What the heck are you talking about, you may be saying right now. Let me explain.
You know on Twitter, when you type the @ symbol succeeded by someone’s Twitter name, and the final text ends up making the name an active hyperlink back to their Twitter page? That’s that I’m talking about. Now, on Facebook Fan Pages, when you post a status update and type the @ symbol, a box appears below the text entry area that will begin prepopulating suggestions based on pages that you have labeled as a favorite for that page and your personal friends. This is something that has been available in the status updates on personal profiles for some time, but now that it’s here for Fan pages, the marketing implications are outstanding!
Some of you may know exactly what I’m talking about, but some of you are still confused. I can see your eye brows doing that funny thing they do when you don’t understand. 
Let me give you an example.
Say I was to post a status update on someone’s Facebook fan page: “Hey, I just wanted to let you know of there’s a huge sale @Pier Park this weekend.” When I typed the @ symbol, then succeeded it with Pier Park, it would populate a drop down below where I’m typing that would then allow me to choose my Pier Park fan page. In the final message, the text “@Pier Park” will be an active, clickable hyperlink that would take all that clicked on it to the Pier Park Facebook fan page.
Pretty neat, huh?
So, why is this important, cool, nifty, handy, and every other descriptive word you can think of?
The reason this is cool is because now you can reference your fan page from anywhere you post a status update on Facebook without having to use up your precious link share. You can imbed hyperlinks right in the text. If you go to other pages and post images, videos or links, you can still reference YOUR page through the text.
In the world of SEO, one of the greatest ways to get exposure through traffic is posting comments on other people’s blogs or web sites. This often allows a direct hyperlink back to your site from theirs. From a Facebook fan page standpoint, this can be an excellent way to attract new fans if you post messaged on other fan pages cleverly and creatively. By linking back to your fan page, you can offer your page exposure anywhere on Facebook. Cool, huh?
{ 11 comments… read them below or add one }
This is really something new. I am going to check it out.
I’m so new to Facebook I didn’t realize this was a new feature, but I can really see the advantage. One thing I’ve learned (the hard way) is that when you are tagging from your Fan Page, only a tagged post will go through to the target Fan Page. If you try to attach a photo, a link or a video it won’t go through. If you want to attach something, you have to go directly to the target Page, but then the post comes from you and not your Fan Page. I hope that makes sense. Thanks for this post and this blog, Jason. Good stuff.
Hi Pamela, yea I know. Sometimes it seems frustrating what you would think you would be able to do on Facebook compared to what you CAN actually do.
thanks for the kind words!
Not sure if you realized, but the tagging feature for fan pages broke yesterday. Well, it works, but it broke in the sense that when you tag another page, your message does not show up on their page as your page, it shows as your personal profile.
I’ve been trying to find out if this is a glitch, but can’t find answers (it’s huge and happenings to a lot of pages…well most). I work for an advertising company in their social department, and we have clients that write for their brand’s page; as you can guess, this is a bad thing! Let me know if you know more about this…guessing you are going to be as surprised as I was. I actually watched some of them change when I was researching brands that it’s not working for.
Questions, is this a Facebook change, or an enormous glitch?
-Dave
Dave, I’m not sure I understand the issue you are seeing.
For instance, when I post a status update on a Facebook Fan page that I’m an admin on, and I “tag” another page (e.g. Be sure to check out @fanpage for some specials today), it comes up in my page’s status update timeline as if it was posted from my page (not from me as a person).
And, when I go to the page that I tagged, and click on the filter to be sure that it is showing updates from that page AND fans, I see the update that I posted on MY page within which I tagged that page. That update on the other page looks like it was posted by my Fan Page profile, not from me as a person.
I did notice however, that when I posted a status update on the other Fan page that tagged my fan page, it wasn’t showing up on my fan page at all. Is this what you are talking about?
It looks like it is working one way for me, but not the other.
I would say that is a glitch and look for it to be fixed – but what do I know, we all know Facebook certainly does whatever the heck they want.
Agreed on FB does what it wants! Saw this on a huge scale happening yesterday. Do you have an email address where I can send a couple screen shots (to better explain and show it).
What amazes me is that I am not seeing this covered anywhere, it’s a huge glitch (or change). It’s not happening to every page, but most that I checked. Haven’t tried today yet, but almost all of my old tags from my various pages are still showing up on outside pages as me and not my fanpage.
-Dave
Interesting. Yep, it’s jason (at) toocreative (dot) com – and it’s on my contact page
This is really weird now. I was on one of the fan pages that I’m an admin to, trying to post a status update, and it would not populate (when I typed the @ symbol) the page that I was looking for.
I’m not only a fan of that page, it is also tagged as a favorite on the page that I was updating.
This is getting annoying – has to be a big glitch.
Facebook – please fix soon!
Only people that are on facebook all day (usually for work) will realize how many glitches it has, and how often they occur! Another one, if you have multiple ones under the same search keywords, when you do your @tag, it may not find them.
Facebook only brings up 4 results, so let’s say for example you are a fan of 3 pages named “Florida”, 1 names “Florida Gators”, perhaps a “Florida Travel”, it will only show 4 pages when you type “Florida”. It is not necessarily the same 4 every time. So if you wanted the 2nd “Florida” page, you may have a hard time finding it when you type @Florida and it returns “Florida” “Florida” “Florida Gators” “Florida Travel”, but not the “Florida” you wanted….very annoying.
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Thanks for the tip – this works a treat when you start a new update, but if you want to reply to someone’s comment, the @ trick doesn’t work. Are you aware if there is another way around this other than typing in the full URL?
Cheers.
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