So Facebook have finally caved in and have decided to use hashtags. For me this was an inevitable move, with the ever growing popularity of Twitter, Instagram and Tumblr and the recent numbers of Facebook users either staying steady or even declining in some areas, it was always going to happen.
People have been complaining lately that Facebook is becoming too spammy, with unwanted adverts taking up a lot of timeline space and with paid posts gaining popularity over everybody else, a lot of people have jumped ship to Twitter and other social network giants where they don't feel pestered by large companies to buy their products they have no interest in. Numbers have decreased for activity for Facebook which is of course a major worry so it is of no shock that a change so drastic has come about, not to me anyway.
I wrote in my last post (before any of this came in to effect, I might be psychic, who knows) about why I believe Twitter can be better for small businesses when it comes to gaining a wider reach and hitting a wider audience. One of the key reasons for this was the brilliant features of the hashtag and the retweet, as these two combined allow you to tap in to conversations with millions of people who aren't following you, and hopefully engage them enough to do so, or at least grab their attention. It seems that Facebook have finally cottoned on to this fact and implemented the hashtag in order to keep themselves at the top of the game.
Twitter is also widely used as a search engine with a massive 2.1 billion queries being posted in their "search" box every single day, on a personal level I have always thought that the Facebook search feature could be improved by changing it from searching for specific people or pages, which even then can be buggy and faulty, to news pieces or current events. It should be (and will now be) used exactly like this, to find out about news and events like Twitter. I think this is great because I know that I use Twitter a lot more than I use Google when I'm searching for current events or news stories as it not only gives you the facts, but it gives you the opinions of everybody in society on what's going on, something other news outlets fail to do (which is reason I feel that social media is taking over news websites/papers, but that's another blog post).
I think the hashtag implementation is a good move for Facebook as it keeps them in the running as the top dog of social media, the stats would argue that they are absolutely flying and unstoppable, but with the rise of Twitter I think that Facebook really does have to fight for it's place at the top right and changes like these will make a huge difference. I also think this is great for users as it increases competition between the sites and therefore (hopefully) increases functionality and benefits to the social media users. A lot of people are doubting the change and calling it pointless but I have a feeling they will be using the feature as much as anybody else, and I can't help but think that Facebook have put this off long enough, and that Mr Zuckerberg must be kind of annoyed that he didn't come up with it first, I know I would be!
