of information will get richer once Facebook begins to inject a high dose of EdgeRank.

Watch out, marketing community

Unlike on Twitter, where brands are free to hold photo/text/video contests by using hashtags, keep in mind that on Facebook it is against the Platform Promotion Policies to launch a game and give away prizes in the framework of a game based on the use of a native Facebook feature. Sweepstakes, lucky draws, instant winner games and other sorts of contests must be run on applications.

Still, the commencement of hashtags opens up many new avenues for brands on Facebook. We wonder what innovation and creative brilliance will ensue with the introduction of the clickable hashtag But above all, we wonder if brands are ready to start pulling out their chequebooks to be listed on 'trending topics'. Who knows? This is a story that’s just beginning.