Facebook Hashtags: the facts that Everything you Need to Know

Facebook announced that it recently incorporated hashtags as a way of bringing conversations about public events, people, and topics to the forefront. The world´s largest social network considered the amount of buzz people tend to generate around popular television shows, sport games, and breaking events.

“During primetime television alone, there are between 88 and 100 million Americans engaged on Facebook – roughly a Super Bowl-sized audience every single night,” Greg Lindley stated, when announcing the new feature in the official blog post. To date, there has not been a more convenient or organized way to monitor events or discussions on Facebook on a grand scale. But now, the roll out of hashtags should help people participate in public conversations they are interested in. The hashtags will work on personal profile posts, fan page posts, group posts, event posts, and all comments.

Basic Hashtag information:

Click on the hashtag to get redirected to its feed. You can also click on hashtags that originate on other services, such as Instagram.
Every hashtag on Facebook has its own unique URL.
Search for a specific hashtag from your search bar, for example, #NBAFinals or type facebook.com/hashtag/xxx into your browser (replace the x's with the tag you want to look up).
Compose posts directly from the hashtag feed and search results.

A few #HashtagTips

Marketers are already embracing the power of hashtags and coming up with ways they can be used to their highest potential. You can find some great tips and ideas under #hashtagtips including:

Whether you have the new #hashtag feature or not, start using strategic hashtags in your public Facebook posts (profile and page). Everyone who has the feature will see your hashtags as clickable links.
Each hashtag on Facebook has its own unique URL with a status update box at the top. Drive traffic to that URL from other sites to spark more conversation.
Include hashtags even when posting on mobile. Although hashtags don't work on mobile (yet!), they do work on desktop when posted through your mobile device.
Use #hashtags to start a conversation with a group. Every word you make into a hashtag will be grouped into its own status update box!
Think about your industry and target market, and the types of hashtags you use on other social networks.
Use tags in trending topics related to your industry.
Capitalize the #FirstLetterInEachWord of your hashtag to make it more readable
Don´t overdo your post with hashtags, 1 – 2 is more than enough

What about hashtag privacy?

You control who sees your posts, including those with hashtags. Facebook marketing expert Mari Smith summed up all the hashtag related privacy settings as follows:

As with all personal profile features on Facebook,privacy settings prevail.
If you publish a post on your profile to friends only, and the post contains a hashtag, the hashtag will be clickable and open up to display all other posts on Facebook containing that hashtag.
But, ONLY friends can see friends-only posts that show up in hashtag searches.
Public posts—with or without hashtags—are public.
Private (friends-only) posts—with or without hashtags—are just that: private and visible to friends only.
Even when friends include hashtags in comments on your friends-only thread, your post is still private and visible just to your friends.
With hashtags shared in private groups, that clickable hashtag will open to show public posts with that tag (along with any friends' posts with that tag), but posts from the private group are only available to group members.
Individual comments on threads do not surface in hashtag searches.

Will hashtags affect the reach of your posts? Will they engage more people and keep them talking? Before we bring you the answers, check out these 8 basic hashtag tips and sign-up for a free 14-day trial with Socialbakers Analytics to see how your social media performance compares to your competition.

Hashtags have been out for almost a whole year on Facebook, and it doesn’t appear that people (or brands) are using them too often. I know I haven’t used them, either personally or professionally, and most of my network has ignored them too.

But what about in marketing? There don’t seem to be a lot of “Hashtags for Facebook” guides out there though. Hmm, it doesn’t look like any marketing gurus are giving seminars or webinars on the subject either. What gives?

Are hashtags useful on Facebook, or are they dead?

Before we dive into the discussion, let’s quickly go over what hashtags are and where they came from.

Source: Placeit.net

What’s a hashtag?

Originally started on Twitter by Chris Messina, they were a way to filter and sort through the massiveness of messages found on Twitter. Essentially, it was a way to filter discussions in a simple way. Click the hashtag to see all tweets from people on that topic. You could find and follow all sorts of new people this way.

Facebook didn’t need to bother with hashtags because users could control what information to see in their News Feed. Think of it this way: On Twitter, it was an active way to seek out information; on Facebook you got the information passively in your News Feed.

Instagram and other social media platforms embraced the idea of the hashtag because they too were platforms where users had to actively seek out the information and users. Google+ and Facebook rely on their platform rules and algorithms to filter the information for you.

Back to the question….

Are hashtags useful on Facebook?

In a word, no. Wait, what?

It’s true. For the very reason that they ARE useful on platforms like Twitter and Instagram, they’re NOT useful on Facebook.

Think about it this way:

When you go to Facebook, you’re probably looking through your News Feed for news on your friends and family. Even if you’ve Liked a brand on the site, the information still comes to you in your News Feed.

You see all the updates and pictures that have been posted by both friends, family, and brands. And then you log out. Can you think of any time that you continued to surf through various pages? Probably not.

Compare that to your experience on Twitter.

You open the app on your mobile phone or tablet, and scroll through your feed. Someone uses a hashtag for one of your favorite TV shows, so you click on it to see who else is talking about it. Maybe the star of the show? The writer? Director? You then lose the next hour as your scroll through all the updates with that hashtag, and maybe even made a new friend who also likes that show.

And there you have it: The reason why using hashtags on Facebook will never catch on (and in fact, hasn’t caught on in the almost full year that they’ve been available.) The platform itself doesn’t lend itself to the notion and practice of hashtags.

No one spends hours on Facebook scrolling through updates based on a hashtag (spending hours playing Candy Crush Saga or Bejeweled Blitz, sure, but reading through messages? Nope.)

Here’s the science to back it up

EdgeRank did a study on hashtags, analyzing more than 500 Pages that posted both with and without hashtags. After looking at 35,000+ posts, they found only 6,000 had hashtags. That’s only 17% of the posts on Facebook.

When they dug deeper into the numbers, they found that hashtags didn’t have a positive impact on the brand’s engagement levels on Facebook.

Engagement on Facebook - EdgeRank Checker

Compare that to Twitter, where EdgeRank found that using a hashtag typically doubled the chances of a message being retweeted. More than 70% of the Fortune 500 brands they looked at experienced an increase in retweets when they used a hashtag. Seventy percent!

When CNET reached Facebook for comment on these numbers, they said that their algorithms “are focusing on posts with high-quality content, rather than simply hashtags.”

It appears, then, that hashtags aren’t really gaining a foothold on the social media user; however, if you’re still looking to use them in your marketing campaigns, here are some tips to make sure you’re getting a good return on investment on them.

Facebook Hashtag Tips

Tip #1-Review your Facebook Insights regularly

Facebook Insights is the administration panel for Page owners on Facebook. When you put a hashtag in a post, make sure to check out your Reach and Engagement numbers for those posts to see if the hashtags are making a difference.

Tip #2-Cross-post your content

This will save you time in your social media campaigns, especially if you’re using a tool that publishes to multiple platforms at once, like Hootsuite.

Tip #3-Hashtags are still affected by Privacy settings

Mari Smith, Facebook Marketing Expert, sums up the issue nicely in this post on, what else, Facebook:

Hashtags work on personal profile posts, fan page posts, group posts, event posts, and all comments.
As with all personal profile features on Facebook, privacy settings prevail.
If you publish a post on your profile to friends only, and the post contains a hashtag, the hashtag will be clickable and open up to display all other posts on Facebook containing that hashtag.
- Public posts—with or without hashtags—are public.
- But, ONLY friends can see friends-only posts that show up in hashtag searches.
Private (friends-only) posts—with or without hashtags—are just that: private and visible to friends only.
- Even when friends include hashtags in comments on your friends-only thread, your post is still private and visible just to your friends.
With hashtags shared in private groups, that clickable hashtag will open to show public posts with that tag (along with any friends’ posts with that tag), but posts from the private group would only show to members.
Individual comments on threads do not surface in hashtag searches; just posts show in searches.

Tip#4-Research your hashtag before using it

No sense in using a hashtag all by yourself, right? You want people to share it, and also avoid the embarrassing problem of using one that’s been used for an entirely different purpose and doesn’t align with your company message.

Tip#5-Use hashtags sparingly in each post

Facebook doesn’t limit your posts by character, so you can type away to your heart’s content. Likewise, you can add as many hashtags as you want to a Facebook update. However, it’s not recommended since it’s a red flag to both Facebook and users.

SocialBakers took a snapshot of hashtag usage on Facebook earlier this year and found that the majority use less than five hashtags per update, with the highest number being in the 1-3 range.

How many hashtags should I use on Facebook?

Still want to use hashtags on Facebook?

After reading all this, and you’re still keen to use hashtags on Facebook, go right ahead. Just don’t say we didn’t warn you.