Three Facebook tagging tips

Tagging has been a feature on Facebook since 2009 and whilst popular on personal profiles there are not too many business or brand Pages that take advantage.

You can tag in both photos and in posts/updates and it’s the latter I’ll focus on. Tagging has two main characteristics. Firstly, a tag is hyperlinked making it easy for readers to click and visit the entity eg page or person that you’ve tagged and secondly your post is displayed onto the Wall or Timeline of the Page or friend that you’ve tagged.

To make a tag, you can sometimes just start typing the name of the Page or friend and a selection of choices will appear in a dropdown list. Just select the Page or person you want to tag. To ‘force’ the tag you can type an @ symbol before the name although for reasons only known to Facebook, it doesn’t work at all!

The name will then appeared greyed out until you’re published the post. PRO-TIP: You can edit the name when its greyed out so for example you might want to just use a friend’s first name to make it more personal. Once you’ve shared your post the name of friend turns into a hyperlink and the friend is notified.

Here are three great ways you can using tagging in posts:

1. In conversation with your customers/clients - for example, if you would like to thank a client for their business then you could tag them on your Page. This has a number of advantages; your client will receive a notification that they’ve been tagged, visitors to your Page will see you engaging with your customers and your Page name will appear on your customers’ Timeline thereby raising the awareness of your Page.
2. Cross promotion - work with your suppliers, advisers and contacts on cross promotion if your product of service appeals to their customers and vice versa. So for example you could tag an advisers’ event on your Wall and a few week’s later they could do the same for you. On each occasion your Page and that of your advisers will be promoted on both Pages.
3. Facebook ‘retweeting’ - Tagging is a great way to acknowledge the author/originator of content that you’ve shared; just like retweeting. So if you find an interesting article that you share on your Wall/Timeline you can credit the originator alongside the link. You could use the Share button under the post but then the originator may not ever know that you’ve shared their content.

Used appropriately tagging in posts is a great way to thanks, promote and credit. Don’t overdo tagging or use it to spam Pages and Profiles. If you have any examples of how tagging being used effectively please let me know.

They’ll be more on tagging and how you can use other Facebook Page functions at my Facebook workshop on 29 February in Cheltenham.

About Jonathan Pollinger

Enthusiastic and knowledgeable about all social networks, Jonathan helps people, business and organisations make the most of social media. View all posts by Jonathan Pollinger →