The more content your community has, the more diverse will be the tags your users have entered. You might have seen spelling mistakes or various ways to label the same thing on your community as well. This makes it hard for your users, as nobody will search all different tags of the same thing in order to find what they are looking for, right?

Our tag management feature will help you to find the right tags, and the automatically suggested tags in consequence will help to structure your content much better. This guide will help you to find the right approach that fits your community.

Step 1: Find what tags are being used currently

If you go to tSettings] - Public Tags] in your Control Environment, you will see a list of all the tags which are used on your community, sorted by popularity:

If your community is small or new, the list probably will be easy to browse. However, for larger communities, there might be several pages full of tags. In this case, you might want to create a topic export in the Analytics section in order to create a pivot table, as this is easier to work with. 

Going through the list of tags, you probably will see a lot of familiar subjects that your users are discussing on your community. Do you see a difference in what tags they use and e.g. what the categories are named? This could be good input for your next categorization review! But it also will tell you which tags might fit better with what users are searching for - often there are multiple ways to describe an issue. See (and mark) which tags are overlapping in their meaning, also check for spelling mistakes and not useful tags. This will be worked on then in the next step.

Step 2: Organize your tags

Once you have found out which tags need your attention, you can start organizing your tags. This means deleting, renaming or merging tags to improve the quantity and quality of content connected to a tag. 

Deleting tags

We only recommend you to delete tags if you are sure they have no value for your users. Sometimes users misunderstand the purpose of tagging or abuse this feature. Simply mark a tag and click on ‘remove’ to delete it.

Editing tags

You want to edit tags in case there are spelling mistakes or when you think a different tag name would be better - but be careful, always use the language of your users. To edit a tag, you just need to select a tag and click on ‘edit’:

Merging tags

When you want to merge a number of tags to a single one, you should be sure that they all belong to the same subject - otherwise the content quality will suffer from this. You can easily double-check this by searching for the topics using this tag in the Moderation Overview page. Once you have selected two or more tags, the merge button will become visible at the top of the page:

In a next step, you will have to define the name of the tag that these tags will be merged into. Most of the time, you want to merge tags to the most popular one. This makes sense as it is what users generally are searching for and will benefit the browsing experience. But sometimes you might want to merge it into something completely new - especially if you do not want to allow users to define their own tags, but rather use your pre-defined set of public tags. Not sure if you want to do that? The next step will help you find out.

Step 3: Define if you want to allow users to enter tags or not

In the settings page, you will notice that there is an option to allow users to enter their own tags. Sometimes it can help to allow users to do so, as you might not have a set of pre-defined tags yet. It could also help you to learn more about which tags users regard as the best, as you might not currently cover all tags which your users would like to add.

In general, new communities should allow end users to add new tags, while more mature communities (which already have an extensive list of tags) should rather not allow it. Here a short summary in case you are not sure what to do here:

Allowing users to enter new tags

Pros:

• Users might use different words to describe something, closer to what other users are searching for

• Trends (new products, features, etc.) will be automatically covered in tags

Cons:

• You will need to “clean up” the list of tags more often

• Abuse of tags is possible (negativity, spam)

Limiting the tags to a predefined list

Pros: 

• Tags will be uniform as users cannot enter random tags

• Less time needed to manage user-entered tags

• Keep your tag usage consistent across multiple platforms for optimal reporting (e.g. ticketing systems like Zendesk or JIRA)

Cons:

• Users will not be able to enter new tags which might be valuable or give you insights into how users describe your product/service.

• You will have to define and add new tags yourself (can be tricky with new products)

If you are still undecided and need some guidance on this: make sure to follow the strategy which will support the goal of your community the most. For example, a mature B2C community which is focussed on deflecting support questions might want to limit the amount of tags, to increase findability of valuable content and streamline the use of tags across the platform. A recently started B2B community focussed on best practices or ideation might want to allow users to add their own tags, to give flexibility and identify trends in discussions or submitted ideas.

Your feedback and questions

In case you have a challenge organizing your tags or if you’d like to pick our brains around tag management, we are more than happy to hear it!