Text Tool and Facebook Help and Guide
Explaining the more intricate details of Text Tool, the optional custom markup for better results, as well as some guidance on how Facebook deals with tags in posts, and how you can get your post out the door as quickly as possible.
Text Tool
Adding tags and tag limit
It will only replace the first instance of a match in the text. This is because there's a limit of 50 tags in a post on Facebook, so to avoid risking going over that, it's kept to just replacing the first instance.
By default no more tags will be added after the limit of 50 tags is reached, but the option to stop adding tags after 50 can be disabled, should you want to.
If more than 50 replacements happen, it will be shown as a warning afterwards, and you will then have to decide yourself which ones to remove to get to 50 or lower.
How matches are found
It will only match something that's written exactly like it is on Beatport, and the matching is case-senstive, so make sure it's also capitalized correctly. The reason for this is that I had to choose something to match up against, and Beatport seemed like the most logical choice.
Names that are common words or a partial word
If an artist or label is also a common word in English, or a partial of a word, you can choose if you want to automatically replace it or not. Regardless of what setting you choose, you will be shown if one or more of these were matched, and if so which ones.
These will have their tag next to their name, so you can just click it to easily copy it to your clipboard.
If the setting is disabled, then if a name, its capitalization taken into account, is anywhere in the text, the first instance of it will be replaced. It will also replace parts of a word if it still matches something, despite the original word being longer.
An artist or label marked as a common word also relies on how likely that specific word or a partial of it, with its capitalization in mind, is to appear in your text. For instance the artist "Plumb" is a common word as well, but isn't marked as such as it's rather unlikely that "Plumb" would show up in your text unless it's a reference to her.
Common words are not an issue if you choose to use the custom markup explained further below.
Using parent label for sub-labels without a Facebook page
If you choose to enable the option for using the parent label for sub-labels that don't have a dedicated Facebook page, please be aware that this can mean that the first instance of the tag may not be the first time the parent label is listed. This is however not an issue if you choose to use the custom markup explained further below.
A sub-label will also not be tagged or changed if the parent label has already been tagged in your text.
No known Facebook page
If an artist or label is known to not have a Facebook page, you will be shown which artists and/or labels that applies to.
Using the Tag Adder custom markup
But why?
It's a valid question, as it does come with a little more work, but it has some nice benefits.
When your text has been tagged up, you can then easily see exactly what has happened to it in the output box as changes are color-coded depending on what happened to them. See further below what each color represent.
This includes the ability to see any artists or labels not recognized, as they're shown in red, so you can easily deal with those manually (and hopefully submit the missing data to Tag Adder, check the FAQ for information on how to do so).
It also eliminates the problem of common words completely. There's no need to worry about that at all with this method, and that includes partials of words as well, no matter where they are.
In short it provides a better overview at the end, and precise replacements without having to worry about something getting wrongly replaced, as well as not having to deal with common-/partial word issues.
What needs to be done
Your text needs to be properly formatted to do this, but luckily it's very simple to do just that. All there is to it is adding two underscores (__) on both sides of each artist- and label name in your text.
Take the following line as an example:
14. Ronski Speed & Jennifer Rene - Into the Sky (BiXX Extended RemiXX) \\ Nocturnal Knights Reworked
That would then be changed to:
14. __Ronski Speed__ & __Jennifer Rene__ - Into the Sky (__BiXX__ Extended RemiXX) \\ __Nocturnal Knights Reworked__
And that's basically it. Do that for all artists and labels in your text and you're set. You however don't need to do it for duplicate labels and artists in your text, but it doesn't matter if you do, as Text Tool will handle it just fine.
Do note that for the label name cleaning option to work, the label has to be formatted this way.
If you know you're going to use Tag Adder anyway, it shouldn't be much of a task to add these when you're writing your text.
Text Tool will automatically identify if your text is using the markup and act accordingly.
What the colors represent
I've attempted to make the colors somewhat intuitive to what they represent, but for good measure here's a legend:
You will be able to hover over most of these items in the output text to get a tooltip with additional information.
But what about the text for other sites?
Putting in the markup in your text obviously makes it unusable on other sites, as is the tagged text. So instead of you having to make two sets of texts, Text Tool will create a clean version of your text as well.
Just to the left of the output area you'll see two buttons, labelled "Tagged" and "Clean", providing access to either version of your text. These are only enabled when the custom markup is detected in your text.
The clean version is no tags, no underscores, and labels cleaned up, if you choose that option. Just your text that's usable anywhere else you might need it, like YouTube or SoundCloud.
Unfortunately there is still a little bit of manual work to do once you paste the tagged text into Facebook, which is out of my hands to fix, however I can offer some guidance to reduce the work needed.
Actually activating the tags
The most important thing is that you still have to "activate" the tags, and to actually get started with that you have to go to your first tag, delete the last letter from it and write it again. This will trigger the ability to activate the tags. If Facebook stops recognizing the tags again, just delete the last letter of the tag you're at and write it again. Facebook doing Facebook things, what can I say?
To activate the tags in the quickest and most precise way possible, place your text cursor directly after the last letter of the tag and the search results should show up, with what you want as the (hopefully) first option. Click it and move on to the next tag, repeating the text cursor placement.
Facebook does its search for matches based on where the text cursor is, so if it's in the middle of the tag you're likely to get wrong results. To understand how it works, Facebook basically searches for what's between the @ and the location of the text cursor to find matching pages and people.
For instance if you have the tag for Steve Allen, which is "@SteveAllenOfficial", and placed your text cursor right after the last "e" in "Steve" you'd get a lot of matches for things that match anything with "Steve", which is not what you want. Instead place it directly after the "l" in "Official" and you get Steve Allen's Facebook page.
One could hope that Facebook would automatically tag something that's a 1:1 match when you post it, but I tested that and it's sadly not the case.
Speeding up locating the tags and avoiding missing any
There's a simple little way to help you locate the tags in your post, so that you don't risk missing any, as well as making you locate them faster. Simply open your browers' search ability and search for @. Bringing up search is usually done by pressing Ctrl + F.
This should highlight them in the post until you've activated the tag.
Characters that disrupt the tags
There are certain characters that will break Facebook's ability to show the popup search selection to activate the tag, if the tag has those characters on either side of it. Those characters are these six: [ ] { } < >
I've seen that labels are commonly put in the square brackets, like "[Uplift Recordings]". However that breaks the tag search and you can't then click the tag popup result to activate it, because it doesn't show up. You could create spaces, activate the tag, and remove the spaces again, but honestly that's unnecessary work.
So instead of writing it like, for example 16. @SteveAllenOfficial - Ophiuchus (Extended Mix) [@UpliftRecordings], an option could be to instead write it out like 16. @SteveAllenOfficial - Ophiuchus (Extended Mix) \\ @UpliftRecordings.
This way you still get a good enough divider, and you don't have to fiddle with spacing and the extra work that creates, but instead quickly get through activating the tags in your post.