Meta's Threads adds hashtags - but with some twists to make them less annoying
Users of Meta's Threads social network who've been clamoring for hashtag support for months need clamor no longer. On Thursday, Instagram head Adam Mosseri revealed in a post that the ability to tag a topic on your post is now rolling out globally. This means you'll be able to add a tag to categorize your post by topic and allow people to search for it and other related posts via that tag.
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Hashtag support has been one of the most requested features by Threads users almost since the platform debuted this past July. Hashtags have been a popular way to identify and find posts on other social networks such as X (aka Twitter), Facebook, and LinkedIn. But Threads is implementing hashtags a bit differently than the rest of the pack.
The # symbol doesn't show up as part of the tag after you add it. However, the tag itself appears in blue so you can easily identify it. Hovering over the tag then underlines it. To generate your tag, you can add multiple words with spaces in between and even use special characters.
You're allowed only one tag per post (a welcome change from all those cluttered X posts that sport a dozen different tags). And the tag view is the search view, which means you simply select the tag to search for corresponding posts. Plus, hashtags work on the Threads mobile apps and website, so you can use them from any device.
"The hope is this design focuses tags more on communities and less on engagement hacking, and does so while keeping Threads simple and easy to use," Mosseri said in his post.
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Engagement hacking refers to the practice of stuffing a post with tags that aren't necessarily relevant as a way to get more people to view it. The one-tag-per-post rule should cut down on this type of hashtag spam.
To add a hashtag to your post, type the # key or select # from the row of icons. From there, a list of popular hashtags pop up, allowing you to choose any of them. Otherwise, start typing the tag you want to use. If your topic already exists, just select it. If not, you can add it as a new topic. The tag then appears in blue.
For any post that sports a hashtag, just select the tag. Threads automatically kicks into search mode to show you all related posts based on that tag.