Facebook hashtags could make it
easier to find others on the social
networking site and market your
business, if the hashtags feature is
soon added as insiders and a recent
Wall Street Journal report have
suggested.
Hashtags, a feature up until now
associated mostly with rival Twitter,
have forged an accepted place in
marketing on social media sites. Flickr
added hashtags recently to its latest
mobile app. Google+ and Pinterest
also recognize hashtags. If Facebook
adds hashtags that will round out the
top social sites.
Hashtags (a word or phrase prefixed
with the symbol #) could improve the
way business owners and
entrepreneurs network, interact and
share on Facebook. Hashtags make
information easier to find, especially if
you give a unique hashtag to an event
or topic of news that is currently hot.
People tag their content with a
hashtag phrase, and others can find it
by searching on such phrases.
Reports have been unspecific about
when the company may roll out the
new Facebook hashtags feature. But
until then, below are five ways
suggested by Janette Speyer and
Katrina McNeill
of Web Success Team about how to
use hashtags in your business
marketing. In anticipation of hashtags
being implemented on Facebook at
some point, I’ve described how
hashtags could be applied in the
context of Facebook:

5 Benefits of Hashtags for
Marketing


1. Find Better Conversations
It goes without saying that
conversations are still happening on
Facebook, but they can be difficult to
locate using simple Facebook search
tools. Because you are often
networking with people you know on
Facebook rather than discovering new
people who share your interests,
hashtags may be a huge help in
connecting with people in your niche
or industry, just by finding their
conversations.


2. Join a Chat
Of course chats have long been
possible on Facebook, but hashtags
could make them so much easier to
start and follow. Instead of setting up
chats on a particular fan or personal
page, hashtags would make it easy to
organize a chat around a topic, niche
or interest. This would allow others to
view that chat later through the same
hashtag.


3. Do Some Research
You can do some simple searching to
locate pages of interest on Facebook
today, but the search may be difficult
with some terms yielding literally
hundreds of results. Hashtags, if
incorporated on Facebook as they are
on Twitter, might make it easier to
monitor trending topics and to locate
specific conversations built around
the topics in which you are most
interested.
4. Locate Tribes
Distinct hashtags may make it easier
to locate specific groups of Facebook
users. For example, those having
discussions around very specific
hashtags like #smallbusiness or even
#BizBookAwards. Knowing these
hashtags ahead of time would make it
easy to connect with these tribes
more quickly and join in their
discussions.
5. Check Out the Competition
Obviously, hashtags on Facebook
could give you the opportunity to see
in a different way what audiences are
saying about your competition (and,
for that matter, what they are saying
about you.) They would allow you to
track conversations beyond your
competitor’s Facebook page to see
what messages are going out to other
groups of users and what kinds of
responses they solicit.
Remember, Facebook has not yet
implemented hashtags, and according
to the Wall Street Journal, they are
“not imminent.” No one knows exactly
when they will be implemented. Still,
the above advice is good for using
hashtags on any social network.
Last week we reported why some
businesses might want to rethink
Facebook
for their marketing and
communications needs. Will hashtags
change anyone’s mind, if they’ve given
up on Facebook? We doubt it. But for
dedicated Facebook users, it could
add more functionality to help convey
information and build an audience
around specific topics.
Share how you will use hashtags for
your business, when they are
launched, and whether the new
feature will change how you look at
and use Facebook in the future.