Save The Date: June 19 Is When Facebook Does Hashtags

Since Twitter has grown so much because of hashtags, Facebook, the number one social media platform in the world, decided to introduce hashtags as well. The move aims to improve its standing in terms of real-time public conversations. According to Facebook, words preceded by the ?#? symbol will be categorized accordingly starting June 19, 2013. Similar to how hashtags work in other social media sites, online users can easily look for related conversations by looking for the hashtags. They can easily click on these on posts to find relevant topics. Greg Lindley is the product manager of Facebook for hashtags. He shared that the use of hashtags in the network will improve the way people search for topics since there weren?t any tool or feature available on the website that would conveniently guide people to the right subject and related issues and conversations. Real-time events can now be tracked easily with the use of hashtags. Facebook and Twitter have been in a tight competition in the past several months. The recent move by Facebook in using hashtags, one of the most prolific markers on Twitter, only means that the former intends to generate more income and users from live events. Once hashtags are available on Facebook, online users can adjust the settings so they can determine which people can view the hashtags and possibly join in conversations. According to Lindley, Facebook will be introducing additional features in the next weeks and months. Hashtags are expected to trend and present deeper issues so online users can get involved in several conversations all over the world. Even though Twitter is the first social media network to introduce the hashtag, one individual, Chris Messina, is actually credited for its creation. He initially proposed that hashtags be included on Twitter to improve content filtering and contextualization. Now, he will witness it introduced to over 1 billion Facebook users.