It’s been a month since Facebook introduced hashtags to it’s platform and they’re still useless as a user. Sure its easier to identify trends, engage with like-minded people/brands and create a list of target customers/clients, but right now even that can’t be done effectively. It’s too random; Which drastically decreases the value of hashtags. Facebook is really the only one benefitting because they can use hashtags to share more specific data around what people are talking about at scale. Until there is a way to create a filtered search by location/region (like you can on Twitter), there’s really no point to hashtags on Facebook – Especially when just a month before Facebook’s announcement, Google+ added a new “automatic” hashtag feature that predicts what you are talking about and tries to categorize it.
Once hashtags are integrated into Facebook’s Graph Search, then we can start talking about them as relevant. Until then, Facebook is stuck playing catch up. In less than a year, all of this likely won’t even matter because eventually hashtags will disappear and CONTEXT of content will be able to be recognized and organized.
If you’re familiar with today’s definition of the phrase “Big Data” forget it. In a few years, the amount of data will be astronomical compared to what we are working now – Which is unthinkable when you hear statistics like this. Are you ready?
Marketing is Simple, NOT Easy. 