Frequently Asked FB Question: How Do You Tag Someone in a Status Update

This is a very remedial blog post for novice facebook users who would like more dynamic interaction with their friends, networking buddies, and old high school friends.

Many people are aware of how you hot link a person in a status update, but since I’ve had 3 people in the last week ask me how I do it, I decided (In the interest of being on vacation and still wanting to put up a post) that I’d post a quick hot link lesson.

There are many great reasons to use this tagging feature on facebook.

Many people have a lot of updates in their stream and as much as you’d like to believe we are all hanging on every word, it’s a good idea if you are going to talk about someone in your status to tag them in the post so they will know about it. Facebook let’s you know you’ve been tagged in a post and then you can respond, laugh or start plotting on your advisory depending on the type of update.

On fan pages this is a great way to draw interest and interaction as well. But you can only tag people in posts, both on fan pages and personal pages whom you are friends with. So if you do want to talk about someone, make em your friend.

When you are typing in your status update simply type the @ symbol. Do not space after it (much like you’d type a twitter handle) and begin typing a name. If you know several Janes, you start to type Jane and you will see a list of your friends with those letters in their name pop up below the status update.

You then select the proper name from the list and a hot link is created in blue. This will than notify your friend that they are tagged in your post.

However facebook has not yet become advanced enough to allow you to do the same thing when commenting on status updates. Hopefully they will see the use of this in the future and comply.

Until then you now have another tool to make your conversations more dynamic on facebook.