By Nicole Fletcher
You avid Facebookers may have noticed that you can no longer tag one of your friends..or anyone for that matter…when posting as your fan page. While many of you I’m sure hoped this was just a glitch…much like when Facebook killed the suggest your page to friends feature,..it’s not. Facebook has killed it.
Their reasoning is based upon the idea that if a popular page tags a person in a post, that person may get large volumes of unwanted friend requests. Pages can of course still tag other pages, which is definitely a nice feature though it’s been acting weird for me in the past week or so, most likely due to the updates Facebook has been making.
In September of 2009, Facebook introduced the ability to tag friends, pages, events, places and even groups. Even more recently, they allowed for tagging within comments making the wide world of social, even more social. Finally, pages could even be tagged in pictures and now one of these gifts has been taken away. There is though one exception to this tagging change. If Page admins click on the “Share” link on their news feed or the stories that appear on their wall, they can select to publish it to their Page. Within this repost, the admin can tag his or her friends in that post. Impressed that was discovered aren’t you? You should be. While it’s a pretty cool loop hole my guess is that it’s probably a glitch and will not be available much longer.
In the mean time, sorry pages. You can’t tag your friends anymore. Facebook is constantly trying to bridge the experience between users and brands and these functionality changes will not stop here. Especially with the beta launch of Google+, I think we’ll see a few more tricks to say the least from Facebook.