Mediaboss Marketing

Facebook may not have pioneered the use of hashtags in social networking conversations, but now that it's adopting the feature, the company is determined to capitalise.

That was the main takeaway from last week's MIPCOM television industry conference in Cannes, where Facebook's vice president of partnerships Dan Rose gave a keynote speech that was low on specific announcements, but high on strategic lines to read between.

"Today, the intersection of social media and television is a given. Nowadays it's literally hard to flip through he channels without seeing social media integrations everywhere you look," said Rose.

"Social media has truly become an inseparable part of the television experience. Everywhere you look you see Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter being integrated into the TV experience."

Note the order of those three services. Rose's speech had several pointers to the social network's desire to establish its credentials as a social TV partner for broadcasters and producers ahead of Twitter, which has spent the last couple of years publicising its own second-screen role, while forging relationships with TV companies.

Part of Facebook's efforts involve adopting some of Twitter's most prominent features, particularly hashtags, which it started making clickable on its social network in June.

"Hashtags are part of the language of the internet, and now part of the language of Facebook. And soon we'll be rolling out trending topics too," said Rose, who added that he's had access to the latter feature for some time. "During primetime hours, unsurprisingly many of the trending topics are about television."

Rose cited examples from big TV events, including 9m people "interacting" on Facebook about MTV's recent Video Music Awards (VMAs) a word that covers Likes and shares as well as actual comments and 125m interactions around the NBA basketball finals earlier in the year.

Now that both Facebook and Twitter support hashtags, the former is hoping that even more broadcasters will display official hashtags while on-air, while also making use of the social network's two new APIs for broadcasters that help them make sense of viewers' activity on Facebook.

Unveiled in September, the Public Feed API shows a real-time feed of public Facebook posts for a specific word, while the Keyword Insights API aggregates posts mentioning a specific term, and helps broadcasters drill down into the data to understand the buzz.

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Facebook Goes Hard On Hashtags To Tempts TV Execs Away From Twitter