Public Profiles Would Grow Much More Virally if Users Could Tag Them in Photos

March 30th, 2009

By Justin Smith

Businesses and agencies interested in marketing on Facebook are always looking for ways to creatively use Facebook’s features more powerfully to reach and engage users. And as we’ve noted in the past, some marketers and developers have found creative ways of using Facebook photo tags to do so.

With nearly 15 billion photos on hand and 850 million more uploaded every month, Facebook Photos is the most popular photo sharing site on the web. Why not let users tag pages and public profiles they’re a fan of in their photos too for all their friends to see? Currently, users can only tag their friends.

phototagbrands1

Doing so would let celebrities, event promoters, and business owners benefit from one of Facebook’s most powerful viral loops. Whenever users uploaded photos of themselves with or near a product, store, or artist they were fans of, they could easily tag their photos with that public profile for their friends to see. Each public profile photo tag would generate many clicks to the public profile (i.e. “viral growth”), and in turn increase the number of fans of the page.

Of course, Facebook could give brands the choice to opt in or out, as brands would probably want to “de-tag” some of the photos they were tagged in by users. But it would be a relatively small cost compared to the benefit of all the traffic coming to their page through Facebook Photo tags.

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7 Responses to “Public Profiles Would Grow Much More Virally if Users Could Tag Them in Photos”

Neil Vidyarthi Says:
March 30th, 2009 at 4:34 pm
Brilliant, I completely agree. The entire ’social’ web would connect products, people, services, entertainment… It sounds scary, but if you look a little deeper it probably means more saved time and better ability to find what you want.
Michael Foley Says:
March 30th, 2009 at 6:52 pm
That sounds incredible. Something like this could only encourage social networking and sharing of information about products.
Mike Monaco Says:
March 30th, 2009 at 7:58 pm
great idea but it seems like a moderator nightmare
No please Says:
March 30th, 2009 at 8:08 pm
Pages should remain pages. Facebook’s old “updates” idea was flawed compared to new status updates. Now few APIs would do the job, no need of tagging social photos.
Daryl Griffiths Says:
March 31st, 2009 at 1:31 am
Interesting concept Justin, but I can’t imagine why the hell I would want to tag a brand in one of my photos.
Alison Says:
March 31st, 2009 at 6:42 am
Great idea, as it would definately help communicate a Fan Page and get more members to join.
Michael Downs Says:
March 31st, 2009 at 12:15 pm
Very insightful. Given Skittles un-site, one could see portions of advertiser page dedicated to crowd-sourced network of visual tags that enhance, extend the brand. While moderation would be tough, I don’t see consumer motivation as a problem.