Algorithms and tools are groping around in the dark, with only the limited tool of tagging to help them figure it out. Let’s say I want to share a blog post on Facebook. I drop in my link, and the page handily populates with information on the post:
All this draws from the page’s metadata and feeds into Facebook’s Open Graph algorithm that determines what the best headline, intro description and image are. If you’re expecting others to share your content, setting up the metadata to feed them the right information will be key – so your copy is the right length and the right image gets pulled in and linked.
Creating Your Tags
When you’re thinking about creating tags, consider which types are most appropriate:
- Descriptive – Terms like #ocean or #beach that say something about what’s in the image, or meta tags that describe the content on the page.
- Image type (for images only)– Qualities of the picture itself – a close-up, a landscape, a soft-focus image.
- Contextual – Relates to the conversation that you’d like to be in – becoming a part of that discussion.
- Conversational – When the tag becomes the conversation. This most commonly happens on Twitter, where hashtags such as the joking apology of #sorrynotsorry are more message than meta.
The Future of Tagging
Search engines like Google have moved away from keyword tagging and towards automatically analyzing the text and structure of a webpage in order to draw conclusions. Similarly, as image processing gets more advanced, algorithms are able to parse out some of the details of what’s in an image.
As an example, Shutterstock recently launched an auto-tagging tool for its mobile image uploading. The tool looks through the existing metadata/tags in the current library of images, maps it against the content of the image, and provides a range of suggestions. For a nature photo, these might include “flower,” “nature,” “beautiful,” “red,”closeup” and more. As these tools become more prominent, we should expect:
- Clustering – We’re likely to see more of what already exists. If people already know to search for #destinationwedding in order to find content related to weddings, we’ll see more and more uses of that tag by people who want to show up in that context, and the tools will continue to recommend it.
- Tags substituting for descriptions – Descriptions are challenging to write, since they need to encompass all that a piece of content contains. Tags are easy, since they can be single facets of that content, because they’re automatically recommended, and because they automatically feed search engines. Expect to see the continued growth of numerous tags over lengthy descriptions of content.
Where do you see the future of content tagging?