Article updated: September 15, 2023
Mention a user or Page
Mentioning is a way to invite others on social to join a conversation, and can help your post reach their audience as well as your own. You can mention a user or Page in a post to let them know that your content might be of interest to them. Published mentions display as a hyperlink to the username or Page. The user or Page mentioned gets a notification that you’ve mentioned them in your post.
Who or what can you mention?
Social networks enforce different rules regarding @mentions. You should note that many do not support mentioning user names with special characters in them (like spaces, periods, hyphens, and sometimes accented characters), or those that are less than three characters long. Here are a few specifics:
- Facebook allows their Pages to be mentioned by other Facebook Pages. Facebook doesn't support mentions of Facebook profiles in third parties like Hootsuite.
- LinkedIn lets you mention LinkedIn Pages. For LinkedIn personal profiles, you can only mention followers of the Page you are posting on and English-US profiles. The personal profile must have the "Off-LinkedIn Visibility" setting in LinkedIn turned on.
- Twitter supports mentioning users. To mention a user in Twitter, type their full @username in the tweet. Note, these mentions appear as plain text in Hootsuite but as live links when published.
- Instagram supports mentioning users. Note, these mentions appear as plain text in Hootsuite but as live links when published.
- TikTok supports mentioning users. Note, these mentions appear as plain text in Hootsuite but as live links when published.
Mention a user or Page in a post
If you’ll be publishing your post to more than one social network and it includes a mention, the mention must be customized in each social network tab.
- In Composer
, enter @username in the Initial content area.
- Select a social network tab, select the mention, and then select the user or Page name from the list. Mentions on social networks other than Instagram, Twitter, and TikTok are highlighted in blue when linked successfully. You’ll see a warning if any tabs contain an unlinked mention.
- Finish creating your post, and then send, save, or schedule it.
Troubleshoot mentions
Make sure you are following the guidelines in the previous section - Who or what can you mention. Note, if you modify your initial content after customizing your mentions by social network, you'll lose those customizations and have to redo them in the specific social network tabs.
For troubleshooting Facebook Page selection issues, see the Facebook help article My Page isn't appearing in Facebook search results.
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