So you took a wonderful photograph of one of your clients, and you are really excited to share it on Facebook. You did your work editing it on Photoshop, removing the red eye and framing it beautifully. You post it on your professional Facebook page at 9:30 pm Sunday night, a time where you receive the most site visits. A few days later you see the client on the street, and you ask him if he liked the post. Aghast, he did not see it! We can prevent this devastating situation from happening with tagging. To tag a post simply put the @ symbol followed by the name of the page you want to tag. Doing this supernaturally creates a hyperlink directly to their profile page.

When should I tag? Who should I tag? Why not just tag everyone all the time? How can I use tagging to boost my reach? These are all great questions I will attempt to answer for you.

I’ve decided to motivate my clients at the YMCA by posting a meme about losing weight. There is one client in particular that is really struggling, so I really want her to see this post. I tag her using the @ symbol, and I pat myself on the back. What I should of done is kicked myself in the back, because this is a great example of a terrible tag. Now the client may feel like I am singling out her weight struggles in front of everyone. As the voice of your business, you need to constantly be thinking about when tagging is appropriate. A post with a picture of a client I want to show off is an example of when tagging would be warranted.

You don’t want to throw tags around like some wild man; there has to be a reason you are tagging this person. The information you are posting about needs to be pertinent to the person you are tagging. For example, I made a video for our summer camp program at the Y. All of the camp counselors were in it singing the classic camp song “Baby Shark”. When I posted this video to our Facebook page, I tagged as many of the counselors as I could. Doing so, attached my post to their personal profile pages so they could watch the video they were in. This also expanded my post’s reach beyond my normal audience. Now all of the counselors friends have a chance of seeing my video even though they don’t follow the Y’s page. The post was relevant to everyone I tagged, and I could safely assume they wanted to watch the video. This is how tagging can and should be used as a beneficial tool to both parties.

One thing we need to avoid doing is mass tagging. This comes across as spamming to most people and is a big turn off. Even though you are really excited about a promotion your company is doing, tagging everyone who liked your page is probably a mistake. That brings me to another point that you can only tag people who have liked your page. So generating likes becomes of the utmost importance, but that is a subject for a different day.

Now that  you have some basic knowledge, let the tagging begin. Tagging is a great power for social media marketers, so lets not forget what Uncle Ben taught us. “With great power, comes great responsibility.” How do you feel when someone tags you? Please leave me a comment below. There are always exceptions to the rules, so use your best judgement every time you tag. Don’t forget to hit the share button below because gaining knowledge is the first step to wisdom; sharing it is the first step to humanity.