The Power of #Hashtags on Facebook

A while back we had a discussion with my colleagues about what qualifies tweets to trend. After doing my analysis on Twitter I remembered that FB has also introduced hashtags in June. I thought it would be great to measure the effectiveness of hashtags on Facebook.

EXHIBIT – THE POWER OF # ON FACEBOOK

In order to prove the power of hashtags on each of these platforms I first had to have knowledge about the following:

Uptake of the hashtags on Facebook
How trends are promoted on Facebook
Uptake of hashtag on Facebook in comparison to that of Twitter

I wanted to know whether people use hashtags on Facebook, if so, are they using them correctly (based on topics being discussed) & is it easy to follow those hashtags.

EXHIBIT – INCORRECT USE OF HASHTAGS

The trends column on twitter appears on the left hand side of my screen (if you are using web), and it continuously updates to show relevant & current trends. On Facebook there is no trends column. I searched various topics with and without the hashtags. I discovered that you do get results on the selected or searched topics and/or it does provide you with various relevant groups.

To make my finding more current, I went one step further and searched something that was trending on twitter: ‘#SignsAGuyDoesntLikeYou’ which was trending in South Africa and USA today, to my surprise, I couldn’t find the topic on Facebook. (I did however find a community called: Signs A Guy Doesn’t Like You, and it had 1 like and no activity at all).

After doing the above-mentioned exercise, I concluded that:

Twitter is more viral than Facebook, therefore the usage of hashtags on Facebook is not as effective as it is on Twitter
Facebook has not created a way of prompting or encouraging the use of hashtags.

In my next blog, I am going to try & answer the following: