Brand-on-brand action has gotten pretty steamy on Twitter in the last year, with companies constantly interacting (sometimes romantically) via the social network. Now Facebook is going to make it easier for businesses to cross-promote each other by allowing Facebook Pages to tag other Pages in their messages and broadcast those posts to a wide audience.
The move is another attempt to put more content in front of users that isn’t from friends they follow or pages they like. If an organization with a Facebook Page tags another Page, that post may appear in the feed of a user who likes the page that’s being tagged. For example, if Bleacher Report tags Dwight Howard’s fan page in a post, people who like Dwight Howard but not Bleacher Report might see the item pop up in their feed.
While the new feature will give brands a greater opportunity to pull in new fans, companies won’t have quite the same free rein for public displays of affection as they enjoy on Twitter. A Facebook spokesperson told Digiday that the company will only highlight brands tagging other brands when there is a “natural overlap” between the two (i.e. Bleacher Report, a sports website, regularly covers Dwight Howard). The company won’t even alert brands if they get tagged in a manner that Facebook doesn’t deem “intuitive.” That means awkward real-time marketing that leads to a bottle of Gain detergent wearing Pharrell’s cowboy hat won’t get any play in users’ News Feeds. Tread lightly, brands.