This Sunday, when you upload your Saturday night dinner party pictures, you can now tag the restaurant page where you dined out!
Starting today, Facebook allows tagging Fan Pages on photos like tagging friends’ profile. This feature will help people share more about the brands, businesses, etc. they interact with in the real world. Anyone can tag the photos in the photo-viewer, not just profiles who liked the page. Social Media Professionals find this feature as a great branding tool for businesses and professionals using social media.
How to tag pages?
According to Facebook, it is similar to how we used to Tag Your Friends Pictures. Click the photo you wish to tag and then type the name of the page you wish to tag. You can tag a single photo with multiple pages. Once done, simply click ‘Done Tagging’ in the bottom left corner.
What about privacy?
Facebook assures that privacy policy settings will still apply. A page admin can disable the photos from appearing in the photos tab by simply un-checking “users can add photos”. Photo published for everyone becomes visible in the photos tag of the page, whereas photos tagged for friends becomes visible only to the friends of the tagger.
What’s in it for brands?
Certainly, this feature is going to add a boost to branding on Facebook. Someone wearing an Adidas t-shirt can tag the brand on his photo and thus it will get free advertising for the brand. Also, services can be tagged likewise. When you upload your last night dinner party picture, you can tag the restaurant in the picture along with tagging your friends. Got a new haircut that you like? Can tag the salon in your picture! Business professionals can now tag the event, conferences they have attended. Possibilities are endless. Companies can run campaigns to tag their pages for some gifts or free offers.
However, negative publicity is also likely to happen as people will have more freedom to tag and express their opinion about a brand on Facebook. For example, if one gets a bad product and is not satisfied with it, he can simply add the picture and tag it with comments. If this tagging goes viral, it will result in negative word of mouth publicity for the brand. There is a limitation to the amount of tagging-tracking that any brand can do to protect its reputation. Thus, the implications can be both sides, and it depends on the brand a lot on how it goes about interacting with its stakeholders online and how prompt is their social media team to respond in real time.
As each new feature adds in the influential social media sites like Facebook, Twitter, Linkedin, etc., branding and marketing opportunities will increase and with this will increase the needed time commitment for active real time reputation management and monitoring. Small businesses will need professional help (professional social media assistant) to make the best use of the social media sites for promoting their local and online businesses. Addition of new features and applications in Social Media adds to the many reasons why one may need to take professional help in Social Media. As the feature goes live, the immediate reactions will define how brands make the best use of this feature. Let’s wait and watch!
