Suites Near New Orleans Sports Venues - Now It Is #facebook

Source - http://www.guardian.co.uk/
By - Tim Anderson
Category - Suites Near New Orleans Sports Venues 
Posted By - Homewood Suites New Orleans

Suites Near New Orleans Sports Venues

Twitter hashtags began in 2007, invented by open-standards evangelist Chris Messina, who was inspired by similar tags on Flickr and, before that ,channels on IRC (internet relay chat). Messina called them tag channels and the idea was to improve "contextualisation, content filtering and exploratory serendipity", for which purposes they have been a remarkable success. Hashtags have many uses, but come into their own when there is breaking news, enabling Twitter users to see live updates from people on the ground.

Earlier this month, Facebook announced its own implementation, which is already live. "When you click on a hashtag in Facebook, you'll see a feed of what other people and pages are saying about that event or topic," says the announcement.

Is this futile Twitter envy or a significant move?

Adding hashtags will not make Facebook a destination for breaking news, any more than it has done for Google+, which already supports them. The culture is different. Some, such as Digg's Jake Levine, argue that Twitter is becoming a broadcast medium with diminishing interactivity. The case is overstated, but Twitter is particularly well suited for hashtags that let you follow a topic. Facebook, by contrast, is the place where you interact with friends.

Hashtags on Facebook are still significant though. In marketing, they are perfect for linking ads – whether online or offline – to online social-media campaigns and, in this context, Facebook's move makes sense. Facebook has more than a billion active users according to its own statements, whereas Twitter is estimated to have around 200 million active users per month. That translates to a large increase in the number of social-media participants who can easily search or click your hashtag and engage by repeating it in their posts.

The bottom line: hashtags are a powerful tool for social-media marketing and too important to ignore, despite the risks. The case for a hashtag tucked into the corner of your ad is stronger than ever.