Tagging or bookmarking websites, images, and people is a tactic that is somewhat synonymous with social media. When you send an @reply through twitter you are effectively tagging that person and linking to them in your tweet. It’s an effective tool on twitter and allows the twitterverse to see your link to that person as well. An effective way to draw some attention to your Facebook activity is to tag people in your images. The act of tagging puts it on their wall, your wall, and sends a notice to the person being tagged. Some folks use this very effectively as an awareness activity. Hint: take pictures with well-known folks you meet at conferences and then upload and tag them and you might draw some attention from the wall of your tagee.

This week Facebook expanded tagging in a way that I believe will be very useful for business purposes. Now, when you update your status on your personal page, business page, or on any business page where you share information, you can tag any of your followers in your update and it will automatically create a link to your follower’s page, publish the status update to that person’s wall, and send them a notice that they were tagged. Do you see how that might be useful?

A couple rules. The folks you tag must be following you and a tagged person has the option to delete the tag. Try this out, but don’t overdo it!

The way you invoke the tag is where the twitterlike comparisons really come into play. You start typing your status update and then add the “@” and the Facebook system will drop down a list of possible people to tag as you start typing that person’s name. The @ sign does not appear in the update like on twitter but it signals Facebook that you are trying use the tagging feature.

My guess is that this functionality will be a big hit and Facebook may look to expand it to events, comments and other updating features.