September 30, 2013
It may be seven years since Twitter revolutionised the hashtag, but Google Plus is fastly finding new ways to take the hashtag further, and in different ways than ever before.
Of course it helps when you own the biggest and most popular search engine in the world. And the most popular video-sharing site to boot. That’s why Google’s new and improved integration with hashtags offers brands multiple reasons as to why they need to have a presence on the search engine’s own social network – Google Plus.
Despite having millions of active users all over the world, there is always that lingering feeling with Google Plus that it’s always the little brother to the bigger, more established and flashier siblings that are Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn. But what Google Plus does have in its arsenal is this: search.
And that’s why the search engine’s new development is so poignant. Because now it means that when you use Google Search using hashtags, you will get a list of relevant G+ posts on the right-hand side, which places a huge emphasis on hashtagging your content and company updates on the platform. Users will also be able to see how many +1s and comments each post has received, but will not be able to directly interact with the post – they will have to go to Google Plus to do that.
So will Google be showing the same results for hashtags from Facebook and Twitter? They will, but underneath the posts from Google Plus – which makes sense really. This update has already rolled out in the US, and we in the UK are expecting to see this in the near future.
With search results being one of the driving factors of brands setting up a presence on Google Plus, searchable hashtags can only be a good thing. Make sure you get hashtagging your updates from your page, and be sure to search throughout the platform which are the most popular hashtags for maximum effect!