Facebook, meet #hashtags

Editor’s Note: The day after this blog was published, Facebook officially announced the launch of hashtags on its platform.

Over the last couple of weeks there has been some speculation that Facebook is preparing to introduce hashtags to its platform. While nothing has been confirmed yet, evidence has been found in Facebook’s code that suggests the new feature is coming soon.  This has left many marketers wondering how Facebook hashtags will affect their Facebook campaigns and how the new feature will work.

Hashtags could help marketers improve their reach throughout Facebook. Not only could they promote a specific hashtag for a brand or campaign, they would also be able to keep track of the audience that is engaging in their hashtags and monitor the entire conversation taking place around it. Subsequently, this may open up new and undiscovered audiences that had not previously been targeted, including those who have not already liked a brand or their friends who are not yet fans.

We imagine hashtags will play an important role in Graph Search, Facebook’s new search function, especially since searching for public comments is no longer possible. We’d guess each hashtag will have its own page, which would display a timeline of all the relevant conversations related to it.  Ideally this page would include ads that use that hashtag, as they would be more appropriate to the user and related to their search. We’re also keen to see how the hashtag feature plays a role in selecting an audience for Facebook ads since currently you can already use them to select precise interests for your target audience.

While this feature has been used on Twitter for years, it will be interesting to see how Facebook’s much larger audience embraces it.

We’re really quite intrigued with the idea of Facebook hashtags and will definitely use them in our own Facebook marketing campaign. What are your thoughts on the likely new feature?

Until the official launch of Facebook hashtags, we’ll stay busy developing Facebook campaigns and Facebook apps for our clients, so please contact our Facebook developers today for more information.