You know things about your members. Who is a founder. Who came in through your last challenge. Who is a client. Who is on your team.
Right now, most of that lives in your head, or in a spreadsheet you have not opened since spring.
Circle member tags are how you get it out of your head and into the platform, where you can actually use it. Here is how to create one, the two different jobs a tag can do, and how to decide what is worth tagging so you do not end up with forty tags and no idea what half of them mean.
I say that as someone who has cleaned out her own tag list more than once. Possibly this week.
What Is a Circle Member Tag?
A member tag is a label you attach to a member. Only admins can create tags and assign them, and a tag does not grant access to anything by default.
That last part is the piece people get wrong. Access is the job of access groups. A tag is information. What you do with that information is up to you.
So a tag does less than people think and more than they use it for. It will not open a space. It will tell you, and sometimes your members, who someone is.
Should a Tag Be Public or Private?
Public tags answer a question for your members: who is this person? Private tags answer a question for you: what do I need to know about this member? Same feature, two completely different purposes.
Public tags show up where members can see them: on profiles, next to names, on posts, in your member directory. Founder, community manager, team member. They help people find their people.
Private tags are admin only. How someone found you, what they bought, which challenge they joined, whether they are a client. Nobody else sees it, and you can filter on it.
Almost every messy tag list I have seen comes from mixing those two up. Before you create anything, decide which job the tag is doing.
How Do You Create a Member Tag in Circle?
Go to the top caret dropdown, then Audience, then Tags. Choose New tag, name it, then set the visibility and display format before you save.
Name it, then make it look like yours
The visual settings are small but they are what make a directory look intentional instead of default.
What that looks like:
- Give the tag a name
- Add an icon: an emoji, a shape, or a custom icon you upload
- Set the background color, which defaults to plain white, and use your brand colors here
Set community visibility
This is the step that decides whether the tag is public or private, so it is the one to slow down on.
What that looks like:
- Choose the display locations: post and comment bio, profile page, member directory
- Pick the display format: label, or icon with a tooltip
- Leave the display locations alone when the tag is only for you
An icon with a tooltip means members see the icon and have to hover to read what it means. I default to label, because a tag nobody can read is not doing the job you made it for.
You can also start adding the tag to people right from this screen, which saves a trip.
How Do You Tag People Without Doing It One at a Time?
Three ways: manually from a member’s profile, automatically through an invitation link, or automatically through a workflow.
Manually works fine for a handful of people. Open a member’s profile, edit it, and use the dropdown to add or remove tags. You will see them display on the profile itself the way you set them up.
Adding one tag at a time gets old fast, which is where the other two come in:
- Invitation links. A link can carry a tag with it, whether it is also granting access to the community or doing nothing but assigning the tag. Anyone who clicks it gets tagged on arrival.
- Workflows. Set a workflow so that when someone is charged for a specific paywall, a tag is added. Now your buyers tag themselves.
That is the difference between a tag list you maintain and a tag list that maintains itself. If you only build one piece of automation this month, make it the paywall one, because that is the information you will want six months from now when you are deciding who gets the upgrade offer.
How Do You Clean Up a Messy Tag List?
Open your tags and go one by one. Ask who each tag is for, set the visibility to match, keep three to five public tags, and delete anything you cannot explain in one sentence.
What that looks like:
- For each tag, decide: is this for my members, or for me?
- Set the visibility to match that answer
- Pick three to five public tags that genuinely help members find each other
- Make everything else private
- Delete any tag you cannot explain in a single sentence
You will not miss the ones you delete. I never have, and I have done this more than once.
Try This Prompt
If your tag list has gotten away from you, do not clean it up from memory. Pull the list and make something else do the sorting first.
“I run a [type of community] for [who] on Circle. Here are my current member tags: [paste the list]. Here is what I sell and how people join: [describe your offers and entry points]. Sort each tag into public, private, or delete. Public tags should help members find each other and there should be no more than five. Private tags should be things I need to know to run the business. Flag any tag that is too vague to explain in one sentence. Give it back as a table with tag name, recommendation, and one line of reasoning.”
You still make the calls. It just makes you look at all of them instead of the three that have been bugging you.
Tags Are What Make Everything Else Smarter
Tags are a small feature. They are also the thing that quietly raises the ceiling on everything else you do in Circle.
Your filters get better. Your workflows get better. Your broadcasts stop going to everyone because you finally know who is who. The email that should go to your challenge people goes to your challenge people.
Right now that knowledge is in your head, which means it is only available when you are sitting at your desk thinking about it. Put it in the platform and it is available every time you go looking for a group of people.
Decide who the tag is for, set the visibility to match, and let Circle do the remembering.
Watch the Video
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Circle Access Groups Explained
More like it on Your Community Strategist, new every Thursday.
More Like This
Watch: What Is Circle AI? A Beginner’s Walkthrough. The admin-only assistant that can help you sort out who is who in the first place.
Watch: Circle Spaces 101. The building blocks everything else in your community sits on.
Read: A new AI prompt every week in Build Notes. One prompt, one place to paste it, email only.
Keep Going
If you want every one of these setup decisions laid out in order instead of piecing it together one tutorial at a time, The Membership Architect walks you through building on Circle one decision at a time, inside coCreator Society. The free Circle templates, guides, and tools are there while you decide.
coCreator Society is where community builders and membership founders work through this together, with the templates, the walkthroughs, and people who are one step ahead of you. Join coCreator Society
If you would rather not do this part alone, Rachel and the team build, migrate, and run communities for founders who need it done properly the first time. Talk to the team
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