Are you being tagged on FB without consent?

Being on social media is the call of the day for any & every business. Without any malice to individual entrepreneurs/start-ups, who try to do everything by themselves to save cost, the one thing that they need to stay away from is working the social media so unprofessionally. The ‘social media’ bug bite is the most contagious syndrome in present times & SMEs want to be there on every platform with ‘Facebook’ being the numero uno choice of almost everybody due to its most engaging status.

Lately, I have been receiving posts that I was tagged in, and I had to untag due to the sheer nature of its content. I have a personal profile on FB where I share my achievements. As my network keeps increasing, I have ‘friend’ requests from people I networked with & who I selectively accept. 

I know I may be offending some of my friends, but this made me think – Do people befriend on FB to abuse their growing friend list & annoying others by tagging them in their posts for personal gains? Besides, surprisingly, I was tagged in some obscene content, which I was told was a virus tagging automatically people from FB friend list! I have always been very reactive in checking tagged posts but what about the many who are silent bearers? Keeping this in mind, I thought of penning down a few basic points that would help start-ups understand business tagging on FB:

• It is perfectly okay to promote your business product/service on your profile as your profile is a list of people you know, trust & are supportive of your work. However, when tagging your friends, take permission from them if it is okay to do so. Tagging without consent could be an invasion on their timeline as they would have just posted something promoting their own business & suddenly their timeline is invaded by another irrelevant post, which affects the attention of their promoted content.
• Tagging your friends or sending invites for an event is great, however, be sure that the event you have tagged them on or invited them for is relevant to them and will hold their interest enough either to accept the invitation or to share the same with another group of interested friends, who could benefit by attending the event.
• If you have received a post from a friend tagging you without your consent, be polite & explain to them that while you are pleased to promote their business, your profile of friends/followers are not the right target for their business. Even if the target is correct and you do not want to deviate the attention of your own audience to other businesses, explain to your friends how important it is for you to maintain a profile that speaks only about your own business.

My advice to social media users would be to create a FB Business page and use the FB advertising tool intelligently. FB gives detailed targeting options, and reaching the right audience is much easier than ever before. Of course, it could cost you a few pennies extra, but you know you are entering the right target audience. But using this medium of social media does not end at getting likes and followers. In order to maintain your reach, continuous engagement is critical, or you’ll lose the attention of your audience.

This article was an after-thought after being tagged on an obscene post, but I think its relevance would resonate with many readers.  Let me have your comments and views on Facebook Tagging. I could benefit from an insight or two and may break some myth that may have come out as irrelevant when it comes to my views on Facebook Tagging.