To Love or to Loathe Facebook Hashtags

Facebook has decided to follow suit and launched support for Hashtags! Twitter and Instagram (as well as nearly every other social media site) have offered this function for some time now giving Facebook much catching up to do. The question is, do we embrace this new functionality or do we loath it as an over-used and over-rated intrusion?

To love or to loathe: Facebook Hashtags?

For Those of You More Medieval Types Who Don’t Know What a Hashtag is:

It is a word or phrase prefixed with the # symbol, for example #epicdev. You would include it in your status update or a post and when you click on it you will be directed to a list of posts or information that include the same Hashtagged word or phrase. Previously on Facebook, the only way you could see if you or your company was mentioned was if you were friends with the informer or if you happened to be tagged in a post.

A Welcomed Aspect Then of the Hashtag

Is that if you are using it for marketing purposes, you can increase exposure and also find out the “who, what, and why” of how you or your business has been mentioned – giving you some great information and sources to work with and thus improve your marketing or business strategies as a whole. This functionality has a lot to do with Facebook’s graph search implementation, making Facebook more of a search engine than just a social media site!

The Downside?

As an individual, your privacy will now be more imposed upon making information on your private life available to more than just Facebook friends and associates. There is however limitations to this and you can manage your privacy settings, but there will still be information that could find a crack to leak through. On top of this, do we really want to read posts riddled with unattractive punctuation marks? It serves to repel just as much as it might attract.

So, Will You be Loving or Loathing Facebook Hashtags?

Should we positively encompass the convenient and enhanced search option now riddling our walls or do we snub it as a nuisance? Its use is to encourage us to have more conversations on the social network, do we oblige? Why not, use it wisely and hopefully more good than harm will be done. Here’s to a new Facebook adventure!

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