Hashtags and Facebook: A Marriage, Long Overdue

Last week, Facebook rolled out news of their plans to make hashtags clickable and to enable users the ability to search and find content on the Facebook platform. Do you hear the resounding cheers from Facebook users and marketers alike?

As one of Facebook’s 1.11 billion users, I am fully aware of the search option for finding people and businesses on Facebook, but that’s about all the searching that’s going on. Facebook has yet to initiate an easy way to find and to follow posts about what may be occurring in current culture or subjects about which people are talking. Hashtag functionality will pave the way for users to be able to search and discover content, like trending hashtags and posts on current and popular subjects, people and events.

How Facebook Hashtags Will Work

Up to now, it’s been hard to post on Facebook and liken it to a larger collective group of similar thoughts and posts. Using a similar clickable functionality as Twitter, Pinterest, Instagram, and Tumblr, Facebook users clicking on a hashtag will be redirected to all other posts with that tag. Facebook users will certainly appreciate the ability to search for trending subjects via entering the hashtag in the search bar and the option of posting within a feed of one particular hashtag.

As marketers, placing relevant hashtags in Facebook posts AND ads will provide a whole new avenue for getting in front of target audiences and for association of your brand with a message – marketing at its most fundamental.

Trends In Marketing - The Hashtag

How many people do you know that get excited about marketing campaigns? I mean, people who aren’t IN marketing? Probably not too many. Well, what is the one exception to most people’s lack of interest in marketing campaigns? Super Bowl commercials. Am I right?

Super Bowl 2013 provided some rich data on social media trends, as seen in the úber expensive commercials (to the tune of $3.7 million for a 30 second spot). From Super Bowl 2012 to Super Bowl 2013, the number of ads with hashtags increased from 7% to 38% while the number of Facebook integrations in commercials fell from 11% to 7% (to just 4 ads)!

Many advertisers made the switch from promoting just their urls and incorporating hashtags in their Super Bowl 2013 marketing campaigns because platforms using hashtags, like Twitter, see highest usage and trending tags when related to an event, person or popular subject. Users have better engagement and association with real time events- feeling as though they are part of a larger whole, a group of people with similar beliefs and opinions- enabled by hashtags.   Also, hashtags make unifying a marketing campaign across numerous media platforms a bit easier.

Facebook Hashtag Implementation



Facebook’s lack of hashtag functionality and searchability has limited brand identification and engagement, particularly between viewers and advertisers. The launch of hashtags is long overdue and virtually necessary to keep up with other social media platforms, as seen from the Super Bowl 2013 ads. 

Facebook has made hashtag functionality available to a very limited group but will be rolling out to more people and pages in the coming weeks. Our friends at Hubspot have compiled a great list of hashtag rules for marketers and they can be found near the bottom of their blog here. So, everyone get out there and start brushing up on your #hashtag skills.