Facebook Tags and the Future

Facebook has introduced a new tool to allow businesses to stand out in the Social Media climate. A great tool for The Brandon Agency’s Social Media clients, tagging allows Facebook users to tag businesses, brands, events or other users in their status, which then creates a link that people can simply click on to be taken to the referenced item’s page.
And right now, Social Media is creating quite a buzz in the digital PR world, but knowing how to use this feature correctly is key.

One of the most innovative new features Facebook has introduced and were not just talking about with your photos and videos, but also in your status updates-so others know exactly who and/or what you are talking about.
A simple process, you basically use the @ and then begin typing what you want to tag, a drop-down list will appear, you pick from the list, the @ will disappear in the post and item you picked from the list will be presented in your status update as a link.

For Example:
This is what it looks like as you are choosing your item to insert as your tag:

And this is what the finished product looks like:

Now, the cool thing is, if you have your privacy settings on your wall set to where you share your posts with everyone, that status update that I just posted onto my profile, will now appear on The Brandon Agency’s profile wall, because they have been tagged in my status.

While all this is very cool and a great tool for pages, it is difficult explaining the concept to people, for instance, when you want to run a contest that requires them to use it. It is a fairly new concept to Facebook, and a lot of people aren’t quite sure what it is yet, so they are hesitant to use it.
Right now we are trying to come up with a simpler way to explain to fans of our pages how to use the feature so we can take advantage of it. Every time they tag our page in a post, not only will their friends see it, but also it will post back to our page’s wall, and create more connectivity and engagement between even more people.

One complaint there has been about the tag feature is the fact that you can only use it in statuses and when posting on other pages. You cannot use it inside any of the comments sections, which many Facebook users have said leaves them feeling as if something is “missing”. In response, Facebook staff said in a recent CNN segment that they have received complaints about the features limited use and could possibly make changes in the future to allow users to tag in comments. Meanwhile, we are still figuring out the logistics of the feature, and how we can put it to good use. In some recent Southern Tide posts, I tagged ST directly in a post so Winthrop University PIKE Fraternity brothers would have easy access to the ST page to post photos from a weekend golf outing in which they would be sporting ST gear. While the tag feature is great for status updates and allowing people to tag our clients, there is a catch. When posting a ST video for our keychain contest recently, the creator of the video, opening a beer with his Skipjack keychain, posted the video to his profile, tagging Southern Tide in the video. While it was cool because it posted to his wall and to the Southern Tide page, on the ST page, you couldn’t make comments on the video, because technically it wasn’t originally posted onto the ST page, it was posted to his profile page, so we ended up reposting it as ST so people could comment and we could get feedback. So while there are some drawbacks to the tagging feature, knowing how to use it and understanding how it works can have some great advantages for the engagement of fans on pages. I am not sure if users just need a tutorial on how it works, or if they are just afraid of sharing what they post with everyone else…and in that case, they should change their privacy settings.