How to Tag Your Friends on Facebook

I remember a few years back when I was still getting my first hand lessons on speed typing how I fumbled at sending my first email because I couldn’t find the @ sign (and sometimes I still do). Now here we are in the 21^st century where a new world of social media reigns and the @ sign (snail as some calls it) has become more popular and important than ever before. This may probably be the favorite character of heavy users of email and yes, not to forget, the twitter users. Well, birds and snails don’t come in good pairs but it was a perfect combination when 170 million Twitter users started using this symbol when referencing a certain username in their message, commonly known in the tweetsphere as a “mention”.

But you know what, love stories always come in triangles. And I guess Facebook is coming into the scene by starting to use the snail symbol in its own Facebook tagging feature.  The roll out of the @ feature (which has been available for a while) may not be as popular on status updates we see, but I believe it’s because the announcement of this feature was like a lost love letter that never reached the mass of Facebook users.

I’m sure there still remain a good number of the 500 million Facebook members who doesn’t use this feature. Not because they don’t want to, but because they don’t know about it. So I thought this would be a good idea to help people become aware of this option. And if you are into marketing, you can’t afford to forget using this feature to save you time. Instead of actually going to your friends walls and writing there one by one you can achieve it all through the @ tags. Through tagging, you can post those messages and updates all from your own message box. Does that sound so trivial? Well, actually it does, but if you’re chasing time, you’ll be glad you knew about it.  Also, for your business, it puts your brand on other people’s wall!

Some good things to remember when tagging:

For Twitter it’s a default that someone is connected to everyone as you can send out mentions to any twitter profile as long as you attach the @ sign, but for Facebook, it’s a different story. You can only tag your friends and the pages you “liked”. That is also under the premise that they have the wall posting by friends enabled. Obviously, it doesn’t appear on someone’s wall if they have disabled wall posting. It will, however, still appear on your friends’ feed.

Here’s a quick, 2-step guide to get you started on how to tag your friends, pages, events and groups on your Facebook updates.

1. Type the “@” sign on your message box. You will then see a message just below the box that prompts you to continue with the name of a friend, a page, group or event.

2.       Once you start typing, a dropdown list of your connections with the letters you typed will appear. Chose the profile to tag on your update by clicking on it.

And voila! You just successfully tagged that person, or page. To see the result, check on the wall of that person, group or page you just tagged!

If you want someone to take care of your online and offline marketing needs, contact us! We’d love to hear how we can offer our expertise in helping you maximize the different social media channels for your business.