Facebook Changes The Rules Again: What Does Photo Tagging Mean for Business?
Posted by Patrick Murphy on Fri, May 13, 2011
A simple tweak that provides organizations and their social media marketers with greater flexibility. That’s how most people are seeing this change on Facebook.
If you haven’t heard yet, Facebook has made a small teak that means users can tag photos with not only other people, but now pages. What does this mean? A simple example would be that if you attend a concert and post pictures from it then you can tag the pictures with the band’s page. The feature was launched on Wednesday, and currently it lets Facebook users tag pages for Brands & Products or People, but Facebook have said they do plan to roll it out for other categories of pages very soon.
Make sure you have a marketer that has it’s fingers on the pulse of the online marketing evolution. SiliconCloud will perform a free social media evaluation for your business by our expert team.
If you tag a photo of a product or brand, it will show up on the photos tab of that products or brands page. Users also don’t need to be fans of the page to tag a photo with it.
This raises a number of questions for us. What does this mean for user photo privacy? And also, is this a good tool or a bad tool for brand awareness? Could it get out of control?
Facebook have said in a recent blog post that your photo privacy settings won’t change if you tag a brand or product page. If you set a photo post to publish to “everyone” then it will appear publicly on the photos section for the page in question, and admins can see it. If you choose to publish for “friends only”, then just your friends will be able to see the photo. The flexibility is there to maintain the level of privacy that the user wishes.
Regarding the point of view of the brand, it will be an interesting experiment for the next few weeks to see if the concept works out in a positive way. We are apprehensive of course, what if a user with ill intent tags a photo your organisation doesn’t want associated with their brand? We would like to see a tag approval process in place so that brands can control what appears on their page. We have all seen what happens when negativity starts to pop up on a Facebook page, and it is best avoided in terms of brand reputation. If you want to avoid the possibility altogether, you can turn off “Users can add photos” in your page settings.
Make sure you have a marketer that has it’s fingers on the pulse of the online marketing evolution. SiliconCloud will perform a free social media evaluation for your business by our expert team.