New opportunities for targeted internet marketing can be found in all sorts of social media advancements, and a recent announcement in a much-anticipated policy change for Facebook has possible significance for small businesses. Users of platforms like Twitter will most likely be quite familiar with the "hashtag," the use of a pound sign (#), which links similar tweets together and is a key marketing tool to raise the profiles of certain advertising campaigns. Now, Facebook has officially announced that it will recognize hashtags on its network in a way similar to Twitter.  

What makes this significant is the way consumers already use hashtags, and how this can extend the conversation around a certain company even further. Twitter and other programs can already be engineered to automatically post on Facebook, preserving the links in this medium and enabling what the latter site's announcement calls "public conversations." It also stated that this is just one in a series of similar features it will be implementing along these lines. 

"Hashtags are just the first step to help people more easily discover what others are saying about a specific topic and participate in public conversations," the post said.

Aside from Twitter, Pinterest and Tumblr users will also see their hashtags transferred intact.

Developments such as this, however useful, can be best seen as a part of a larger targeted online advertising plan. Consult Key Media Solutions for the fundamental ideas on the best way to orient your initiatives and which trends are worth putting into practice.