<http://schema.org/articleBody>
"Over the years, Facebook has borrowed a few notable features from Twitter, including adding verified accounts and introducing the options to mention other users with the \"@\" symbol and \"follow\" influencers. But on Wednesday, Facebook introduced a feature popular on Twitter that may have a much bigger impact on its revenue: hashtags.\nFacebook announced in a blog post Wednesday that it is rolling out a series of hashtag features in the coming weeks, including clickable hashtags \u2014 available today \u2014 and trending hashtags, which should be available soon. The move is billed as a way to \"bring conversations more to the forefront,\" but as with most features Facebook introduces these days, advertising revenue is certainly a big part of it.\nSEE ALSO: 10 Tips and Tricks for the Facebook iPhone App\n\nFor all their similarities as leaders in the social networking space, Facebook and Twitter have relied on two significantly different marketing pitches to date. Facebook's strong suit its treasure trove of data, which advertisers can use to target users based on content shared on the site and sites they visit after leaving the social network. Twitter, on the other hand, has excelled at giving marketers a way to participate in real-time conversations.\nNow, Facebook wants to have it both ways. \n\"This is a layer on top of what Facebook is already offering,\" Debra Aho Williamson, an analyst with eMarketer, told Mashable. \"If marketers are already using hashtags as part of their marketing on other sites, they will be able to use those same hashtags within Facebook and drive engagement within the Facebook environment.\"\nIn particular, Facebook hinted in the blog post that it is gunning for the second-screen ad dollars that Twitter has tried for in the past year. \"During primetime television alone, there are between 88 and 100 million Americans engaged on Facebook \u2014 roughly a Super Bowl-sized audience every single night,\" Facebook product manager Greg Lindley wrote in the post.\nWilliamson believes that the introduction of hashtags, and eventually ads attached to them, may have an \"incremental\" impact on Facebook's revenue. eMarketer projects that Twitter will generate more than half a billion dollars in ad revenue this year, all of which is based on this real-time advertising model. Facebook, by comparison, generated a little more than $4 billion in ad revenue in 2012. \nWhile the real-time ad business still pales in comparison to Facebook's overall ad business, Williamson suggests that it's still in the early stages and could contribute more later. \"To the extent that the marketing and advertising community embraces this concept of real-time marketing in general, the more that Facebook can offer opportunities for advertisers to market in the moment, the more success they'll have,\" she said.\nBeyond that, hashtags offer an indirect benefit to Facebook's existing ad products by potentially encouraging users to share more information publicly as part of a real-time conversation. \nFacebook, for its part, told Mashable that ads are off-limits to marketers right now, though it is already encouraging brands to include hashtags in advertisements on the social network to increase the reach of those hashtags.\nThe hashtag news comes one day after Facebook executives were grilled by frustrated investors about whether they are working on new products to generate more revenue and boost the company's stock price.\nFacebook's stock was down by more than 1% on Wednesday following the news.\nImage via Robyn Beck/Getty Images"^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string>
<http://mashable.com/2013/06/12/facebook-hashtags-ads/>