 "Facebook hashtags reduce post virality, fan engagement: Study")
If you had doubts about hashtags being a dud on Facebook, here’s some more proof. An EdgeRank Checker study on Facebook’s new feature has shown that hashtags do nothing to help with additional exposure of a post but reduce its viral reach instead.
For the uninitiated, Facebook finally rolled out the hashtags feature back in June after showing clear indications that it wanted to venture into the real-time segment, dominated by Twitter currently. It’s worth mentioning that while there are other social networking websites and apps, including Facebook owned Instagram, that use the hashtag, the feature has been identified with Twitter ever since it began to be used.
So when Facebook started to let users hashtag words, it led to some skepticism that now checks out. The EdgeRank report consisted of 500 pages studied by researchers in July that checked whether or not posts used hashtags. In all, there were 35,000 posts of which 6,000 used hashtags.
Not the best feature from Facebook in recent times
The researchers realised that posts with hashtags, contrary to popular belief, had less viral reach than those without hashtags. The difference between these two types of posts was about 0.50 percent. Engagement per fan was also down by 0.3 percent on posts with hashtags.
“If people see an object in the news feed with a hashtag they’re interested in, they will click the hashtag to discover more interesting content related to the particular hashtag,” the study read. “Brands that talk about trending hashtags may receive additional exposure due to other Pages using hashtags because their Page may show up unexpectedly.”
On the other hand, hashtags worked brilliantly well on Twitter. EdgeRank Checker put up a caveat emptor saying that it usually did not study Facebook but for the sake of comparison with Facebook did so in this case. It studied 50 accounts, all belonging to Fortune 500 companies and found that having hashtags in a tweet nearly doubled its chance of being Retweeted. Over 70 percent of the brands experienced an increase in Retweets when using a hashtag versus not using one.
The results of the EdgeRank Checker study about Facebook’s hashtags being a no-show corroborate that of Simply Measured’s from July. The study, while it was conducted barely a month after the launch of the feature, suggested that there was no concrete evidence to suggest that hashtags influenced engagements. Even while the top 100 brands of Facebook had embraced the feature whole-heartedly, it had not been having any positive impact on engagement.
Facebook does not seem to have any plans of abandoning its real-time plans just yet. It unveiled pages for hashtags recently and is also testing out a Trending Topics section that apes Twitter’s features yet again. This section, just like on Twitter, will tell Facebook users what others on the social networking website have been talking about. While it might help others take up using hashtag more, chances that the usage of hashtags will grow enough to make an impact on Facebook are very slim.
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