Some companies use hashtags on Facebook the same as they do on Instagram, some leave hashtags out completely on Facebook. But what’s best?
Facebook introduced hashtags quite a while ago now (I want to say 2015?) and the last time I looked, I couldn’t see any official Facebook guidelines for the use of hashtags on their platform. There is however a post on their blog with some very basic guidance for hashtags on Facebook, which has not been updated since 2016.
In my opinion, the most useful thing about using hashtags on Facebook is the search functionality. Billions of searches per day are done on Facebook so it does make sense to optimise your content to give a better chance of it showing up in a search.
Popular hashtags like #ThrowbackThursday or #MotivationMonday are often used by successful Facebook marketers representing big brands in the hopes that their content will pop up in a search by someone looking for a motivational quote or an interesting throwback post.
Also, don’t forget that you could post content relevant to a certain day with an appropriate, widely used hashtag – for example #BankHolidayWeekend or jump on a trending hashtag, just as you would on Instragram.
Another avenue to go down is creating your own hashtag that your audience will come to associate with your brand. If you intend to do this, two things are VERY important. Firstly, choose one that is simple and easy to remember. Secondly be consistent and make sure all your content contains this hashtag.
On Instagram, there is a limit of 30 hashtags per post, with most advice being to add as many as you possibly can, at the end of your post (or as first comment) so, you would be forgiven for thinking that on Facebook you should do the same in order to maximise your chances of appearing in a search. Actually, almost the opposite is true.
All of the statistics that I could find in my research for this post actually showed that the posts with the most engagement on Facebook had only included ONE tag. So fewer is actually better. Also, in all of the research I did into successful marketing campaigns by big brands on Facebook – more often than not, they incorporated the tag into the main body of text.
Given that the best use of Facebook hashtags is completely different to over on Instagram, make sure you adapt your posts if you schedule them in advance.
