The first time a hashtag was used on Twitter was back in 2007.
What started as a random idea by a Google employee ended up becoming a foundational tool across multiple social media platforms.
It took Facebook until 2013 to finally integrate hashtags as clickable links to updates and by then the word had entered day-to-day vocabularly and users were busy hastagging Facebook posts regardless clickability and how they were actually used on Twitter.
These “cart before the horse” beginnings of the hashtag on Facebook have likely, in part, been what has led to pretty poor reach of hashtagged posts ever since. Edgerank Checker research of some 35,000 posts seemed to indicated that hashtagged posts actually enjoyed less rather than extended reach:
Now I’d suggest that one of the reasons for the poor reach is that posts that brands hadhtag tend to be of the spammier variety. And there’s nothing like a list of hashtags in a Page’s Facebook post to get people ignoring it and scrolling past. That alone will send a poor quality indicator to Facebook resulting in further squashing on reach (we cover all this and a lot more in the book and course Winning at Facebook Marketing with Zero Budget).
Facebook would appear to agree in that it responded to the EdgeRank Checker survey with the following:
“Pages should not expect to get increased distribution simply by sticking irrelevant hashtags in their posts. The best thing for Pages (that want increased distribution) to do is focus on posting relevant, high quality-content – hashtags or not. Quality, not hashtags, is what our News Feed algorithms look for so that Pages can increase their reach.”
I do believe there are ways of using hashtags well on Facebook and I cover them in detail in our new Hashtags Masterclass. Let me know what you think.