Based on my notifications, a lot of you have figured out that if you tag @followers on Facebook, your fans will get a notification that you posted. A LOT OF YOU HAVE FIGURED THIS FOLLOWERS TAG OUT.

I’ll be honest: I’m not paying attention to these notifications anymore. It’s annoying to get tagged in posts that I have no interest in. So the notifications just live there with no click for me to see what is going on.

Are most people feeling this way? I’m gonna go with yes, but there’s a chance this tag is still effective and I’m just an old grumpy person. Maybe most people are only experiencing one or two pages taking advantage of this tag whereas I’m lucky enough to have a whole army of pages misusing this tag.

Yes, misusing, because I should not be getting this many notifications from one page. This is a tag that is meant to be used sparingly and instead, pages are using it at every chance.

So let’s take a look at some times it’s okay to use this tag.

Emergency situation

Getting the word out about an emergency situation is a great usage of this tag.

Let’s say you are a restaurant who has had a fire and you want to get the word out quickly that you will be closed for awhile. That would be an excellent use of the tag. It’s something unexpected that will impact all of your customers in a negative way. You need to let them know what’s happening.

To make it even more effective, you might want to add on any ways that your customers can help you to make this situation better. Maybe you have a GoFundMe or maybe buying your merchandise will make it affect your bottom line less. Just make sure it’s not overly promotional and will actually make a difference.

A big announcement

And we’re talking huge here. This has to be something that will impact your customers’ lives in a big way.

Recently a popular software company was purchased. Obviously this was a big deal to anyone who uses this software. To announce it, they did a Facebook post with all of the information that customers would need to know about this acquisition, and then, in the comments, they used the followers tag to alert all of their followers to this news.

This was a great usage of this tag. The news had already gotten out by the time the post had went live. So this was a confirmation of news all of us already knew. It got answers to those burning questions their customers had, and it did it in an effective way. But I will be honest that the only reason why I clicked on this particular alert was because I knew this news was about to break and I wanted to see if this was it.

Anything that affects your customer’s daily life

I am not going to be able to hit all the great ways to use this tag. It might be easier to list out all of the ways you shouldn’t. I have that many examples of what not to do and not so many great examples of what to do.

The bottom line is that if you hold events regularly, using the followers tag is not a great idea. But if Freddie Mercury is coming back from the dead and performing at your event venue, yes, please use the followers tag and let me know. I would very much like to be there.

Know the difference between what is absolutely vital for your customers to know and what is just an everyday occurrence. And as long as you’re just using that followers tag for those posts that will shake their world, they may actually click on the alert when it comes through.

Have you used the followers tag? Has it improved engagement or reach at all?