By now, most of us know that #-tags can help posts be more searchable on Facebook, when they make sense. However, with the extent of random usage of hashtags, and the hashtags flooding the social media networks, this is a million-dollar question, and is, in fact, a technical one, and well, once you learn how it works, you will surely refrain from using hashtags randomly without a cause.
One needs to remember that, on FB, a hashtag needs to be written as a single word, devoid of spaces. Numbers, along with letters, can be included in a hashtag, but numbers alone (without letters), punctuation marks and special characters (including % and $) will not work. Hashtags convert terms and phrases into clickable links in a post, both on the wall of your own profile, or in a Page. The primary aim of a hashtag is to help other people find out posts especially about topics they are interested in.
In this context, one should also be informed that, compared to the social n/w Twitter, Facebook’s backend technology uses an algorithm that is fairly similar, in order to track the URL with hashtags distinctly. However, they use hashtags for categorizing or grouping conversations between users.
In order to search for popular hashtags on Facebook, you can just type the keyword preceded by a ‘#’ sign in the search bar. But this technique does not always work perfectly for quick searches. As for instance, we tried to run search with ‘#worldcup’, and the result showed up some recent and related posts, along with a few engagement.
On the contrary, if you directly search with “facebook.com/hashtag/worldcup”, it will display a list of more precise results, along with the listings with recent ‘mentions’ from people in your friends’ list, as well as, other content that have highly been shared by different other users. Then you will be able to view the FB posts related to or surrounding “#worldcup”.
It is important to be careful about using hashtags on Facebook. In Twitter, you will get to view every hashtagged tweet posted in the recent past. But in FB, you will be shown the list of hashtags with various information, for which reason, it is important that you use them logically and thoughtfully.
When you think of experimenting with FB hashtags, the first thing you need to do is to understand the best practices of the very platform of this social network. To begin with, you need to know how many hashtags are allowed per post on Facebook, as also consider going through some good examples of hashtags on FB that has gone viral or popular.
In fact, FB allows you to add as many #-tags you want. Once such questions (as mentioned above) begin to appear in your mind, think that, you are following the right track to understand the technicalities of hashtagging, and eventually using them effectively. What we mean is, using hashtags on FB is quite okay, but you need to use them wisely and tactfully. All you need to understand is where to and how to use hashtags, and be sure that you are not using them unnecessarily just for the sake of it only to annoy your viewers and targeted, potential clients.
You should understand that, you can only add them in such a way that it neither looks spammy, nor leave a negative impact about you or your product, but rather looks convincing and help you increase reach. Hence, knowing precisely what exactly you want to achieve will help you determine how you use hashtags.