As you know, Facebook had just announced the use of hashtags (#), and in fact rumors about this have been circulating since March of this year. It finally materialized. Hashtags have always been associated with Twitter as they were the first network to use them for the purpose of users expanding their reach. You type in the hashtag next to the keyword that strikes your fancy into the search bar, then you find all kinds of interesting tweets that are relevant to the keyword you had typed in. For instance, if you are in the pet industry niche, you would likely have sent out relevant tweets and would insert hashtags like this #dog #cat #pets. You have may have been interested to see who else is chatting about anything pet related so you would have searched for those particular terms in the search bar. Lo and behold you had found many other conversations that you had wanted to jump into in relation to pets. I bet you had expanded your network quite well due to this feature. You may have increased your business as well from this. Then Google Plus, and Instagram started using it for the same reason. Now finally Facebook is using hashtags. The funny thing is, a lot of people seemed to have rolled their eyes once this took place. Well, I happen to like this feature and I will talk about why.

1. You will Expand your Reach Like I had mentioned above, that is the purpose of the hashtag. To help you expand your reach and grow your network. In my opinion there is no better place to do that other than Facebook. If you want to reach out to new Facebook connections that are interested in something that you have to offer, well, they will search for it by clicking on the hashtag and as long as you insert it, they will find your post. Again, for instance if you want to connect with others interested in the pet industry- after your post, insert those relevant hashtags and others interested in that niche will click on it and find you! That is a great way to grow your reach on Facebook.

2. Jump into Great Conversations Another excellent way to grow your network is to click on a hashtag that you see on your feed from someone in your network that strikes your fancy- or that you happen to insert in one of your status/post updates- you will find other posts from people outside or in your network that have used the same hashtag. You will them jump right into those conversations by commenting on their posts and others will be doing the same to you. Therefore, hashtags are a great way to increase your online engagement.

3. Great for Use of Multiple Campaigns Okay, it is firstly recommended to hook your Twitter to Facebook so anything that you put out on Facebook goes out to Twitter. You will want to bear in mind that important status updates that you put out on Facebook that you want to add the hashtag to should be less than 140 characters. This way you will not only expand your reach on Facebook, but onto Twitter as well.

So I am not all that sure as to what all the pouting about Facebook implementing these hashtags was about. All I know is that I like the fact that they had finally come around to doing this and see nothing but advantages to it.