How to use Tags (what are they for anyway!?!)

In the second of my planned tips on how to use HUKD is "How to use Tags". This is much later than planned as my first was wayyyy back at the end of September (http://www.hotukdeals.com/deal/5903/tip-using-the-expired-button).

Better late than never though!

This tip is about Tags. Whenever you post a deal or freebie on HUKD you have the option of adding a tag, also any member can add tags to any deal - whether they posted it or not. Tags are simply words or phrases that you associate with that deal post. You can use multiple words or a single word and just separate these tags with a comma.

So now you know you can put tags on any deal, but what do they do? Simply these tags allow you to associate deals with each other...call it metadata or keywords or whatever but practically speaking if you click on a tag it will show you all deals with that tag. Also if you go to Deal Alerts you can set an RSS or email alert by tag so that you will receive an alert whenever a deal with that tag is posted.

So what is a real world example? Really the limit is only your imagination in how to use these. As tags are open to anyone you can tag any deal with any tag you want, thus building you own deal relationships. You could make a tag "Admin mum" and then give that RSS feed to your mum so that any deal you see that you thought of interest to your mum you would tag "Admin mum" and presto it would show in her RSS feed. Or you can use them to make ad-hoc deal groups in the forum.

This is probably the best example. When the January sales started we tried to tag all January Sales deals with the "january sales" tag. So if you click on that tag you will get a dynamic list of any deals holding the "january sales" tag (http://www.hotukdeals.com/?tag=january%20sales). Another example is the "wii" tag that will grab all the Nintendo Wii deals with that tag (http://www.hotukdeals.com/?tag=wii). Because you can also use Deal Alerts with these tags you can create dynamic RSS and email alerts based on these keywords.

So how do you apply this? Well for personal use use whatever tags you want in whatever way you can think of! If you want to start a group around a certain tag then mention that in your post so that others know to use that tag when they post a deal. So if you wanted to get a group of people hunting down cheap n64 deals, put a tag in like "n64" and then ask any other interested people to do so also when they post their deals.

These tags are one of the more useful things we have on the site so hopefully this post will get more people commonly using them! If you have any questions please ask in the Comments thread.