Building on yesterday's post about the importance of reading the links you're collecting through social media monitoring, today we're going to focus on tags.
What's a tag?
Well, if you think of the web as one big filing cabinet, a tag is the label you put on a folder within the cabinet. The beauty of these files you're using is that you can put as many labels on them as you like.
You can create these folders in one of two ways:
- As a content producer, you'll use the labels (re: tags) to help others who are diving into the filing cabinet find your content. Your choice of tags is important, because you have to imagine how others will use the filing cabinet and select words that are relevant to them.Content producers will tag their content when they update their blog, post videos to YouTube, add pictures to Flickr and so forth.
- As a content consumer, you'll use tags to organize files that you'll want to reference again later. Social bookmarking services like Delicious provide a practical example. When you bookmark content to your Delicious account, you're asked to provide tags for that piece of content. You can then search through your bookmarks by tag to find related information.Of course, how you tag content as a "consumer" will help others find information within the filing cabinet as well.
Why is this important for social media monitoring? Because tags are an excellent way to see how people relate the content you're interested in to other topics. When you examine the tags attached to a particular piece of content - or several pieces of content discovered through the same keywords - you'll gain insights that go well beyond your keywords. Ultimately, you'll discover new information that will help you understand the topic you're researching that much better.
How do you think of tags?
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