Have You Started Using Facebook #Hashtags?

I must admit, I'm a big fan of Twitter. While every social network has their niche, Twitter is the best for finding news and information that is relevant to your life. A large part of this is because an individual is able to partake in conversations outside of their personal network, which is facilitated by the use of hashtags.

Last month, Facebook announced that they were adding interactive hashtags to their platform, allowing users to discover new content within Facebook, which is very similar to Twitter.

With hashtags, you can:

• Search for a specific hashtag using your search bar
• Click on hashtags to discover what is being said about a topic
• Compose posts directly from the search results

While some are celebrating and others less enthusiastic, it will be interesting to see how much adoption it will receive moving forward. The major obstacle of hashtags on Facebook being adopted by the personal user, is privacy settings. The majority of user's conversations are happening within their personal network, and will likely continue to be this way unless they are open to removing a large portion of their privacy settings.

The 'open forum' attitude amongst Facebook users is much less prevalent than those who are active on Twitter, where the hashtag has been so successful. The opportunity for hashtags on Facebook lies in the hands of business, marketers, and advertisers.

In the past Facebook utilized pages users "like," the people they are connected with and other demographic criteria to determine which advertisements are most relevant to them. Although this is still a major advancement in targeted marketing, there is one downfall. A user could have "liked" a page years ago that is no longer relevant to them today. They may be connected with people they don't really talk to anymore. And they may not have updated their current city, age or relationship status.

Hashtags provide a real time metric to determine what is relevant to a person today, which is the most important information you need to know, whether you're selling clothing, gadgets, cars or, of course, real estate.

It should be interesting to see how this plays out in the coming months. How do you feel about hashtags on Facebook? Leave a comment below!

To view the original article, visit the Lone Wolf blog.