Hashtags coming to Facebook, may wish to change privacy settings
Joanna Stern (@joannastern) of ABC News penned a nice piece last week on the impact of hashtags coming to Facebook.
It’s a small change, but the addition of hashtags will make your posts dramatically more discoverable.
Even though your public posts on Facebook could always theoretically be seen by anyone, there has never been an easy way to find them. Now it will be easy for anyone to find posts on a specific topic. For example if you use a hashtag for your #lawfirmname, anyone doing a search or clicking that hashtag anywhere on Facebook will retrieve your post.
What does this mean? As Stern warns, you’ll want to be extra vigilant that you’re sharing your posts with the people you want to share them with.
At the bottom of the status update box there is a toggle you can set to public or friends. You can even limit posts to specific groups of friends. You also have the ability to set your default to public or friends.
My default on Facebook is set to public. I am not concerned about anyone seeing my posts. From what I can tell, most people are sharing their posts publicly. Most people just don’t see the posts today.
I am going to keep my default to public with the change to hashtags. If you’re concerned about privacy and will be using hashtags (expect most people to do so), you may want to change your default on posting to friends.