Facebook officially announced on June 12th that it has added support for the popular Twitter and Instagram staple. Now the facebook users can put a hashtag in their status update or comment, it connects them to others talking about the same and connect you to a community of similar people.
The feature that has kept the social network to wait for so long is finally here. Welcome to the new age of online marketing known as “# (Hashtag) Marketing”. Facebook, taking a page from Twitter’s book, recently introduced hashtags to enable its users to have a better search experience on the social network.
Introduction of hashtags on the world’s most popular social network is a welcome step as it, along with the Graph Search will allow the users to search Facebook easily. The hashtag support, which is a trademark of communications on Twitter, will enable users to have a more engaging social media experience. By clicking on a hashtag, users can access the source of the discussion to get the bigger picture. Apart from being user engaging, marketing pundits are predicting that hashtags on Facebook have the potential to bring a marketing revolution.
So the question that arises now is how the hashtags are going to revolutionize the marketing scenario? Here are some of the new avenues the hashtags can open up for the marketers –
Reach – Everyday, 4.75 billion pieces of content is shared on Facebook. As the social network’s monthly active users are increasing steadily, brands through clickable hashtags can target customers in a more efficient manner. This will give the brands an opportunity to be a part of the conversation, which is more timely, meaningful and relevant.
Better organization – Hashtags will allow Facebook to organize the real time conversation, which offers a huge opportunity for brands and businesses. Adding ‘#’ to the post and ‘graph search’ can present the same to the searchers finding tag related query. With a click of mouse, the hashtag link will open a graph search result page, with mentions to the ‘#’.
Moving beyond Twitter – Hashtags will allow brands to move beyond Twitter. Brands that have always dreamt of capturing the interest of Facebook’s over 1 billion user base can now have an access to it, thanks to the hashtags. Hashtags will allow brands that organize or participate in Twitter chats to have those same chats on Facebook as well.
Create media buzz – Hashtags have given a new power to brands to create a media buzz. As it is now proven that a social media conversation spreads faster than a wildfire, hashtags can facilitate brands in creating a mammoth social media buzz. The hashtags will allow marketers to have a more flexible and focused approach and strategy to grab the attention of the social community.
Cross promotion of the campaigns across different media – Hashtags has allowed the marketers to venture into different realms. Hashtags make it easier for the marketers to cross promote their campaigns. Often marketers design custom hashtags for streamlining information such as offers, product information, and brand and now they can cover Facebook as well. Hashtags have added another dimension to a marketing campaign as now, by simply adding a hashtag in their commercial, they can make the viewers follow them on the social network.
Marketing through trending topics – Although Facebook has not yet unveiled trending topics similar to Twitter, but as the winds of change blow, introducing trending topics does not look like as a far-fetched possibility. The popularity of trending topics on Twitter is an example as to how Facebook can implement and utilize the same on its network. Marketers pay Twitter to make their topic trending so that it can be easily discovered by the users. Facebook, which earns a lot from its ad revenue, can not definitely remain deaf to this revenue source.
Mobile holds the key – Facebook has kept the hashtags to the PC usage for now, and has not unveiled the same for the mobile platform. However, the introduction of hashtags for the mobile platform remains just a matter of time with the exploding mobile phone usage. As of March 2013, monthly active users through mobile stood at 751 million, showcasing a year-over-year growth of 54%. As being connected on the go is the new user mantra, mobile conversations hold the key to future marketing. Hashtags on the mobile will allow a better and more effective customer and marketer interaction.
With timely updates and providing users something new, Facebook has successfully managed to rule the social media and the whopping 1.11 billion user base is the proof for it. Hashtags will allow users to tag their posts that can be indexed and surfaced by Facebook in graph search along with its four main areas – Places, People, Photo and Interest. Hashtags give users the ability to discover the conversations about brands, products, public figures and local businesses. They bring with them a new power that can completely revolutionize the marketing concept. The future is here.