Facebook photo tagging for pages and moderation

Facebook has improved photo tagging by enabling users to tag photos with the names of pages.

With brand owners and marketers salivating over the potential for increased exposure in people’s news feeds not to mention it could also include the Holy Grail of getting more ‘user-generated content’ submitted to pages it’s seen as a great opportunity for brands.

Or is it?

In practical terms protecting a brand on Facebook can be a huge task. You already have to manage a number of permissions including:

• Allow users to write or post content on the Wall
• Decide what type of content you’re going to allow to be posted

 

 

Why photo permissions are separate

Currently video and photos are individual permissions levels. Why? Because there is a world of difference between someone posting something written which is inappropriate or Spam and someone posting something visual.

Anyone who has ever managed an interactive community knows that if you allow photo submissions there are one or two images which are guaranteed to be submitted by users over and over again (HINT: They are not rainbows & kittens)

The problem of allowing anyone to tag photos of people, brands or products

While it’s not clear how it will look on the Facebook page once a person, brand or product has been tagged (it may not actually appear on the page) the idea of people tagging photos willy nilly of them doing anything with a person or product gave me a little shiver.

Possible negative iterations I’m thinking of are; new ways to name and shame celebrities in ‘kiss and tells’, underage users who have joined a drinks Brand page lying about their age but are clearly underage in photos drinking product, activists tagging brands in pages, general use of products in ways they are not intended to be used (do you really need me to elaborate?)

Maybe I just think of the worst. But a quick look at the page which was used as an example by Facebook of how the new photo tagging will work showed a page already plagued with Spam and general irrelevant stuff. What will people tag in photos?