Hashtags are not a Facebook thing.

If you’ve got a whole stream of hashtags it slows down Facebook’s algorithm. And not only that but hashtags can send people to something else. For example, if I hashtag the word Facebook it’s going to send you to anybody else who’s using the #Facebook, which means I’m not sending people to me, I’m sending people to anybody else who’s used that hashtag. So potentially we send them away from us not towards us because we don’t search on Facebook with hashtags. Facebook is like Google in that we can just put in the word Facebook, and when we put the word Facebook in anybody else who’s using the word Facebook will come up.

What we want to do is make sure we’re sending people to OUR Facebook page.  Instead of giving hashtags and sending them away from our page, we want to rather send them to our page, our content, our website, our database, so we can continue to nurture them.

Hashtags are used on Facebook is to create top topics.

So if the topic is about Facebook, you can go #facebook, but as I said, lots of people are using it so it does slow down the algorithm and you’re sending people off your page.

But you must remember, when people read the post, they’re going to click on those hashtags, they’re going to go off your post to someone else’s post who’s using the same hashtag. If you haven’t gone and checked who else is using that hashtag, possibly your competitor, you may well be sending potential clients elsewhere. Unless you have your own hashtag, that is different. Like my one is, #chantalsaid, and I’ve investigated it and no one else is using #chantalsaid, especially the with the way I spell my name. So if anybody did click on that, they would go to a whole bunch of my content.

And,  as I said, it’s not a Facebook thing. You don’t need to use them. Facebook groups, use hashtags, the administrators use hashtags. But the reason they do that is to so that they can control the content on Facebook. It’s not a Facebook thing. It’s a group admin way to control the content. So, yep, there are many opinions out there of people telling you what you can and can’t do, but hopefully, that explained how hashtags do work on Facebook.