1. Mary Jane Smith's business page "The Really, Really Good Book Marketer";
2. My own "Really, Really Good Authors Circle" business page;
3. John Jones's personal profile and
4. John's "Great New Writers Group" group. Note I put a space after the tag when I am using an apostrophe. I did that to ensure the link doesn't get broken (it has happened on occasion).

Recently I wrote a similar post to the example above and, when you take all the tags into consideration, that single post was visible to over 5000 people, just about all of them authors. Within just a few minutes of sharing that post, I noticed the person whose fan page I tagged increased by 5 members. Not bad for a post that took a few seconds to compose.

In this post, I am not only helping the person who owns the fan page by sharing her page and saying something nice about her, but I am also helping the other people I have tagged in the post, because they are a targeted group of authors, all hungry for new information about book promotion. Furthermore, because I "shared" the "Really, Really Good Book Marketer" page, people will see the logo and description of the page, which makes the post far more visible and attractive than words alone, and makes people far more likely to check it out than if it were a simple link.

But the beauty of this is that I am also gaining from this. How?

Because I am being seen as someone who likes to give value to others. And because of this, people enjoy staying connected to me. Furthermore, because the tags make the post appear on the other person's profile and fan pages, new people might see ME and my business page on her page and check me out as well. If they perceive me as being someone who can offer good value to them, they are likely to seek me out as a connection or "Like" my business page. These days, I have more Facebook invitations than I can keep up with.

IMPORTANT TAGGING NETIQUETTE:

NEVER abuse tagging to SPAM your Facebook friends or Facebook