Facebook

Facebook’s EdgeRank Tool Decides Who Matters To You

EdgeRank is a tool that Facebook uses to decide who should see your status updates.  In recent months we have all wondered why some of our friends no longer show up in news feed or why people are not seeing us in their feeds.  The answer is EdgeRank. 

Social Media Examiner just posted an informative article that explains EdgeRank and gives some pointers on how to have better engagement on Facebook.  In a nutshell it’s all about quality engagement.  Check out the article called 6 Tips to Increase Your Facebook EdgeRank and Exposure.

Facebook sees everything that is published as an object.  Every object receives a rank.  The author of the article Jim Lodico explains how EdgeRank works:

An object’s EdgeRank is based on three factors:  affinity or the relationship between the creator and user, interaction with the object (likes, comments, etc.) and timeliness.  Add the three factors together using a formula that only Facebook truly knows and you’ve got an object’s EdgeRank.

So, you can see that it takes more than just posting your status to be seen on Facebook.  For friends who are truly close and comment to each other frequently, the EdgeRank is high enough for them to see each other in the news feed.  However, for business purposes getting seen will require the use of advertising as well as engaging content.

Has Facebook’s EdgeRank caused you to notice that a few of your friends are missing?  How will you go about getting to a level of engagement with your missing friends so that you can keep up with each other?  

On the business side, does anyone have any suggestions or experiences to share about using Facebook advertising?

How To Get “Liked” On Fan Page

People ofter ask me what is the best way to get liked on Fan Page.  Most of the time I find that new social media users tend to believe that is just a matter of exporting a list or just converting their friends from the personal profile to the fan page.  If only it was that simple.

Getting liked in a way that makes sense is acutally a lot of manual labor. You must get found on facebook by people who want to follow your page and who want to contribute to the conversation there.  Who knows where they will come from.  Your job is to give people the opportunity to find the link to your fan page in many places online and offline.

I read this terrific article with great information about getting more likes on Fan Page.  It’s called 15 Ways to Get “Liked” on Facebook.  The article has some great suggestions about how to do this. 

The only additonal information I would add is:

Way #1 – The article mentions the corporate website but don’t forget that your blog is your corporate website.  Most blogging platforms offer a way for you to add the button through a plugin or widget.

Way #2 – Don’t make adding icons hard.  You can simply go to the web and download a typical social site icon as a jpeg.  Add it to your site then hyperlink it to your fan page.

Way #9 – A fan gate is a fancy way of saying a landing page or reveal page.  There is an easy to use site that offers a free fan gate page.  Try out  iFrame from Wildfire.

Can you think of any other ways to get liked?

Facebook Redesign Is A Hit With Me

Attribution: Flickr Creative Commons - Smemon87

Well Facebook is at it again!  Another redesign?  I don’t know about you but I was just coming to terms with the last one.  However, I have to say, I do like the changes that have been made to the fan page so far.  You can read about the changes for yourself on Mashable but you’ll have to go ahead and take the plunge to understand how it will affect the way you interact with your fans/likes or whatever we call them these days.

My favorite change is the way we can choose our persona.  Now we can interact as our personal self or as our business (page) self.  Basically, what that means in action is that when we choose our business self our posts and comments will show our profile information from our fan page not our personal page.  I think that’s great because before I was always a little uneasy about commenting when I knew that the picture the person would see would be that of me on the dance floor at my last birthday party.

I’m not so sure about the photo slide show at the top.  However, it is easy to hide any photos I don’t want to be seen. 

Have you tried the new version of fan page yet?  What do you like or dislike about the changes?

The Trick To Protecting Your Privacy Online: LIE!

Yes, I said it.  That’s the ticket!  Who says you have to tell everybody everything?  Let me be clear though.  I am not saying be so afraid of protecting your privacy that you don’t participate at all.  I’m just saying be smart.  I see people all the time who slip up just enough to make themselves a target for people who are less than honest.  Good example, I just saw a Facebook status update that read, “Can’t wait to visit my folks in VA… 3 days to go.”  Does that make sense?  How about this simple but fact filled tweet that I saw that read, “Hungry, going to get a sandwich at the Subway.” Ok, just say you are going to leave the door open because this guy is very well known in the city.  It wouldn’t be hard to know where he lives and he’s always tweeting like this.

I ran across this very interesting article by Christopher Penn that puts a statistical spend on this issue of being transparent.  He reminds us that everybody is not a friend.  Now I know that stings but social media has made us drop our guard a little bit more than our mothers would recommend.  There are over 4,000 people who follow me on Twitter.  The moment I forget that I’m not just tweeting to my known business associates and my family then I’m putting myself at risk. 

Again let me emphasize that this is not about being so afraid that participation is impossible.  I’m saying be as smart online as you are in person.  In person, I take certain percautions, like keeping my purse on my arm instead of in the basket at the store.  Or, if someone who looks friendly approaches my car, I will not open the door or window.  Why? Because everyone is not friendly. That’s the reality of our world.

So what are some ways to share online without being totaly exposed?  I have a few suggestions.

• Never say that you are in a certain place at the time of your tweet or update.  Use past tense verbs.  Enjoyed my sandwich from Subway or really liked having coffee at Starbucks.  You’re not obligated to tell everyone that you’re still there.
• Don’t follow people automatically on Foursquare, Gowalla or any location based service.  Be a little bit more prudent here than on Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn or your blog.  The whole point of the location based services is to let people know what you’re doing and maybe even join you there.  Perhaps you have an app that let’s you see who’s near you.  So, just like we do in real life when we are deciding who to hang out with, vet these potential followers a little more before letting them in on your whereabouts.
• The changes Facebook made to the personal profile gives more information.  Be sure you visit the edit section and take out what you don’t want seen.  Also, Facebook decides what your top 5 pictures where you have been tagged will be but you can untag yourself on any that you don’t want or create a list of the ones you want to show.

I’m sure there are way more suggestions than this.  What would you suggest?  How do you remember to stay safe when online?

FaceBook Is Not Private! Use Common Sense To Be Safe

So often I have conversations with people about Facebook and just what is appropriate to post.  Just recently, I had a conversation with a young man who is in his mid 20′s and has landed a job at a bank.  Naturally, working at a bank should be a no brainer when it comes to posting on FB.  This young man is well informed and does not post anything about clients or about what is going on inside his department.  However, he did post a comment to a friend who was just catching up.  The young man commented that he had landed a nice job a a bank and gave the name of the bank.  The result:  he was called into his manager’s office for the talk.  Thank goodness, he hadn’t said anything damaging but it was a great low level lesson to remind him that his online social conversations are being tracked.

This whole thing reminds me of when email was first becoming popular.  (Yes, I’m that wise)  We did some really dumb stuff like ranting unfavorably about our bosses, telling company secrets, and gossiping about our co-workers.  How many people had to get fired before the reality of the openness of the internet really set in?  I don’t know but today you don’t hear people asking what information is appropriate to email.  It’s a no brainer.  If you don’t want every one to know, don’t use email to share.  It’s the same for Facebook and the other social media sites.

Oh, and don’t get me started about mobile phones!  Your voice is being carried along in little data packages in the air and they are subject to being snatched out of the air.  I also hate it when I’m watching a movie and someone goes to the center of the earth where clearly there are not cell towers.  Yet, they call home. Oh no they didn’t!

But, back to Facebook, did you know that even after you delete a photo FB keeps it on their server for an unspecified amount of time?  Scary isn’t it?  So if someone has the URL for that photo they could possibly retrieve it from the servers.  As a mother, I always used FB to spy on our children while they were away at college.  Sometimes it was fun and sometimes I wanted to cry!  As a marketer and social media strategist, I am still crying at times when I see people making big mistakes like telling everyone where they live or that they are going on vacation. Why not just hang out a sign that says your house is empty and available for robbery.  That would be insane!  It is just as insane to post that you are going away in a few days on FB. 

The Huffington Post had a great slide show about this subject.  Check it out.  You might be surprised to find that you are doing some things that might be putting you at risk of being improperly exposed.

What NOT to Post on Facebook: 13 Things You Shouldn’t Tell Your Facebook Friends

How do you decide when something you want to say is inappropriate or at the very least not safe to post on FB?