Facebook appears to be expanding the test of its new listings of hashtag usage stats within the post composer when recommending relevant tags to add to your post.

As you can see in this example, shared by social media expert Matt Navarra, the recommended tag listings show not only the top tags based on predictive text, but also a listing of how many posts are already on Facebook using that tag.

It’s similar to Instagram’s Explore listings, which display hashtag usage within the search suggestions.

Given Facebook owns Instagram, it already has access to the source code for such process, and it makes sense to add it to the Facebook composer, providing more context on the surrounding platform discussion – which could help users and businesses tap into the most popular hashtags to maximize the reach of their posts.

If, of course, you bother to add hashtags to your Facebook posts. As we reported recently, Facebook has been putting increased emphasis on hashtag usage on its main platform in recent months, with new, specific prompts on using hashtags ‘to improve your reach’, and trend-based hashtags to prompt more community engagement.

At that time, the new hashtag usage listings were available for some, including our main Page, but not everyone appears to be seeing them as yet.

Now it seems that more users are getting the new listings – we’ve asked Facebook for more information on the feature, but haven’t heard back from them as yet.

As noted, it could be a good way to tap into the broader conversation, and for Facebook to promote the use of hashtags. And even though hashtags have never really caught on for Facebook users, looking at the stats in these images, they are, apparently, seeing use.

Maybe worth considering in your approach.