Again, we’re pondering the age-old question of Facebook hashtag effectiveness. So do they work? To put it simply – yes and no.
Facebook hashtags were introduced in 2013, but they haven’t received as much love than they’ve had on other platforms. For instance, hashtags on Twitter are very user-friendly. By clicking any hashtag you’re automatically pulled into a bigger conversation with the option to sort tweets by most recent or most popular. Facebook’s algorithm works a little differently.
When you type a hashtag into Facebook’s search bar, it pushes the most relevant content to the top of the results and filters posts made by friends and pages you follow.
Clicking a Facebook hashtag doesn’t have the same effect. Instead, Facebook will sort the hashtag into different categories like articles, videos, pages and top posts with the hashtag that have a lot of engagement.
Hashtag best practices
- Capitalize the first letter of every word in a hashtag sentence. After all, #ThisIsAHashtag is much easier to read than #thisisahashtag.
- Incorporate hashtags in your posts when possible. Sometimes hashtags work best as an afterthought when you place them at the end of your sentence. Other times, hashtags are great to insert into your posts to save space. This is often done on Twitter to reduce the character count. Luckily, that’s not an issue on Facebook.
- Only use hashtags that are timely and relevant to your brand. Otherwise, it will lessen the credibility of your page.
How many hashtags are too many?
Unlike Instagram which allows only 30 hashtags in a post, the limit does not exist on Facebook. However, you want to be strategic about which and how many hashtags you use or else your post will look cluttered. One or two hashtags are advised to make your post searchable, but still professional.
Tools for generating hashtags
Sites like SeekMetrics and Hashtagify are great for searching relevant and trending hashtags. They’ll give you some inspiration for when you’re stuck.
To sum it up. Are Facebook hashtags effective? Yes, but only in some ways. Should Facebook hashtags be eliminated completely? No, but use them strategically.
Hopefully, that’s helped clear some confusion on Facebook hashtags. Need more help? Check out the rest of our blog.
