Facebook is planning to incorporate a hashtag feature into their platform, according to industry insiders. Following in Twitter’s footsteps, Facebook is hoping to become more of a “personalised newspaper”.
The humble hashtag is no new thing. They first appeared in online chat rooms to categorise post themes and highlight topics of conversation. Twitter really brought hashtags to the foreground and now people across multiple social media platforms use them every day. Hashtags enable users to group their tweets into catagories that can then be indexed and searched for.
Twitter is not the only hashtagger on the block. Instagram, Pinterest and Google+ already have this feature. Hashtags are a great way of grouping user conversations and indexing trending topics to encourage sustained levels of user interaction. This in turn increases the chances of users seeing and engaging with advertisements.
As Twitter becomes increasingly aggressive with its advertiser-friendly products, Facebook could be looking to cash in on advertisers wanting to benefit from real-time trends and short messaging. In addition, the move would also benefit the development on Facebook Graph Search, a semantic search engine that allows users to find people, places and things based on user relationships including common interests. As Facebook has refused to comment on the rumours, only time will tell if they roll out the hashtag feature.