.The Costa Rica News (TCRN) – The big social media company recently enabled the use of hashtags on posts and comments.
A hashtag is a word or a phrase preceded by a hash symbol (#) used in social networks like Twitter, Tumblr, Flickr, Instagram, Pinterest and Google+, among others. They create groups or communities of people posting about something specific. For example, one of the most popular hashtags in Costa Rica is #temblorCR (is like saying #tremorCR or #earthquakeCR) where people instantly post about their experiences with this natural phenomenon, doesn’t matter if it’s 3:00 a.m. or in the middle of work hours. On Twitter, #temblorCR is used commonly by important news sites and governmental institutions like CNE (National Emergencies Commission) and the RSN (National Seismologic Network) on their official accounts.
According to TechCrunch, on March, 2013 Facebook has 1.1 billion active users (approximately 1 in every 7 people in the world has a profile on it). The hashtags offers people the possibility to see what’s going on in the world at the moment, and people love them. Having almost the half of users of Facebook, Twitter and its hashtags are widely used by everyone and it’s almost sure that the same will happen with Facebook, but in a bigger scale.
Since the launch of this feature, Facebookers have been using the hashtags to follow events, personalities, news and pretty much everything. This conversational form is very powerful to companies and brands to promote their products. Besides, this is a very lucrative feature for Facebook itself; there are sponsored posts, trends and many other marketing strategies around hashtags being used on the other social networks. This feature also allows a better “cross-posting”, which is the possibility of posting the same content on different social networks, for standardization purposes.
So it’s good for people, good for the social media, also very profitable for companies and for Facebook, as many people said about hashtags on Facebook: “it was about time!”
Sources:
Hashtags: https://www.hashtags.org/
“What’s up with Facebook Hashtags?” Social Media Today: http://socialmediatoday.com/suzimcc/1550361/facebook-hashtags-smtnews-tweetchat
“Facebook Growth since IPO in 12 Big Numbers”. TechCrunch.
http://techcrunch.com/2013/05/17/facebook-growth/
Contributing writer, Eladio Montero Porras
The Costa Rica News (TCRN)
San Jose Costa Rica
