Facebook announces hashtags for posts, so your friends’ updates finally make sense

Do you have a Facebook feed full of friends who have been hashtagging their posts for ages, even though hashtags only work on Twitter? Well, there may be a chance those friends of yours were clairvoyant and just preparing for today, when Facebook officially announced it would now support hashtags in posts.

In a blog post today, Facebook’s Greg Lindley said that hashtags would be introduced as a way to get “the larger view of what’s happening [and] what people are talking about.”

By adding a pound sign in front of a keyword in your post, like #this, it will make the word link up with all other uses of that hashtag on Facebook. So if you’re posting about #GameofThrones while you’re watching the latest episode, you can click the hashtag to see what others are saying about it, too.

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The new hashtags will be a way for Facebook to capitalize on all the people who automatically post to the social network via other services like Twitter or Instagram – both which have had hashtags for a long time now.

Users can also search for specific hashtags in the Facebook search bar. Lindley says that in the coming months, Facebook will also add a trending list, so you can see what others are talking about (again, like Twitter), but there’s no specific time frame for it yet.

Hashtags will be made available to users over the next few weeks, starting today.

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