10.1% of tweets have at least one hashtag in their text while 20.8% of retweets contain a hashtag*

Perhaps you’re already an avid supporter of Facebook for B2B marketing? Or perhaps, like most B2B marketers, you have not been lured into the belief that Facebook is as effective as other social media sites such as twitter .

The fact that twitter offers the ability to track (listen to) conversations using hashtags, makes the process of building relationships with customers and prospects just that bit easier. You may well already be tracking conversations by searching for, and clicking on, relevant #hashtagged words, something that even you probably saw as a unique feature.
Well, perhaps not so ‘unique’ anymore. Facebook has recently announced their latest feature…the clickable #hashtag. If you are one of the many companies already using twitter, you can probably hazard a guess to how this may benefit you.

So does Facebook potentially have a larger place in the world of B2B marketing, contrary to what some of us may have initially believed? It may take some time to know for sure, but my guess is that by providing a way to group conversations on particular topics, the gap between Facebook and twitter is about to get just that bit closer.

*Source: Bongwon Suh, Lichan Hong, Peter Pirolli, and Ed H. Chi. Want to be Retweeted? Large Scale Analytics on Factors Impacting Retweet in Twitter Network. In Proc. of IEEE SocialCom 2010, Aug 20-22, 2010. Minneapolis, MN.