Skip to main content
  1. Home
  2. Social Media
  3. News

Are Facebook hashtags a big fat #failure?

Kate Knibbs
By
facebook hashtags big fat failure fb ht
Image used with permission by copyright holder

Facebook has been taking cues from Twitter for a while now, introducing trending topics, giving high-profile users verification checkmarks, and most obviously, introducing hashtags.

Hashtags are a prominent feature in a variety of social networks – beyond Twitter, people enjoy using them on Instagram, Vine, and (to a lesser extent) Google+. It was certainly a reasonable gamble on Facebook’s part to attempt to bring the enthusiasm for hashtags from other websites onto its own service, especially since hashtags act as a simple discovery tool. And SEO experts even thought hashtags would have a big impact on business marketing. 

Recommended Videos

But alas, Facebook’s hashtags aren’t working. In fact, a study from Facebook analytics firm EdgeRank Checker discovered two pieces of very bad news for Facebook.

Related

According to EdgeRank Checker’s research, Facebook hashtags are actually less likely to make a post go viral. So if you want to get ‘shares’ from friends and followers, putting hashtags in your status updates or photo uploads will be a deterrent to getting eyes on your content. Moreover, using Facebook hashtags also made people less likely to engage with posts. So if you thrive on the short-term positive feedback loop that is Facebook ‘likes’ you’re going to want to avoid hashtagging those wedding pictures and albums of trips to Aruba.

EdgeRank had much better news for Twitter: the hashtags on the microblogging site are still effective engaging tools. If you want to get a re-tweet, you’re still better off using hashtags than skipping them.

EdgeRank doesn’t offer a take on why exactly Facebook’s hashtags are failing so disastrously, but there are a few potential reasons. First, before the introduction of hashtags in June, it looked bad when people posted them on Facebook because it gave the impression that they didn’t know how to use the social network, or that they were being lazy and auto-posting from Twitter.

Second, people don’t use Facebook the same way they use Twitter. If you want to see what your friends are saying about Miley Cyrus’ twerking escapades, you’ll check your News Feed, but if you want to participate in a more rapid-fire public conversation about the VMAs, Twitter is still the place to go. 

Editors' Recommendations

Topics
Kate Knibbs
Kate Knibbs
Former Digital Trends Contributor
Kate Knibbs is a writer from Chicago. She is very happy that her borderline-unhealthy Internet habits are rewarded with a…
Reels are about to show up in yet another Facebook feature
A smartphone with the Facebook app icon on it all on a white marble background.

As its answer to TikTok, Reels is clearly a particularly important priority for Meta. Which is why a number of its platforms' recent feature updates often involve Reels. And today's announcement was not exempt from Meta's push to make Reels just as competitive as TikTok.

On Thursday, Meta announced that it would be bringing Reels to Facebook Groups, mentioning it as one of three new ways for users to "to connect over shared interests." Facebook group members and admins will be able to add "audio, text overlay and filters on top of their videos before sharing to bring their stories to life."

Read more
What is a Facebook Pixel? Meta’s tracking tool, explained
A silhouetted person holds a smartphone displaying the Facebook logo. They are standing in front of a sign showing the Meta logo.

If you have a website for your business and you're wondering how well your ads are reaching prospective customers, you'll probably want to be able to measure that to make sure that the money you've spent on advertising for your business is money well spent. Meta (the parent company of social media platforms Facebook and Instagram) offers a tool that can measure that by capturing how your customers interact with your business' website.

At one point, this tool was known as a Facebook Pixel. But since the technology company's recent rebranding to Meta, the tool also underwent a name change and is now known as the Meta Pixel.

Read more
Twitter experiments with a major change to hashtags
The Twitter app on the Sony XPeria 5 II.

Update October 13, 2022: Twitter reached out to Digital Trends to clarify a few points about its current experiment with hashtags and had this to say:
This is a temporary test visible to a small number of people on web only. We have no plans to remove hashtag functionality on the platform.
Clickable hashtags are kind of important to how people experience Twitter. Clicking through hashtag links is a convenient way to find more tweets related to specific and niche topics. And they're so useful for browsing content that other popular social media platforms (like Instagram and TikTok) have them too.

So why would any platform, especially Twitter, want to experiment with reducing the functionality of such a feature? We don't know. But apparently, that is what's happening. On Monday, Jane Manchun Wong tweeted a screenshot of what appears to be an experimental change to how hashtags work on the bird app. In this case, as Wong notes, that change apparently involves having hashtags without clickable links "unless the tweet contains branded hashtags like #OneTeam and #Periscope that brands pay to add an icon next to hashtags for a while to promote stuff."

Read more