Facebook Introduces Hashtags

Facebook now supports hashtags, allowing users to find and follow popular and topical conversations on the site.
Two of Facebook’s key rivals in the world of social media, Google+ and Twitter, have already incorporated hashtagging into their sites. Facebook affiliate Instagram, the photo sharing app, has also had hashtags for some time, so it is no surprise that Facebook has finally introduced them.

Microblogging site Twitter revolutionised the onsite search format by introducing hashtags early on in its development, allowing users to easily find and follow conversations, despite the amount of data published on the site every second.

Due to its early adoption of hashtagging, Twitter is now where users go to find out about the top stories and breaking news from around the web, and even around the world: Facebook have introduced hashtags in an attempt to compete with Twitter in this respect. According to the announcement post on the Facebook Newsroom page, people are already discussing popular television on the site:

During primetime television alone, there are between 88 and 100 million Americans engaged on Facebook - roughly a Super Bowl-sized audience every single night. The recent "Red Wedding" episode of Game of Thrones, received over 1.5 million mentions on Facebook, representing a significant portion of the 5.2 million people who watched the show. And this year's Oscars buzz reached an all-time high on Facebook with over 66.5 million interactions, including likes, comments, and posts. 

However, up until now there has been no “simple way to see the larger view of what's happening or what people are talking about”. Hashtags are only the first step in Facebook’s plan: the social media giants intend to roll “out a series of features that surface some of the interesting discussions people are having about public events, people, and topics”.

According to the announcement post, hashtags allow users to:

• Search for a specific hashtag from your search bar. For example, #NBAFinals.
• Click on hashtags that originate on other services, such as Instagram.
• Compose posts directly from the hashtag feed and search results.


Users can still control who sees their posts, even if they contain hashtags, which does limit the service slightly. However, hashtags may encourage users to post public content more frequently, increasing user interaction beyond their friendship group and liked pages.

Hashtags will also help increase brand interaction. Without hashtags, users were limited to seeing posts by their friends, the pages they had liked, and the pages their friends had liked – as well, of course, as any promoted posts. With hashtags, users are more likely to see posts from outside their immediate circle, but just as likely to see posts which interest them: it is the user, after all, who has to click on the hashtag to view the conversation, displaying a willingness to actively engage with the content.

Facebook has published a post on the Facebook Studio pages, advising marketers how they could and should be using hashtags to promote their brands. Here is what the company believes marketers need to know about the new feature:

• If you are already using hashtags in an advertising campaign through other channels, you can amplify these campaigns by including your hashtags in Facebook advertising. The same creative best practices on Facebook still apply – compelling copy and photography that is in the brand voice works best.
• Any hashtags that you use on other platforms that are connected to your Facebook Page will be automatically clickable and searchable on Facebook.
• Like other Facebook marketing tools, hashtags allow you to join and drive the conversations happening about your business. We recommend you search for and view real-time public conversations and test strategies to drive those conversations using hashtags. 
• Hashtags do not impact your distribution or engagement in News Feed on either desktop or mobile. We recommend you continue to focus on your existing campaigns to drive your most important business objectives.

In the post, Facebook has also gone into more detail about the features they intend to release over the next few months to help drive conversations on the site, revealing that trending hashtags are in the pipeline. There is as yet no word on whether hashtags will be monetized or not, but if they are, it will presumably be in a fashion similar to Twitter’s Promoted Trends.

Do you think hashtags will work on Facebook?       

Twitter Has Retired API v1

Today, Twitter finally retired version 1 of its Application Programming Interface, replacing it with version 1.1.

A number of Twitter apps will become obsolete due to the update, including a few that are Twitter owned, such as TweetDeck.

Most Twitter app developers have already moved onto version 1.1 of the API, which was released in September last year. However, a number of smaller apps have been unable to make the transition due to usage restrictions imposed on them.

A small set of clients, who were “replicating the core Twitter experience” (according to a post on the Twitter Developers blog), were limited to 100,000 user tokens, making monetization almost impossible.

Twitter actually originally announced that version 1 would be shut down in May, but they extended by just over a month to ensure that version 1.1 was ready.

The update to version 1.1 is unlikely to affect any major Twitter apps.

Does this update affect you?

Facebook Is Simplifying Facebook Ads

On Thursday, Facebook announced that the Facebook ads experience for marketers was being simplified and streamlined, making it easier for businesses to identify which ad products will help them the best achieve their intended goals.

Facebook has been gathering feedback from advertisers over the past year, figuring out what adverts work best for which advertisers. However, Facebook has now realised that by creating so many ad units, 27 in all, they have created some products which accomplish the same goals as others, hence making them obsolete.

Facebook plans to get rid of over half of the 27 current ad models, streamlining the advertising process for marketers. In the announcement post, Facebook employee Fidji Simo reveals what the proposed changes to the ads experience will eventually achieve:

When we work with a marketer, we always start with their business goals, and we are going to do the same thing with our ad products. Our vision is that over time, an advertiser can come to Facebook and tell us what they are trying to achieve, and our ads tools will automatically suggest the right combination of products to help them achieve it. 

Simo also mentions some of the streamlining process’ early casualties: Facebook will remove the Questions product for Pages, as advertisers can simply ask a question instead; the Offer page post will also be removed as a marketing option, because advertisers are using Page post link ads and achieving the same results to a greater efficacy. These two changes will come into effect in July.

In Autumn, Facebook is updating page post photo ads so that they contain social context (“John Smith liked company’s post” or “Jane White commented on company’s post”), meaning advertisers won’t have to purchase sponsored stories as well to get the benefits of this type of effective word-of-mouth marketing.

The soonest changes will occur later this month: Facebook will reduce the number of ad formats so that advertising is more consistent across the site, making “the ad creation process much simpler for advertisers”.

In the coming weeks and months, marketers will start to see these streamlined changes to our ads solutions. We think these updates will make it easier for them to do what they do best: reach the right groups of people with the right message and drive the results they care most about. 

The proposed changes will mostly likely help small businesses by simplifying and streamlining the ad creation process, and saving them time and money. However, if Facebook achieve the vision they have for Facebook ads, all businesses could benefit.

What do you think of Facebook’s proposed changes to ads?