Play Tag – Market Locally on Facebook in 2010

Whether you are a user of the popular social media platform or not, you have probably noticed that more and more businesses are using Facebook pages to stay on the minds of their customers. But are they limited to only reaching Facebook users who connect with them? Not if they take advantage of Facebook tagging.

Business and Geographic Area Tags
Local businesses can increase their reach and visibility in the Facebook community by connecting with other local business and geographic area Facebook pages, and then sharing updates using tags. The tagging feature allows users to tag other Facebook users in their posts, as long the users are friends or fans. For an illustration of how this works, I may decide that I would like to embarrass my teenage daughter by posting one of her baby pictures on my Facebook page. If I include her name in the post, tagged with the @ symbol right before it, my post and the picture will appear on her Facebook page, for all of her friends to see. While this is fun, local business promotion is a much more productive way to use this feature. For example, Cincinnati Bell recently used its Facebook page to promote the annual Labor Day fireworks display that it co-sponsors with a local radio station, WEBN. In a post, Cincinnati Bell tagged the page Cincinnati, which has 29,022 fans and the page WEBN.com, which has 9,793, and was able to substantially increase the visibility of their post.

In addition to expanding reach to broader audience, tagging is a great way for local business owners to network and support fellow businesses, as well as their communities. By taking an informative approach to status posts, businesses can really establish their Facebook pages as a great local resource for Facebook users.

Community Page Tags
Another way to use tags for local marketing is by tagging relevant topics within Facebook Community Pages. These pages are based on various things, interests, and activities. They are intended to be hub pages for users to discover shared information. They look and function like other pages to a certain degree, however they are not maintained by a single author and typically include informational Wikipedia content. Community Pages do not generate a News Feed, but they do display Related Global Posts, which are essentially picked up from anyone on Facebook who mentions the topic word or phrase in a post.

To borrow from the previous example, there is a Community Page for Fireworks, on which related global posts appear from people who mention the word “fireworks” in their text. Anyone who likes or is a fan of this page can tag it by typing “Fireworks” and there will be a link to the page from that post. As a result, people who view the post could click on this tagged subject to find more information about it.

Tagging key subject words in business updates can be beneficial for increasing the informational value of posts, and making them more attractive to readers. This is especially true for subjects that are associated with ongoing developments or breaking news, since people are typically interested in hearing the latest information. Tagging relevant subjects just gives readers another reason to look forward to informative updates from their favorite business pages.

To learn more about using tags, check out the Facebook blog article Tag Friends in Your Status and Posts.