Facebook Hashtags Have Marketing Potential, Privacy Issues

When Facebook announced the rollout of its Twitter-like hashtag program last month, it wasn't immediately clear how marketers could take advantage.

Facebook didn't provide much information, except to say that there would be no hashtag-related advertising, at least not yet. Many marketers rushed ahead anyway, eager to try the hashtags out.

Colin Sutton, U.S. director of social media at OMD, a media-buying firm that works with brands like PepsiCo, Levi's and GE, estimates that 75% of OMD's clients have already tried hashtags on Facebook. In the UK, 61 of the country's top 100 brands have used Facebook hashtags.

The consensus? It's a tool with the potential to be bigger than Twitter's hashtags, but there needs to be a lot of consumer education before it really catches on.

The Privacy Issue

One of the biggest questions is whether asking consumers to make their hashtag-enhanced status updates public is be one step too much. It's not clear how many people make their status updates public. A Consumer Reports study last year found that 28% of Facebook users make all their posts public. By default, every tweet is public on Twitter, while Facebook's default is private.

Thus, to get a hashtag to really catch on, marketers need to instruct consumers to make their status updates public. That's what the cable net BET did when it tried to get viewers of its BET Awards last month to use Facebook hashtags. The network used on-screen prompts like this one:

Other marketers haven't been specific about where consumers should use hashtags, the thinking being that such discussions should be platform-agnostic.

Facebook needs a certain amount of updates to be public if it wants to offer a list of trends that will alert consumers to real-time discussions, a move that is likely in the offing. Such a list will provide a prime ability to monetize the hashtags via Facebook's equivalent of Twitter's Promoted Trends, and to offer advertising related to second-screen and other types of real-time discussions.

One major limitation is in the way Facebook catalogs its hashtag discussions. On Twitter any tweet with a hashtag will show up in a search for that hashtag. On Facebook, only status updates show up in hashtag searches. If your comment has the hashtag, it doesn't make the search.

"The reasoning is that you are the one that should control whether your post is in the feed, not someone who added a hashtag as a comment (meaning your original post didn't have a hashtag, so I can't insert it into any feed I want by adding a random hashtag)," said a Facebook rep. "I shouldn't be able to hijack your post and force your content into a feed (e.g., #YOLO)." (At the moment, hashtags don't have full functionality on mobile, either, though Facebook will likely fix this soon.)

As a result, a Twitter search for one of MasterCard's hashtags, #lovethiscity, yields much richer results than those on Facebook.

Hashtagged comments don't have to be public to be useful. Yolanda Lam, SVP and group client director at MediaVest, says she thinks Facebook's hashtags will ultimately benefit marketers by letting them identify consumers who are engaged with their brand. "If I liked a brand two years ago that doesn't necessarily mean something, but if I took the time to [participate in a] hashtag, this is more real-time," she says. Lam doesn't think that consumers will get in the habit of making their hashtags public. "The scale might not be as prevalent as Twitter," she says.

JR Badian, VP of digital marketing and social media at MasterCard, says he thinks Facebook will be able to figure out how to make hashtags a mass medium on the platform. Like Lam, though, he believes that even if that doesn't happen, hashtags will be valuable for targeting purposes. Badian calls the passions expressed in hashtags "hasherests," a portmanteau of "hashtag" and "interests."

By offering such info in addition to the demographic and interest targeting that Facebook already provides, advertisers like MasterCard will be able to serve up more relevant ads in the moment. Of course, Facebook's 1.1 billion-strong customer base also provides a nice megaphone for hashtag campaigns: "The ability to put a hashtag within the News Feed is allowing us to extend the reach of our conversations," he says. "The difference we're seeing really is with the numbers."

Engagement

JP Lespinasse, director of social media for BET, says he was happy with the results his channel got for directing viewers to Facebook for hashtag conversations around the BET Awards. The cable net saw more than 9.3M interactions on Facebook related to the awards show. Likes to the BET Awards Facebook Page grew 53% year over year, with a gain of 741,363 Likes to the page, according to Facebook.

Is that good? Lespinasse says he never got interaction data from Facebook before, so there's nothing to compare it to. A Twitter rep, meanwhile, says top hashtags have led to engagement in the tens of millions. (Facebook defines engagement as clicking on, liking, commenting on or sharing.)

Meanwhile, UK researcher Sotrender looked into whether hashtag updates from brands prompted more engagement and was unable to find any conclusive proof.

One factor working in Facebook's favor is the length of interactions. On Facebook, there's no character limit, so consumers could in theory offer more data about themselves. Lisa Pomerantz, Michael Kors' SVP of global communications and marketing, says longer statements haven't yielded much more information yet. "We're more focused on what the sentiment is quite frankly," she says, noting that such sentiment can usually be discerned in a few dozen words. Michael Kors has run some Facebook hashtag campaigns including #WhatsInYourKors, which was designed to spark a discussion around the content of their handbags.

Bigger Than Twitter?

Pomerantz sees Facebook as just one component of that discussion. At the moment, it looks like other marketers are seeing Facebook's hashtags similarly. Until Facebook evolves the program a bit more, its hashtags will be an ancillary to where the real conversation is happening: Twitter.

"It's going to take a while for people to get into the habit of using Facebook #hashtags, but for brands that do adopt it, it can be a powerful search tool for organizing information, targeting new audiences, and being part of larger conversations," says ad agency Droga5's director of social media strategy, Gerard Crichlow. "Shame though that it doesn't collect public posts like Twitter does. Such a miss."

Not everyone sees it that way. OMD's Sutton notes that Facebook's sheer size can make its hashtags the industry standard. Twitter reported 200 million active users last December. By Sutton's reckoning, if Facebook gets 30% of its base to go public with their hashtagged status updates, then Facebook's program will be bigger. Sutton also believes that Facebook can change the nature of hashtag discussions. "We're going to see a significant opportunity pre- and post," Sutton says, referring to major events.

He noted for instance, that most of the Facebook discussion about Game of Thrones' "Red Wedding" episode took place a day or two after the show aired. Fans may stay glued to Twitter during breaking news and live events, but for scripted shows, there's more of a lag, which explains the popularity of next-day recaps on blogs.

There were only 367,000 "Red Wedding" mentions on Twitter out of 5.2 million viewers. On Facebook, 674,242 fans of the Game of Thrones Facebook Page were talking about it the following week, and that was without hashtags.

Says Sutton: "The scale is so big that even with privacy settings, we're still gonna see 4X."

Composite image via iStockphoto, Generi; other images courtesy of BET, Michael Kors/Facebook and HBO