If you’ve made it a point to stuff your Facebook marketing posts with hashtags in hopes that it will go viral — or at least reach a few extra people — it turns out all that effort might not have mattered. According to a new report from Facebook post rating service EdgeRank Checker, posts with hashtags actually perform worse than those without.
Twitter, the birthplace of the hashtag, where phrases hyperlinked and prefaced with a # symbol will lead us to other related content, has us in the habit of assuming that’s how it works everywhere else. Which makes sense, since Instagram, Tumblr, Vine and other social-media companies have adopted similar protocols. But apparently on Facebook — the last major holdout to implement hashtag hyperlinking — hashtags don’t do anything to help businesses reach customers searching in a related space.
According to EdgeRank, posts with hashtags have a median viral reach of 0.8 percent compared to posts without hashtags, which have a median viral tech of 1.3 percent. The same counterintuitive skew applies to metrics across the board. Hashtagged posts have a median fan engagement, of 0.22 percent versus 0.25 percent and a median organic fan reach of 12.47 percent versus 13.36 percent, respectively.
Read more: http://www.entrepreneur.com/article/228205#ixzz2e6quGGvF
