We all enjoy Facebook’s constant tinkering, right? Yeah, not really. They change so many things SO often it’s really hard to keep up. However, there are ways to take advantage of it (if you can get past the timeline thing…)
I’m not at all coming up with an excuse for not posting a new Facebook tutorial since the one about setting up FBML fan pages. There are plenty of talented folks that built a profitable reputation around keeping track of those FB changes.
Improving User Engagement on Page
Well, a not-so-recent change is Photo tagging for Fan Pages, which allows users to tag themselves or their friends on pictures uploaded by fan pages. Such feature was heavily requested by marketers that wanted to share photos of business events, meetings, testimonials, etc., but were unable to tag the people on the images. Well, not 100% unable. If the admin uploading the pictures was friends with the people on the photo, you were able to tag them, which is clearly not a simple thing to achieve.
Here’s what the feature looks like on your Admin page:
The checkbox we highlighted is unchecked by default (thanks, FB!), so you need to go into your Admin area to enable it. Immediately, your fans are able to start tagging themselves.
As it is the case when a user tags a photo, the person tagged gets a notification, and their friends see it as well. With the super annoying useful ticker on the upper right, this repercussion is even bigger. You can see how this can have exponential growth fairly quickly.
Increasing Page Reach With Photo Tagging Contests
We recently ran a Facebook Halloween contest for the film Hesher. See the promo image we made for it:
In the past, we had 2 options when running such contests:
- Upload the images ourselves – all of fans see the update, but the person portrayed in it may or may not the picture’s been uploaded. Much less their friends
- Allow the users to upload images themselves – that makes sure all of THEIR friends see the photos, but 95% or more of the fan page is never aware of it
With page users being able to tag themselves, admins can upload the pics, publishing the info on their users’ newsfeeds, and users can still tag themselves, reaching their friends’ newsfeeds as well. Here’s what such feature looks like in action:
Want More Real-life Application For Photo Tagging?
How about $100,000 worth of it?
There’s a photography couple that built a 6 figure business using Facebook’s photo tagging capability. Yeap. They went from hobby photographers to popular Wedding Photographers in less than a year!
Can you think of a better application than that? Seriously, if you do, let us know your thoughts on the comments below.
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