As social media marketers we use #tags every day to push our social media content and messages and promote our sites. #Tags are an extremely effective way to track social media conversations and enable people to find content they are looking for, like #indoorplaygrounds or #bestchilirecipes. By searching for a #tag in social media you can quickly find images, Facebook posts, You Tube videos and tweets that you are interested in. #Tags offer a very targeted way to push and pull social media content.
We’ve noticed a lately a lot of parents using #tags in their social media posts when sharing pictures or videos of their kids. While it may seem cute to give your kids a personal #tag, for instance #catewinslow, so that your family and friends can follow images and videos of them in social media, you are in fact creating a targeted search for ANYONE who wants to follow images of your child. Once they have found one image or video including your #tag, they can simply follow that feed to see all of your posts.
You may think you are sharing your images and videos privately with that #tag, but its not necessarily so. What about all the shares and retweets your friends and families do of your post and #tag? How are you able to control those shares?
We too have been susceptible to the allure of the cute #tag. A few months ago we commented on a friend's Facebook post with a funny #tag in reference to a picture of their child. In hindsight we realize that, while seemingly harmless at the time, the #tag had included the child's name, which meant anyone searching for that name using a #tag might pull up the post the #tag was in.
Parents, please think about how you are using social media in reference to your family photos and videos. Just use common sense. And by all means, skip the #tags if you aren't trying to drive traffic to those posts.
