August 12, 2011 Update!! I figured out a way to tag your fans on your page. You have to do the tagging from your personal profile status feed!
Tag the person, and tag your own page in the same post. Now your post shows up in 3 places – your personal page, your fan’s personal wall/news feed and your own page wall/news feed.
The finished result will look this on your business page:
Editor’s Note: As of June 22, 2011, it’s no longer possible to tag friendly fans from your page, whether you’re in personal or page mode. If this changes, I’ll let you know. Sorry!
In a recent blog post, I talked about 3 ways a business can make use of the Facebook tag as a marketing tool. In the article, I noted that pages can no longer tag people, they can only tag other pages.
But there are times when you’d like to tag a fan – if you’re doing a “fan of the week” promotion, for example, or highlighting your 500th fan, etc. If you could tag a person on your page, your fan’s friends would see the mention on that fan’s own news feed. This gives your company an opportunity to be seen by people who aren’t already fans of your page.
I reached 250 fans on my own Facebook page last week, so naturally, I wanted to acknowledge that milestone by thanking the fan. I automatically started trying to tag them, because old habits die hard! The thing is, I was trying to do it while acting as my page on Facebook. I don’t know what made me think to try this, but I decided to see if I could tag the person while acting as myself. So I switched back to “personal profile” mode and, lo and behold, the tag worked!
But there is a catch. (Nothing’s ever easy with Facebook, is it?) I couldn’t tag someone if they weren’t already a friend of mine.
How to tag a (friendly) fan on your business page:
1. Switch from using Facebook as your business page to personal mode. This is the most important step because you cannot tag a person IF you are acting as your business page.
2. Check Page Settings. Make sure you check the box on the posting preferences under “Your Settings” so that you can post as your page even when using Facebook as yourself.
3. Go to your business page.
4. Type your comment. In the status bar, type your comment, using the “@” sign before your fan’s name to tag them.
5. Hit share. Voila! You have tagged your fan.
Could you use additional Facebook training? Visit my Facebook page for more tips.
Any thoughts on how to tag fans that you are not already friends with?
*I didn’t check the “notify” box… have now. Let me know if you have a solution to above!
I hope you saw my reply to the earlier comment, Matt.
Sorry, Matt. But you can’t tag fans that you’re not friends with. There’s no reason why once they become a fan that you can’t request to be friends with them. Just send them a message, and say, “Hey, thanks for being a fan! I’d like to be friends too. ” See what happens. Otherwise, you can certainly mention their name in a post without tagging it, and since they are a fan, they should still see the post anyway, even if it doesn’t show up on their wall. It will be in their news feed. Hope that helps!
Gloria
This doesnt work for me for some reason 🙁
I followed the steps and it still will not let me tag anyone, only other pages.
Derek,
You’re not alone. Looks like Facebook took this feature away…. again… GRRR!!! Even when I’m using Facebook in personal mode, I can’t tag a person either, only pages. Sigh… I’ll have to keep on eye on this and see if it changes later. Thanks for bringing this to my attention. Sorry!
Glori a
Yes, frustrating indeed. I loved being able to use this feature. By commenting here, will I be notified of updates to this post?
Scott,
Yes, you should be notified of updates. I’ll keep checking, but I’ve got a sneaking suspicion that the feature won’t come back. But then, again, with Facebook, who knows?
Gloria
Hi Gloria! This article has been really helpful. I thought I was going a little crazy when I couldn’t tag a person on a page I admin…even when using my personal page as a page admin. If you hear of updates, could you let me know? Thanks much!
Hi Claire,
It’s so frustrating when Facebook changes the rules! If we get the tagging ability back, I will definitely let you know! I miss it!
Hi Gloria
Hope i get the notice of tagging as well!
Have a nice day!
Rgrds
Max
It’s a tricky situation. If Fb allows tagging, then I [speaking in business mode] could ‘tag’ each and every fan each and every time I uploaded a video or picture or status update. That would be rather ‘spammy’ but some business owners would.
I can definitively say that I’m not going to ask every ‘fan’ of our fitness business to become a fan on my personal wall. [Geez, I wish someone would make… like…”circles” where we could pick and chooses different content to share with different people. hmmmm……]
For now, the ability for me to tag my fans in any pic/vid that I upload is impossible. However…
If, after I upload the vid/pic, I ask users to tag themselves [ding, ding, we have a winner], most of the time, my users WILL! yea! Thereby creating the desired outcome.
Brad,
I haven’t had a chance to update this article yet, but there have been new developments now on the tagging front, as of Aug. 29, 2011. Now you can tag a friend and post it on your page, IF you’re posting a link or photo to your page.
Hi Gloria,
I actually just tried to tag a friend from a business page (the magazine where I work, and where she just published a story) while linking to the story itself … and no go. As suggested, I made sure to logged on to Facebook as myself, had checked the box ensuring I’d post at my job’s page as the job, selected the link first and then attempted to tag to this individual. No dice. Any suggestions?
Thanks! –Melissa
Sounds like you were doing every thing right, if you were using the “Share” feature under the comment. I was just able to tag a friend while writing a comment about the story I was sharing with my page. The reason it may not have worked may be because of their privacy settings. They may not allow tagging!
I am fully able to my friends on my FB page but I cannot tag fans if they are not friends. I do not want to add alot of these people as friends becasue I would prefer to keep my business and personal accounts separate. My clients do not need to be up to date on my personal profile. I wish FB would fix this. If it is a spam issue, fans could simply unlike the page if the spam is a bother to them. Sigh…
Angie,
Hang in there. I haven’t had a chance to write about the latest changes to Facebook, but will shortly.
Any updates, Gloria?
Nope. Still seems like the only way you can do it is how I mentioned on August 12. Tag the person from your personal profile page, and tag your own page at the same time. That way it will show up on your page. I just tried it out again.
That way works, but the only problem with that is I wouldn’t want to spam my personal page with my business page. Also, if you want to tag a another fan page on your page, you have to like the other page on your fan page.
David,
Why would you consider it spamming your personal page with your business page? As long as you’re not doing it all the time, what’s the harm? Your family and friends know you’re in business, right? And actually, you CAN tag a page that you’re NOT a fan of from your own page. I just tried it out, and was able to tag a page that I don’t “like.” That’s where the danger of spamming comes in. Luckily, I haven’t seen too much of that yet.
Dear Gloria,
Please help me out with this! I am trying to share a Group that I am a member of, along with tagging my personal profile, on a page that I admin.
Thanks so much! 🙂
You can share the link to an open group on a Business Page.. But you can’t tag yourself on the page. You’d have to tag your business page on your profile, and include the link to the group at the same time. That should let people on your page see the group. Hope that helps! If not, I’ll email you directly.
Tagging on my personal profile won’t help much, as it won’t be shared as the status message of that page, right?
If you tag your business page on your personal profile, the status will show up on your business page.
Exactly. Even I have that optioned enabled on my page, the one lets me post as the page when I am using my personal profile. But it’s not working somehow, when I am setting my profile status along with tagging my page and my profile and that group I want to share through my page.. it’s just not showing up on my page.. not even under the hidden posts of the page! pretty weird, right?
You may want to double check your privacy settings on Facebook to make sure you are allowing tagging.
I am afraid I have checked, more than double. 🙁
Hmmm… You’ve stumped me. I would ask Facebook or better yet, Mari Smith. 🙂 She might have an idea what’s wrong. Check her facebook page: http://www.fb.com/marismith
Great 😀
How do your tag all of your fans that are also friends in a post?
Tiffany,
You can only tag fans that are friends from your personal profile. If you want the post to show up on your business page, you have to tag your page and your fan in the same post from your personal profile. Business pages can only tag other pages.
How about this one… A page I don’t like, and want nothing to do with, has tagged me on a wall post. I can’t find a way to remove the tag, and I’ve received no response from Fb when I notified them of the harassment. Funny thing is, I have no idea how I could do similar on my page, since I can’t tag anyone I don’t know at all.
That is strange. The page tagged you personally? Did you try to contact the admins of the page to ask them to remove the tag? I’d try that first. The tagging must have done from a personal account, anyway, since I haven’t found a way to tag a person from a page other than the way I’ve explained above. If you can find out who personally tagged you on the page, you can block the person to remove the tag as well. Did you report it to Facebook using this link? https://www.facebook.com/help/?faq=212722115425932. If not, try that to see if you get anywhere.
Yup, the page seems to have tagged me personally, and not through a profile but as the page. I don’t know who owns it, and the admins aren’t listed. I doubt it’s any of my friends, since it’s an artist page and judging from the art and posts it isn’t anyone I know (my friends list is short and made up of only people I know personally). I reported the page itself, as well as the offending post, but nothing has been done about it; Facebook is notoriously slow, it seems.
Come to think of it, I’ve been tagged (recently) by another page – that I like, and not in a harassing way – and yet I can’t tag anyone from my page at all. Are there certain types of pages that can tag, but not others?
I am baffled! I would love to tag people directly from my page, but I can’t do it. I don’t know how they’re getting around this. I have asked Mari Smith about it. If anyone knows, she will! I’ll keep you posted.
Hi, I am trying to tag a FAN who is also a Friend and followed instructions at the top however I am unable to. Please advise… doing something wrong?
Are you trying to tag from your personal profile wall? If not, here is another way to tag a fan on your page, thanks to Mari Smith! A Page can tag a person: *only when the Admin is logged in as their profile (not logged in via the page), *only in a comment (not as a wall post), and *only if the Admin writing the comment is friends with that person. OR, a Page can tag any person (profile) within a thread of comments, e.g. once someone has commented on a thread, the Admin can tag that person in a later comment on the same thread. The Admin doesn’t have to be friends with the person. A Page cannot tag a person who has not yet commented in a thread, or with whom the Admin is not friends
I guess that answers my question! I had inadvertently commented on a Wall post by the page when I thought I was commenting on a friend’s post instead of a shared status. Guess that was some missing information you could have used… Sorry if that made this more difficult to figure out.
Thanks, Gloria! You rock.
I’m so glad! And don’t apologize! If you hadn’t asked the question, I wouldn’t have been able to find out the answer. Thank you!