EPISODE 34 OF THE MARKETING SOLUTIONS PODCAST: Hashtags on Facebook

Sonya:

It's going to be another ranty episode. I should stop saying they're rants and maybe rephrase to straight hitting marketing advice. That sounds a whole lot more positive, doesn't it. If I had a dollar for every time I got asked about hashtags, I've give JK Rowling a run for her money, particularly when it comes to Instagram. But today I'm not here to yammer on about Instagram, I'm here to talk about Facebook. You see everyone has that one pet hate on social media. Mine, when people share the Instagram posts straight over to Facebook and leave their hashtags in the Facebook post, it really grinds my gears. And my eye develops this little twitch and I just want to message them and be like, "What are you doing? Read this article."

            Anyway, to understand why this is my pet hate, we need to go back in time to 2013 when Facebook decided to introduce them onto the platform. So the year prior Facebook purchased Instagram for $1 billion, yes, billion with a B. At the time, they had to work out a way to grow Instagram and decided they're introducing hashtags to the Facebook platform, which already were being used on Insta and Twitter by that point, would be the way to get people familiar with it. Remember back in the day, everyone would share all of their personal pics straight from Insta to Facebook and it would say shared from Instagram, another tactic to get us to use Insta and get users off Facebook using Instagram.

            So hashtags have only been around on Facebook since June 2013. And three months later research from Edge Rank Checker found that using hashtags on Facebook has zero positive effect on reach. Posts without hashtags outperform those with hashtags. Granted, this data is old, but I like to think about things logically and the psychology behind what we're seeing on Facebook and social media and how we're engaging with it.

            So when have you ever searched for hashtag on Facebook? By the way, this does not include Facebook groups. I'm part of a mastermind that has a great system of sorting posts and questions using hashtags, AIG systems, hashtag pricing, which will then show posts within that group that have been tagged this way. So it actually looks super spammy to see hashtags on posts on Facebook, especially in big paragraphs, like we saw on Insta. So one or two is fine when you're using it in context, for example, something ironic, but if they're using them to put in, say your business tagline in the caption, ick, it just makes it look like an ad. You won't getting as much engagement. Don't do it. So remember to respect the platform, think about how you use it and what you engage with. Until next week, bye.