Trends Q: Does tagging people/pages in Facebook posts increase that post’s engagement?

Last year Facebook revealed that “when a Page tags another Page, we may show the post to some of the people who like or follow the tagged Page.” But has this potential for increased reach led to an increase in engagement? Here’s what we found.

The Goods
To find our answer we looked at over 100,000 resort and hotel Facebook posts shared since that change was made on February 24, 2015. We grouped the posts by how many pages/people had been tagged (excluding posts that explicitly asked their fans to “tag your friends”) and found the average engagement of each.

Email performance started high for posts with no tags and dipped sharply once tags started showing up. Performance then slowly rose to a point near or above the original mark once there were at least 7 tags in a message.

What This Means
What surprised us most was that the first couple of tags seemed to have such a negative impact on engagement for this sample. Even more interesting was that this trend held true even when we just looked at the month following Facebook’s announcement.

To answer the question we started with, the simple answer is NO. If you want or need to use tags because of sponsor or partner obligations, by all means. But if you tag other people and brands in the hope that engagement will increase, it may take a fairly long list of tags before that actually happens.