How to tag products on social media

It’s a fairly common practice but not everyone knows how to tag products on social media and it can be pretty interesting.

At this point we don’t think we need to talk about the importance of social media in a modern company’s marketing strategy. Many users turn to online stores’ official profiles to keep up to date with new changes, offers and company news.

This has given rise to what is known as Social Commerce or commerce through networks, a logical evolution of user interaction with brands. For a moment, we’ll flip the strategy and go from fighting to send traffic from social networks to e-commerce, to going the other way.

Do social networks make sales?

Although for a long time we were certain that social networks weren’t an efficient sales channel, over the years and platform refinement, it has been widely shown that this was little more than a hoax.

Networks sell and they sell extremely well. If you think about it, they have many favorable features for doing so. In the first place, through segmentation. They allow us to reach an audience whose profiles and interests make them more apt to buy from us when they see our products over others that we reach more generically.

They are also tools that highlight the possibilities of multimedia. Our publications are considerably more visually attractive than those on other channels, in many cases this includes websites that are not particularly well-designed.

And last but not least, for the effect they have as catalysts for social proofs. Comments and interactions such as ‘likes’ represent an indirect recommendation made by a person, an equal. This is much more objective and has more credibility than any ad we can design at the corporate level.

It’s said that social proof was the latest form of marketing but there’s a parallel type that came out of social networks as its own entity: influencer marketing. Let’s not forget the prescription power of so-called influencers, it’s something that’s worked at the promotional level forever but social networks have helped make it take off. 

Now people can anonymously interact directly and recommendations, impromptu or promoted, have a greater impact.

How to tag products on social media

Each platform works differently but the most popular ones, and those with the best conversion rates, are owned by Mark Zuckerberg’s network: Facebook and Instagram.

The best part is that with a single set up you can use both networks, which is always an advantage to saving time and making the technical aspect easier so you don’t have to learn two different systems.

In order to tag products on Instagram and Facebook, the first thing is having an online catalog. This is similar to what we would do if we wanted to put our inventory in a Marketplace like Amazon or even Google Shopping.

This is done from the Facebook sales administrator, in the “create catalog” option. Once inside your new catalog, you can upload products manually (filling in the fields as you would in any CMS) or doing a mass upload of a file using a spreadsheet that we previously would’ve completed with a template.  

It’s a simple process, but we’ll leave you more information here in case you have questions when you start or want to explore alternative integrations.

From this moment on, your valid and approved products are ready to be tagged in your posts just as you would tag a person.

A shopping bag icon will appear at the top of the photos you upload. By clicking on it you enter the labeled mode and will only have to click the portion of the image where the product we want to highlight appears. 

A floating window with a search engine will be displayed so we can locate the product by its name or ID (reference). Done! We have our product labeled so users can see its name, price and, of course, start the purchasing process.

Using the shoppable tags or purchasing labels on Instagram is practically the same as on Facebook. Thanks to this system, we can add the ability to generate sales and not just visibility. Tagged products are easily added to both our feed posts, popular stories, and even video reels.

Other platforms 

Not every social network is Facebook. In fact, there’s a network that keeps growing and threatens to overthrow it. We’re talking about the quintessential Chinese network: TikTok.

Surely you’re aware of this video network that has driven younger generations crazy. Well, you can also tag products on TikTok if you have a company profile and the TikTok Shop extension. This way you can upload your articles with their respective references and directly tag in the video description.

Since we’re talking about videos, we’ll mention that there’s a pilot program to tag videos on YouTube shorts. This can be the prelude to tagging products on YouTube in a general sense that is open to the public.

Interesting, right?