How to Use Community Tagging in Online Community Management

We live, work, and communicate in a mobile, 24-hour world. More and more businesses are adapting by leveraging online communities, like business-to-business (B2B) or business-to-consumer (B2C) communities, to connect with their target audiences, bolster brand loyalty, and gather valuable insights. 

One of the best tools for achieving these goals is a community tagging system, which simplifies and streamlines the ongoing task of online community management.

Tags enable your business to organize content easily, making information more searchable and accessible. That boosts the value—and the enjoyment—that your community provides, making it more likely to thrive and succeed in the long term. 

If your company or product has an online community, make sure you’re taking full advantage of tags in your community platform. In this article, we’ll explain how you can use tags to help educate your customers, optimize your community visitors’ experience, gain insights into consumers’ unmet needs, and reap other benefits for your business. 

What is tagging in online communities?

Tagging is a feature commonly found in online customer communities, including both B2B communities and B2C communities. Tags allow community users to categorize and label content using relevant keywords or phrases. 

Tags serve as a way to organize and search for specific topics within the community. When a user creates a post or discussion, they can assign relevant tags to make it easier for others to find—and engage with—the content. Admins and moderators can also use tags like tagging groups or categories. 

Tagging is a valuable tool for online community management because it helps streamline content discovery and navigation for end users, moderators, and admins. For example, community moderators and admins can use tagging systems to ensure the community remains organized and easily searchable. This enhances user experience (UX), encouraging community participation and knowledge sharing.

Benefits of using tags for community management 

Tagging offers numerous benefits—not only for a community’s members but also for the community moderators and admins. For example, community tagging helps admins keep track of discussions, identify popular discussion topics, and maintain the overall quality of the content shared within the community.

Here are five ways that tags can enhance your online community, regardless of whether it’s geared toward consumers or businesses: 

1. Tags enable businesses to organize content more effectively
2. Tags facilitate and improve community moderation
3. Tags make content more searchable for community members and visitors
4. Tags improve and expand users’ exposure to recommended content 
5. Tags show you what your customers discuss—and purchase—most frequently

Let’s examine these benefits and how tags can help deliver them in more detail. 

1. Organized content

One of the primary advantages of using tags for online community management is that it gives you the ability to organize content in a systematic and highly structured manner. For example, community managers can create categories and subcategories by assigning appropriate tags to different pieces of content, making it easier for users to navigate—and quickly find—the information they’re looking for. 

This improved organization allows for efficient content management, ensuring data is not lost in the vast sea of information. 

The Learning Cloud from WorkRamp makes it easy to build, manage, and organize all types of content—or browse our library of more than 85,000 pre-built content resources. 

Learn more about building a customer community with WorkRamp Communities, and get on the waitlist to be notified when the product is released.

2. Easier moderation

Another benefit of tagging is that it facilitates community moderation—which is essential for maintaining a safe, inclusive, and positive environment for members.

By implementing a tagging system, community managers and moderators can set specific rules and guidelines for each tag. This enables irrelevant or inappropriate content to be filtered out more easily and accurately. 

Moderators can simply remove content that violates community guidelines by monitoring the relevant tags, saving time and effort in the moderation process.

3. Better searchability and navigation

Using tags increases the searchability of your content, making navigation faster and easier for community members and visitors. 

When users are looking for specific information or want to see content around certain topics, they can easily browse your tags (or use your community’s search function) to find relevant articles, videos, infographics, and other types of learning content.

This not only saves time for community members, but it also improves UX by empowering users with swift access to desired information. In short, tags act as signposts that guide users through your community and help them discover related content they may find valuable.

4. Recommended content 

By implementing a robust tagging system, online community managers and moderators can significantly improve the community’s usefulness, relevance, and ease of navigation. 

Here are three ways tagging boosts UX for online community members: 

1. Tags allow users to personalize their community experience by selecting the tags they are interested in. This customization lets users see content that aligns with their preferences, making the community more relevant and engaging. 
2. Tags make it faster and easier for community members to find or get recommendations for relevant content. 
3. Tags foster a sense of belonging and community cohesion, as users can connect with like-minded individuals with similar interests.

5. Customer insights 

By monitoring the tags used by community members, businesses can identify common themes or topics that interest their target audience. 

That means tagging content within your B2B or B2C community is a way for your organization to better understand its customers’ needs, preferences, and pain points. 

This information can be used to tailor your products, services, and marketing campaigns to better meet customer expectations, leading to improved product adoption and customer retention. 

Similarly, tagging enables businesses to track and analyze customer sentiments. By encouraging users to tag their feedback or reviews, businesses can easily identify positive or negative sentiments associated with specific products or services. This helps businesses address customer concerns, provide timely support, and identify areas with the biggest potential for improvement. 

How to use tagging in online community management 

Now that we’ve covered some of the benefits of using tags to help manage your online B2B or B2C community let’s explore five tips and strategies for effective community tagging: 

1. Choose which tags to use   
2. Add tags to your online community 
3. Make your tags searchable 
4. Share your tagging feature with community members 
5. Measure the impact of your tagging efforts 

1. Determine tags 

The first step to setting up your community tagging system is to determine which tags you will use—and your community users themselves are the best sources of insight. 

Start by analyzing what sort of content is most frequently shared by your community users. For example, you should identify the top recurring topics, themes, or categories that arise in discussion groups and chat forums. 

The tags you create should be based on the recurring themes you identify, which ensures they will be helpful and relevant for the greatest number of users.   

2. Add tags 

Once you have determined the tags, it’s time to add them to your community content. 

With the Learning Cloud, adding and managing tags is easy. For example, our Google Tag Manager integration enables you to embed code into your WorkRamp Academy to optimize your campaigns and gain deeper insights into your target audiences. 

With the Learning Cloud,  you can also create a tailored learner experience based on role, custom tags, or geography.

Whether it’s a post, article, or discussion, assign the appropriate tags that accurately represent the content. This will ensure that the content appears in the relevant tag categories and can be easily found by users interested in that particular topic. 

Remember: consistency is key, so apply tags consistently across all content.

3. Make them searchable

Tags must be easy to search or browse for admins and community members. Therefore, it’s important to use concise tags, relevant to users’ needs, and easy to interpret clearly. 

Avoid using overly complicated or ambiguous tags that could confuse community members or deter users from engaging with the content.

 Also, check for typos and formatting discrepancies, like using hyphenation or alternate spellings, that could interfere with how tags are displayed. 

4. Share your tagging feature

Once you have implemented the tagging system, it’s essential to inform and educate your community members about its benefits and how to use it. That’s why creating a guide or tutorial that explains how tagging works and encourages users to tag their content is helpful. 

It’s important to highlight the advantages of using tags, such as better organization and searchability, to persuade more community members to use them. By promoting the tagging feature, you can ensure that users actively use it, leading to a more organized and engaging community.

6. Measure tagging impact 

Last but not least, measuring and evaluating the impact of community tagging on your online community is essential.

 Some examples of metrics to measure include:  

• Monthly posts, likes, shares, views, and comments
• Total number of active community members 
• New monthly users 
• Clicks and conversions 
• How users rate their satisfaction with the community 

Continuously monitor user engagement, content discoverability, and overall user satisfaction to assess the effectiveness of the tagging system. 

Gather feedback from community members and make necessary adjustments or improvements based on the input you receive. 

Regularly reviewing and analyzing the impact of tagging will help you optimize your community management strategy and ensure a seamless user experience.

Simplify online community management with WorkRamp 

Implementing a robust tagging system requires you to choose the appropriate tags, apply your tags consistently, make your tags searchable, and measure your tagging strategy’s impact over time. WorkRamp Communities helps you streamline this process for your business, empowering you to build a community your customers will love—and keep coming back to again and again. 

Discover how WorkRamp can power your online B2B or B2C community. Contact us to schedule your free, personalized demo.