The tagging feature on LinkedIn is one that most of us discover far too late. However it’s really useful even if you haven’t yet categorised all of your contacts. To access the tagging feature select Contacts > Connections and on the left-hand side of the page you will see the Tags area.
LinkedIn sets some of these for you automatically. For example, if you have connected with people who have said they are friends then they will be tagged as friends. Oddly, anybody who has the word partner in their job description appears tagged as a partner which can be a bit confusing – it doesn’t mean they are your partners.
You can easily create new tags or remove existing ones. Removing a tag does not delete any of your connections with that tag. Click on Manage and set up the tags so that they are useful to you.
To tag somebody, go back to your connections, select their entry and then select Edit Tags. and then check or uncheck tags for that person simply check the box alongside their name and click on edit tags to the right. Just tick (or untick) the appropriate tags and for the tags you want (or don’t want.)
One of the great features of organising your tags is that you can message a selected ‘group’ of your connections based upon how you have tagged them. There is a limit of up to 50 people with a free account and an unlimited number of people with a LinkedIn Premium account. This does mean a bit more work, perhaps adding a special tag to select the connections that you want to send the message to.
Select a tag (highlighted in blue in the left hand column) and then on the right of the contact list click on send message. A message box appears for you to enter your message plus the list of recipients. You could further refine the recipients list by scrolling through and deleting individual addressees.
Do remember to choose whether recipients should be able to see each others email addresses or not.
So there you have it. No need to tag everybody you connect to, but a really useful way of creating groups to email to.
This post is based on an earlier post from my colleague in the Social Media Bureau, Julie Leadbeater. The original post is at http://www.thesocialmediabureau.com/playing-tag-on-linkedin/