Tag- you're it! Some Facebook tips

Recently several people have asked me questions about tagging on Facebook. I'm not as up to speed with Facebook as I am with Twitter, but I reckon I've got the hang of tagging - so tag along with me and I'll explain it.....

There are actually two things  known as tagging on Facebook. I'll call them tagging in an update and tagging a photo.

If you tag somebody in an update, you write a message on your own  wall  that can also be seen on the wall of the person or business you have tagged.  Why would you want to do this? Well, you might want to send a message to a friend without visiting their wall, or you might want to send the same message to several people at once, but if you are a comper the most likely reason will be  that the promoter has asked you to write something on  your  wall,  in order to enter a competition. Imagine you are  entering a competition run by Bloggs's Biscuits and they ask  you to write "I love Bloggs's Biscuits" on your wall. If you just write it like that, only your friends will see it, and Bloggs's won't know you have  entered, so you need to TAG them. To do  this, type an @ symbol and then  start typing Bloggs's Biscuits immediately, without a space. A drop down menu  will appear and you can select Bloggs's  Biscuits from it and when you have finished typing, the @ symbol will no longer  show  up but  the words Bloggs's  Biscuits will be highlighted.

If you have tagged  somebody in an update, the message appears on both your wall and theirs. And anyone who clicks on the highlighted word will be taken to the tagged  person's page.

Tagging a photo. This was originally intended  so that groups  of friends could tell each other who was in a photo, which is why you are sometimes asked to "Click on a person's face" when there are no faces in the   photo. When a  photo is used for a competition it is just an easy way for the promoter to collect entries while sometimes showing you some of their products. Before you can tag a photo,  you will need to "Like" the promoter's page. Once you have Liked the page, you should see the words  "Tag this photo" in the list under the lower left hand corner of the photo. (Unless,of course, Facebook is playing up, as  it was when I was writing this!). When you have clicked  on "tag this photo" you will see the "Click on a person's face" message I mentioned earlier, but unless the promoter has asked you to tag a specific part of the photo you can click anywhere. Click on the photo and choose your own name from the drop down menu that appears, and then click on "finished tagging" to make sure your tag is saved.There you are, done!

The snag is that a photo can only be tagged 50 times.  Any more than that and you will get a message saying the photo is full. Sometimes a promoter will run a quickie competition for a small prize and close it as soon as the 50 tags are reached;sometimes they have photos of several items and ask you to tag your favourite;  sometimes they will keep on adding more photos each time one is filled up, and sometimes once the photo is full they will say that you can enter by commenting on the photo instead. And sometimes they simply don't know about the 50 tag limit and are surprised when they start getting stroppy messages!

Sometimes when you tag a photo you are asked to tag several friends too  but in fact it is often possible to tag friends and enter  on their behalf  anyway. Do be careful when doing this though, in  case the competition only allows one entry per person. It would be a great pity if they entered too,  maybe on a different photo where you hadn't seen it, and you ended up disqualifying them instead of doing the good turn you had intended.