One of our social media clients recently asked us a question about their Social Media Engagement Strategy.
Is it possible to tag these business and non-profit pages in our social media posts?
The Problem with Tagging a Business in a Social Media Post
As a Social Media Agency, we made a choice years ago to avoid the dark arts of social media growth and managing engagement because we believe that engaging with potential customers is part of the relationship building sales process. We stay in our lane and focus on quality orangic social media content creation.
Our scheduler does allow us to tag people, businesses and non-profit pages. We told this customer that usually try to avoid tagging because social accounts often have different handles for different social media accounts, and it gets complicated!
Unless the client checks and provides the handles for each social platform, we risk tagging the wrong page. _I once saw a client who helps people with eating disorders accidentally tag a rave night in Scotland! Big Oops!
We’ve found that small business owners think they can just add the @ symbol to the front of the business name. That only works if the business has managed to have consistent social media handles on all platforms. Sadly, we’ve seen that small businesses who set up their socials themselves didn’t know enough about branding to make sure that they have consistent social media handles across all platforms. Facebook tagging poses an additional problem. If the business page has not claimed its username, it is impossible to tag the page in a social media post. The way to tell if a Facebook page has claimed its username is to check if there are lots of numbers in the URL. If the Facebook page looks like our link below without numbers at the end, you can simply copy and paste everything after the / and add the @ symbol before the text without a space. (Also, if there is a / after the business name, do remove it from your tag. https://www.facebook.com/OfficeHounds
The solution to tagging a business in a social media post
Social Media Engagement Strategy Example 1
Check for each social handle and make a list of the tags for each social media account
- If their Facebook page url has numbers after it like above, the tag won’t work. If it doesn’t have numbers after it, she can add @ before the text after the /
example @officehounds https://www.facebook.com/officehounds - Instagram is easy and just their IG handle
- LinkedIn Add @ before everything after company/
https://www.linkedin.com/company/officehounds/
Social Media Engagement Strategy Example 2
Wait until the post is published and send a personalized email with the links to the social post
It’s more work, but if you have one or even a few key contacts in these organizations, you could email them a link to the social post with a friendly note. Just click on the post to copy and paste the direct link to that specific post.
What I like about this approach is that you can ensure the right contacts see it rather than relying on whoever manages the social media page. This also allows you to send one person the links to the FB, IG, and LI posts in one email, so they can choose to like and share one or all of them.
Social Media Engagement Strategy Example 3
Tag them in the comments after the post is published
The other alternative is to wait until the post has been published and tag the organization in the comments. This allows you to write a personalized message.
Remember that, unfortunately, people often have different tags for different social channels, so the correct tags should be found for each social platform to avoid accidentally tagging the wrong business or having a tag that doesn’t work.