Note: This is a guest post written by Ashish Bhatnagar
Facebook’s transformation from a social network to a personalized newspaper is in progress and they’re continuously rolling out new features for making this newspaper attractive. In a series of efforts to do so, today they launched a longtime missing feature of hashtags.
What this means is that now whenever you post your status update on Facebook, you can make it look like a part of any conversation by including a topic relevant #hashtag in it. Till now, hashtags used to look like plain text on Facebook without any link for supporting them. But now, these #hashtags will be clickable and by clicking on them users will see more stories related to that topic in the feed – just like Twitter.
If you’ve enjoyed this feature from a longtime in Twitter, Instagram and Google+, then you’ll love it here on FB too.
Although Facebook has more active users as compared to Twitter, still it hasn’t yet been successful enough in marketing itself as a place for online discussions. In that case Twitter comes into the game and dominates everything else. Now, Facebook is trying to get rid of that image.
Facebook’s Product Manager Greg Lindley said in a blog post on Facebook blog that between 88 million to 100 million status updates are done on Facebook during prime-time TV hours. And during that time span people remain more active on FB and comment actively on whatever they see.
When it comes to privacy, then Facebook said in the same blog post that we (users) will remain in the full control of privacy and our posts won’t be shown to any unintended audiences even if they include a hashtag.
This is the third Twitter like feature launched by Facebook. At first, they launched newly designed news feed and said that they want to make Facebook more like a personalized newspaper for everyone (and actually, Twitter is also the same thing if you notice). After that, they launched blue verified check marks for celebrity profiles and now finally, hashtags.
Let us know what do you think about them in comments.
