Lollipop Local

“I heard that hash tags have some purpose on Facebook… Anyone have any idea what that might be?”

Hashtags and Twitter

Many people believe that hashtags on Facebook are just copying or mocking the Twitter use of hashtags where they are used to make it easier to search out tweets on the same subject.

Or that they are tweets which have been auto-posted to show up on a person’s Facebook wall and so the hashtags from the tweets come across even though they have no real purpose. This is an interesting post about using hashtags on Twitter

Some people have had success with Facebook status updates which auto post to Twitter and find that the hashtags they have used are then picked up by some of the Paper.li roundups of tweets on that subject.

Hashtags on Skype

Others find them especially helpful in Skype groups about particular subjects where there can be lots of comments. If they use the # with a relevant word or phrase, search can bring up all the relevant remarks on that subject.

Hashtags on Facebook

If you have put a hashtag into a comment or status update in a group and then use the search function within that group, it does not pick up the punctuation mark #, only the keyword itself.

So if you include #hashtag in a status update and then search within that group for hashtag, you will find a list of status updates or comments that have included the word hashtag and that word is highlighted.

Do the same for # and you will get some results but no # highlighted and no obvious relevance to that as a search term.

Do Hashtags on Facebook get indexed by Google

A lot of people were curious. So, what I did was a status update on 27 June which began #hashtagtestament and accompanied it with an image called hashtagtestament. People liked and commented on the test to help me to see what would happen.

When I checked google for the term #hashtagtestament on 14 August, it told me that there was nothing for that term but had some listings for hashtagtestatment without the punctuation.

There, at number 2 was a listing for my wall posts on Facebook and at number 3, the hashtag image with the accompanying status updates. Now I will probably have to try the experiment again but with no image, just a status update to see if I can get an actual post itself to rank.

We already knew that Google could index Facebook profiles and business pages to show bios in their results pages but what this shows is that they also index status updates. And that hashtags on Facebook are probably irrelevant.

Hashtags on Google Plus

According to this status update on Google Plus hashtags are a very useful search tool on that platform, helping you to identify mentions of a specific word in both status updates and comments.

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Tags: hashtag facebook, hashtag on facebook, hashtags on facebook

This entry was posted on Thursday, August 16th, 2012 at 8:44 am and is filed under Facebook, Local SEO, SEO For Business. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.