Over the last week the social media marketing buzz was about how Facebook incorporated hashtags into their search. The majority of news articles and blogs out there proclaim this a huge victory for brands in terms of being able to promote your products and services, and for searching and finding topics within Facebook.
But hold on. Facebook hashtags are in place but they are still in the infancy stage. They are not ready for mass implementation in your social plan just yet. Simply type any promotional marketing buzzword or brand name into Facebook search and see what comes up. Not pretty. I typed in #sweeps and spotted 3 examples of Sweepstakes that don’t follow Facebook Promotion Guidelines. And the results for #coke might make Coca-Cola’s brand team cringe.

So #tohashtag or #nottohashtag? That is the question.

Here is a quick guide of six things to be aware of, and what your brand should avoid doing with Facebook hashtags – at least in the short term.

1. #NoHashtagContests
It only took 3 days after Facebook hashtags were announced before one of our clients asked if they could run a Sweepstakes on Facebook similar to Twitter, where you ask a consumer to post something and use a set hashtag to be entered. The short and overwhelming answer here is no. Asking people to post a comment or a status update is still banned from being considered an entry under Facebook’s promotional guidelines. Guidelines are very specific when they say, “you must not condition registration or entry upon the user liking a Wall post, or commenting or uploading a photo on a Wall.”

2. #NoAnalytics
Currently there are no analytics or way to track what people are saying about #yourbrand. So how are you supposed to track hashtags? Facebook plans on rolling this out soon.

3. #NoSetResults
Search results show posts by friends first and then by public results from pages (especially pages you like) and people. This means what you see will be very different from what your boss or neighbor or high school buddy sees based on who each person’s friends and likes. You can’t count on your company’s #superblog showing up in any users results for that hashtag – even if they like your brand.

4. #NoDashes
A dash in your hashtag will not work – Facebook will only pick up the search from the word before the dash. So #superblog will look for the term “superblog” but #super-blog will only look for “super” which isn’t very super at all. This is a bit problematic for Marden-Kane since we have a hyphen in our name…. but #mardenkane works just fine.

5. #NoMobile
Facebook hashtags don’t work for mobile yet. Not through search or by clicking on a hashtag word in a post. Plan accordingly if you plan on using your hashtag as a gateway to more content since anyone on a mobile will be left out.

6. #PrivacyisKing
Privacy settings still exist, so even if 99% of Facebook is posting about your #brandname you won’t be able to see the posts in your search results unless they allow the posts to be public. Since most people don’t post their posts to the public this leads to a lot of spam in the results. As people get the hang of this, especially the social media managers for brands, expect to see results get less spammy and more relevant.

The take home lesson with Facebook hashtags right now is that your brand can start using hashtags that make sense (like #yourbrand) but needs to keep abreast of changes. When analytics and mobile catch up, and people get the hang of using Facebook hashtags, the spamminess of most of the public post search results may wear off. Until then, use hashtags sparingly and don’t plan basing a promotional campaign on them just yet!