6 Ways to Use the New LinkedIn Features to Get More Business — Social Media Examiner
Even your online presence only gets one chance to make a first impression. LinkedIn recently updated its user interface to help users present their accomplishments and skills in a refreshing, new way. This article looks at how to use these new features to your advantage to make stronger connections, create more business, and engage with people with whom you share a common interest.
Microsoft’s Bing Social Sidebar Gets More Context with Facebook Status Updates, Links, and Comments — The Next Web
Facebook may have launched its new Graph Search feature this week, but Microsoft is also making some major improvements with the addition of social data to enhance its partnership with Facebook. Moving forward, when you search the web using Bing, you’ll get some Facebook results mixed in; using Facebook’s Graph Search will yield some Bing results.
11 Obvious A/B Tests You Should Try — QuickSprout
A/B testing can help you generate leads for your business and, if properly done, can help you create a competitive advantage. Here are some easy tips and tricks to increase your conversion rate.
YouTube Investment in VEVO Would Strengthen its Top Position in Online Video Rankings — Search Engine Watch
VEVO is the largest video publisher on YouTube, so it only makes sense that YouTube plans to invest in it for a content partnership. Between rumors of Facebook showing interest in stealing VEVO away from the Google-owned YouTube and its deal with YouTube ending in December, this would be an effective way to help YouTube maintain its more than half-billion views per month.
23 Reasons to Improve Your Content in 2013 — SEOptimise
From ranking on Google and Bing to local search and keyword competition, there are a multitude of ways to beat the competition by creating relevant, quality content in the new year. Check out this handy list for a compelling array of reasons to get it in gear and start killing it on the content end in the new year.
Facebook’s Graph search introduces a new multi-dimensional tool for discovering people, places and things filtered by your personal friends and likes. The concept isn’t entirely new — Bing has been integrating social data into its results for over a year now now, and the Google Hotpot experiment (failed though it was) featured location- and personal recommendation-based place discovery, as well as a host of Foursquaresque features such as check-ins and reviews. However, Graph offers social search on an unprecedented scale, with access to likes, posts and preferences of users’ entire social network.
It’s been said that Facebook has become something like a search engine for people, and they’re moving into direct competition with Google with Graph. The levels of refinement are remarkable (from geographic location to employer to relationship status to hometown and more). Music preferred by people who live in Austin and Like “Motown”? Television shows for engineers over 35? No problem. Your friends with friends who work at Google? Start flexing those networking muscles.
Local search promises to be another strong point: if you need a plumber or a doctor, you’d trust your friends to make recommendations. With Graph, you can simply discover professionals in the area with a high rating from your network. It’s going to be important for small business owners to start owning their Facebook presence harder than ever.
Of course, the value of Graph is going to depend heavily on the extent of a user’s personal network — even the most dedicated of social networking addicts would be hard-pressed to Like their accountant on the ‘book. But it’s a self-fulfilling cycle: the more things that a user Likes, the more extensive and accurate their data becomes, providing better recommendations, which lead to more Likes, which grows the data further.
Users will also be able to view a comprehensive backlog of the things they’ve Liked over the years — useful for search, but not so much for the nostalgia and/or procrastination-inclined among us. Tom Stocky, director of product management at Facebook, characterizes the new capability as a “third feed” for users: you have Timeline, which allows you to see your own activity, and the News Feed, which allows you to see others’ — now the “search feed” allows you to see an archived history of what you Like (and like, for that matter).
We can only hope that “Looking For: Random Play” will make a resurgence in 2013.But enough about search ramifications and local business: let’s talk about how this is Facebook going back to its roots as a people engine. I’m of the generation that started using the ‘book when it required a .edu email address, producing a 25-and-under wonderland of a location-based dating site (or hookup machine, if that’s what you’re into). These days, it’s positively weird to get a message or request from a stranger who saw your profile and wants to get all up ons. However, with Graph, the networking potential is enormous — I’ll be surprised if the increased access to data doesn’t lead to a massive uptick in communication specifically via Facebook, or at least reduces the stigma of having an inquiry slotted into the dreaded “Other” box.
Facebook Graph is the company’s first “beta” product, with a waitlist that will slowly open to English-speaking users first, then other languages. It’s tough to offer a value judgment on something so new, but personally, I’m optimistic. Graph’s potential is enormous to users (who doesn’t love getting personal recommendations without the effort of actually making a phone call?), businesses (who stand to gain a lot of notoriety if they play their social media cards right) and marketers (who have access to a veritable treasure trove of incredibly specific demographic targeting data) alike.
Of course, Graph will be most valuable to those who are fully immersed in the service and have friends who do the same — but with Facebook’s 800 million-strong base and the heavy-engagement nature of the service, that’s a hell of a sample size. It’s a smart move for Facebook as a company and a potentially incredible tool for its users. Keep your eyes on this space for further reports as details roll out!
While some may view the right-hand side of their Facebook stalking experience as an uninteresting blob of text, Facebook was once the world’s largest display advertising network, pulling in over $2.2 billion in annual revenues. Even now, Facebook ads are an invaluable tool for any social media campaign. Industry standard click-through rates, the percentage of the time an impression leads to a user clicking on an ad, hover around .05%, but we’ve recently seen CTRs as high as 1.5% for well-targeted sponsored stories and over 7% for post like ads!
But this glowing opportunity can be hard to grasp if you work in less family-friendly fields. The reader can easily imagine business models that may be be considered prima facie inconsistent “with the overall user experience” of Facebook. For those businesses, it’s important to understand the value of “black hat” advanced Facebook PPC: bending editorial guidelines to best advertise your product.
Some folks may cringe at the term “black hat.” While hacking for links is loathsome, most spam is only annoying to the end user: the act of creatively interpreting best practice guidelines is hardly the cold-hearted evil that fits into the wide swath of questionable techniques available to an advanced marketer. In this post, we’re focusing on the last (and probably least applicable) definition of “black hat:” bending poorly-policed rules to make sure we do our best for our clients.
To boot, Facebook actively goads advanced advertisers to bend their rules. Regardless of your page’s subject matter, Facebook still beseeches marketers to “See Your Ad Here,” often showing a recent post. For a page that is already posting inappropriate content, this enticement throws down the gauntlet to get the ad to pass content review. Sometimes, it’s easier than you think.
Despite the challenge, all ads are subject to review under the guidelines, even if they’ll show in the preview. The rules themselves are reasonable, protecting users from malicious software and malicious badthink such as hate, prurience, and tobacco. These rules are not dissimilar from other networks like Google’s, but advertisers must more intimately understand the review process to best handle the occasional ad review oddity.
Skirting the Line & Errors of Commission
Facebook prohibits directly asking users about demographic information, preferring to have ads show the value to the demographic. From a marketing perspective, this makes sense: you’re targeting interests already, so why ask if you’re hitting your target? However, it’s clear that this guideline is inconsistently applied.
The approved ad (right) directly asks “Have you been Fired, Laid Off, or Quit?” There’s no guideline prohibiting asking about employment status, skirting the spirit of the rule while both the message and visuals remain striking. In contrast, the disapproved ad (left) does not “assert or imply… a user’s personal characteristics” and offers a more subtle image. In this case, Facebook’s reviewers didn’t miss a minor error, but seemed to fabricate or transfer an error.
As this is bound to happen with the scores of ads these reviewers must see, this problem is easy to fix: just resubmit the ad. If there isn’t a real underlying problem, it’ll be reviewed and approved. Two different reviewers will be unlikely to make the same mistake, but if you’re hard-pressed to find something wrong with your ad, contact support at your direct email or here — this won’t necessarily get it approved, but will likely give an answer as to what triggered the disapproval.
Errors of Omission & Retroactive Disapproval
Even with safeguards, sometimes ads get through that shouldn’t have. We serve a variety of niches that often trigger violations of image guidelines, yet are always surprised at what is allowed to be approved. Below is a collection of test ads we ran to see what did and didn’t get approved. These ads were intentionally at least borderline, skirting the edges of the ad guidelines.
Often, it’s not the image or ad copy, but the content of the Facebook page that causes ad approvers to hit the reject button. In these cases, a marketer has two options. The first is to use a white-labeled Facebook page for the landing tab, guiding users to a Like button on the tab that likes the actual page. This introduces blackhat Facebook tactics by offering a possible dark pattern by not telling what the user is actually liking. We didn’t test this to maintain the strength of the brand we advertised, but the temptation was there. Facebook again tempts the darker side of advertisers.
How to Beat the Approval Process: Don’t Connect to Facebook!
The second trick that we found much more effective is to use the full URL of the landing tab instead of “Advertising a Page” in Facebook’s ad editor. Due to the lack of an API hookup, this does not pull in the content of the Facebook page, thus letting an advertiser send traffic to a page that would otherwise be speedily disapproved. This also works with individual posts, letting an advertiser run ersatz sponsored stories to their post. Using an acceptable image and what could be questionable text, the ad would have landed users on a image post that was undoubtedly obscene. Surprisingly, the ad was approved shortly after creating it.
This approved ad linked to a pornographic picture hosted on Facebook.By simply pasting the URL, the advertiser is now heading to a landing page that only just happens to be on Facebook; thus, the content reviewers can only look at what’s on that web page, as opposed to the edges created and shared on the page. Furthermore, the rampant use of iframes and javascript on Facebook may not allow the approval team to see what’s actually on the landing page, as they may be unable to follow the labyrinth of code to the questionable content.
This might mean that much of the approval process is automated, but running at a lower level than Google spiders are. Unlike Googlebot, which is likely running a headless browser, Facebook is running something similar to older versions of Googlebot. This means quite a bit for advertisers who are used to the review process of AdWords, which often looks at landing pages. In all likelihood, medical images that may show nudity and other useful but “not family-safe” imagery will be permitted on Facebook landing tabs. This opens the door for a variety of verticals that otherwise wouldn’t be able to best show their competitive advantage.
You Can… But Should You?
Regardless of what tricks are used and what CTRs are produced, Facebook isn’t lying when it says that users prefer not to have certain subjects in their faces when they check Facebook at work to find out what their daughter is up to. Often, users will hide ads they’d rather not see, prompting a set of reasons for blocking the ad. If enough users hide your ad because of inappropriate content, Facebook will disapprove your ad retroactively.
This causes a familiar sight to seasoned Facebook advertisers: disapproved ads with qualified traffic. There are two options for a marketer, much like with accidentally disapproved ads: resubmit or leave it and create new ads.
In most cases, a resubmitted ad will have similar performance, but still eventually be disapproved; thus, it’s probably best for even experienced Facebook advertisers to bite the bullet and leave any retroactive disapprovals on the table. While frustrating, these ads are disapproved based on the feelings of your targeted group, who may not like what you’re using as copy. If your target isn’t connecting with your ad content, it might be time to change tactics, lest your brand be damaged by backlash and social media outcry.
A Game Plan for Being (Only a Little) Evil
The lesson in these examples isn’t that Facebook’s unfair and inconsistent: it’s that the rules are fluid and hard to pin down exactly. Similar to regular Facebook content, ad reviewers are only human, and inundated with split-second decisions. For a savvy fedora-sporting Facebook advertiser, there are three steps to solving a disapproval:
Simply resubmit the ad
Test different times of day for submitting ads. Some people feel certain hours take advantage of the human element and are therefore best for borderline ads.
Test the landing page
Try sending the ad to the URL of the landing tab or to your homepage. This should eliminate ad copy problems.
Make small, incremental changes to the ad content
Make sure to keep an eye on what does and doesn’t work to sneak by the reviewers next time without issue.
With these three steps, most advertisers will be able to handle even the most controversial of Facebook clients and successfully get traffic on one of the biggest display ad networks.
I had an unexpected conversation with my Grandma on Christmas Day. You see, a while back my parents got her an iPad, and she uses it to get on Facebook pretty much every day. This has been a really great development for her, as it allows her to instantly see pictures of my cousins in Texas and keep up with family friends across the US.
My Grandma figured out how to declare that the Bee Gees are her favorite band on her Facebook page pretty quickly, but what I just discovered is that Facebook is a primarily innocent place for her. She hasn’t watched the site go from pokes to likes to pictures to drunken pictures to sarcasm to the Notorious IPO to one giant platform for ads like the rest of us have.
It made me realize how much fun Facebook was way back in 2007 when I first encountered it. This was back in a time when nobody could link Twitter to their status, Mark Zuckerberg didn’t care which movies you like to watch, and people were pretty much on point with their status updates — even though they all started with the dreaded “is.”
But above all that, I realized that when you are producing content for any online source, you have no idea who is going to read it and how they might react.
Would the Real Chris Owens Please Stand Up
Now, to understand the nature of my Grandma’s Facebook status misadventure, you first need a lesson in French Quarter Royalty. For as long as anyone can remember, a local singer, dancer, burlesque performer, and all around entertainer named Chris Owens has had a strong presence on Bourbon Street.
Every Easter, Owens leads what can only be described as the most sensational and fabulous Easter parade on the planet. She also holds court regularly in her eponymous club on the corner of Bourbon and St. Louis Streets. The woman is a living legend. She is also older than my grandmother, but that doesn’t seem to slow Chris Owens down one bit.
Now, imagine my surprise as I was watching an otherwise disappointing New Orleans Saints game versus the Atlanta Falcons when the name “Chris Owens” was suddenly all over the screen. It turns out the Falcons have a 26 year old cornerback named Chris Owens. He happened to have a very good game against the Saints that day (which I still hold against him), so the announcers kept saying the name “Chris Owens” again and again.
My initial thought was “My God, is there anything that woman can’t do?” and I posted as such on my Facebook wall. Little did I know the effects that would follow.
Sarcastic Facebook Status Updates
My friends and I tend to alternately vent our frustrations and shout our exultations about our beloved yet downtrodden New Orleans Saints during every game. This season started off with complaints about the replacement refs and ended in a mixed chorus of “next year” and “I hate Roger Goodell.” In the midst of all of this, I posted my status alluding to how amazing it is that a burlesque performer who got her start in the 1960s is also an NFL player, intentionally blurring the lines between the two very different people.
Now, when my Grandma read that, she didn’t take it that way. She agreed with me that Chris Owens the performer is amazing, and went on to say that she has been performing since my Grandma was a little girl. I thought that was a great comment, so I liked it.
Then my friend Christian came along and pulled a “Leave Britney Alone!” defense of Chris Owens. My grandmother, not accustomed to the level of cynical sarcasm, snark, and pop culture references that permeate Facebook status updates, thought she had offended my friend and was quite distressed. So on Christmas Day, I had to explain to my grandmother that no one was offended, and how no one means exactly what they say on Facebook. But how do we draw that line?
Watch What You Say
This brings me back to my central point. What started off as a small bit of humor to fill the void of a crappy Saints season ended up with my grandma scared that she had offended a friend of mine by talking about an octogenarian burlesque performer. (You want to move to New Orleans now, don’t you? This is normal here.)
It reminded me that no matter what your intention, and no matter what you say, you will probably offend someone somewhere. When writing online content for absolutely any outlet, your prime concern as an online content producer should be to sound as neutral as possible while still reaching your client’s intended audience.
This is not as easy as it sounds, and Facebook status update fails are only the tip of the iceberg — so be careful what you say and how you say it. A simple joke can end up being offensive, and that’s usually not what the client is looking for. While my incident didn’t make waves, a personal Facebook update can tarnish your professional reputation, and it’s even more important to watch out when you’re writing in the voice of a client. This isn’t to say that you can’t embrace divisive topics and provoke discussion, but as with most things, absolute clarity is the primary goal.
Google Plus communities, the newest section of the social networking site (often referred to as G+ for short) are meant to bring people of similar interests, work experience, or hobbies into one place. These communities can be created by anyone with a G+ account, opening up a whole new vista of networking and sharing potential for users.
The communities are designed for users to have a forum to share similar ideas, thoughts and beliefs and promote discussions amongst peers. The pages themselves can be made open to the public, restricted to certain users or undiscoverable by anyone not personally invited. They are also controlled by a moderator. Community types vary: users have the ability to create general communities such as “People Who Love Food” to more specific versions like “Vegans Rule.” They can also be industry- or location-specific, like “Lawyers’ Association” or “Lawyers of Southeast Louisiana.”
According to Social Media Today, there are several beneficial aspects to a G+ community:
No Edgerank: updates reach 100% of users
Companies don’t have to pay to promote posts in G+ stream
The content posted in the communities can be picked up by search engines
Facebook does not have public search engine and the content posted is not searchable
Google provides authorship to G+ users
Businesses engaging on Google+ may potentially rank higher
Sounds enticing. But don’t be so quick to dump your Facebook social media campaign yet. G+ Communities could be very beneficial to a company that wants to reach 100% of their followers without having to pay to do so. But, how many followers do companies actually have on G+ compared to Facebook, and if they are on G+, how many are actively using it? Google+ has 500 million users and only 235 million active users compared to Facebook’s 900 million, but how much time do they have to spend to be considered active? According to a study by comScore, the average G+ user only spends 3 minutes a month on the social network compared to the average Facebook user, who spends around 7 hours a month.
Facebook is still the king of social media and remains the place users spend the most of their Internet leisure time — but it’s not a bad idea for companies to expand their social media strategies to G+ and create a community for consumers to interact with their brand. While it’s disappointing to see Google, the innovation giant, reinventing the wheel, there are a few advantages to Google Plus communities that make them worth your attention. Let’s just hope that the social network’s next move will be something that we haven’t seen before.
Facebook Nearby Gets a Facelift Last Monday, Facebook released updates to its check-in feature “Nearby” in an effort to bring some competition to social sites like Yelp and Foursquare. Each month millions of Facebook users check in with the service, reporting their whereabouts to their friends. Now, Facebook is using that information to show you places you will most likely be interested in.
How does it do it? With the update, Facebook will consider your proximity to a place with the amount of check-ins, Likes, star ratings and recommendations made by your friends and other users. The update also allows users to search through 7 other categories, which include Restaurants, Coffee, Night Life, Outdoors, Arts, Hotels and Shopping. From each category, there are subcategories to further help narrow to your desired results.
Updated Nearby results are shown on a split screen of map and list of businesses with relevant rating information. Each business listed appears with the business name, profile picture, address, distance from you, star rating and friends that have Liked it.
Although Facebook Nearby has been dabbling in the check-in game for awhile, this update could be the inspiration needed to help it become more of an authority.
What Does This Mean for Local Businesses? Well, in short, it is another arena you will need to monitor and encourage interaction. Because this algorithm takes into account check-ins, Likes and recommendations, the more interaction between your business Facebook page and consumers, the higher it will appear on the Nearby list. Leading to the question of how to get consumers to visit, check-in, rate, Like or review a business.
Tips to Gain Facebook Interaction:
Make it easy. If you haven’t done it already, go create your business’s Facebook place page. Without it, consumers will be left to either create their own or not have the capability to check-in. This can cause issues from naming conventions to potential customers now knowing you exist.
Offer deals. Deals give an incentive for users to enter your business and try your products. Check-in deals or incentives to encourage consumers to rate or leave reviews on Facebook can increase interaction.
Stay active. Thank users for commenting or reviewing your business, and encourage interaction on your main page. Saying thank you can go a long way for many consumers, both current and potential.
Be interesting. Add photos and relevant information to your place page. For example, if you are a restaurant, add images of your menu, food and location.
Be helpful. Clearly list your operating hours and contact information.
Only time will tell whether the Facebook update to the Nearby application will become more popular with users and beneficial to business owners; in the meantime, optimizing your page for its potential benefits is just smart.
Social media is a fairly new medium, so it’s no surprise that people gaffe from time to time when they try to execute it right. Of course, there’s a varying degree of severity between “Whoops, I posted the wrong link!” to “Oh my, I’ve done something so bad that I need to dig a hole and crawl in.” You might expect the latter from individuals or smaller companies, but when a big company slips on that level, it comes as a bit of a shock. And that is just what happened yesterday when the enormously high profile video game publisher Square Enix tried to use a Facebook game to promote their newest title in the Hitman game series.
Since the game itself depicts the adventures of an assassin, the Facebook game in question was a social device that allowed you to “put a hit” on friends. That’s already a little weird, but with the right comedic twist, I can see the potential for it. However, the faux pas came in the form of a drop down box that allowed you to specify the reason for the hit. The list included PC-unfriendly motivations such as “her muffin top” and “her bad hair,” but took the cake with “her small tits,” which is not only inappropriate language but sexist as hell to boot. Men weren’t left out of the insult war either, as “tiny penis” was also an option.
As expected, social media exploded over the app — in exactly the opposite way that Square intended. The app was pulled within hours, apologizing and they issued a statement saying they did not mean to offend their audience. The campaign was created by Emmy-award winning ad agency Ralph, who apparently don’t that cruelly making fun of people before shooting them in the face with a sniper rifle is much of an objection given the game’s “mature” audience.
Epic fail doesn’t even begin to describe the debacle here. While the newness of social media has made it a necessity for businesses to figure out how to connect with their consumers, it also means a lot of wandering into the creative unknown — which can yield stellar results or a landmine of bad PR. I keep trying to wrap my brain around how anyone greenlighted this thing, and no matter what angle I come at it from, I still can’t get a handle on it. Kudos to Square-Enix for reacting with lightning speed, removing the app less than an hour after it appeared, but how did it even get that far in the first place?
If you are trying to think of ways to use Facebook to engage your client that are cool but not over the top, it’s best to have a checklist handy. “No racial, ethical, or sexist slurs” is probably a great place to start, followed by “know your target audience.” In this case, sadly, the target audience MAY have found this app funny, as the 2011 demographicfor gaming shows that 53% of the people playing games are between the ages of 18-54. In other words, lots of teenagers that might not think twice about picking on a classmate for physical flaws. Sexism in gaming has recently drawn huge amounts of criticism over the rampant and violent misogyny that the medium and its consumers have tacitly encouraged for years. The fact that the company was willing to put their seal of approval on such a blatant example of juvenile asshattery shows that they’re tragically out of touch with the contemporary climate — not to mention ignorant of the disastrous PR effects on a brand that wading into these issues can provoke.
What do you think about Square Enix’s slipup? Can you think of any other social media disasters that have caused you to facepalm at the speed of light?
In the modern world, there’s tremendous emphasis on finding a romantic partner. As if we didn’t get enough pressure from literature about star-crossed lovers, movies about pairing up, and images splayed across glossy magazine pages depicting blissful partners holding hands and gazing into the sunset, now Facebook has decided to join the bandwagon with a new addition. It’s called Profiles for Couples, and it gives you an excellent opportunity to show the world that you have indeed achieved putting off old maiddom for the time being.
Scorn aside, the general reaction to this new addition has caused some negativity. CNN documented some of the more extreme reactions in a recent post. Profiles for Couples is actually not anything wildly innovative: Facebook Friendship Pages work in a similar fashion and have been around for years. If you go to any friend’s page, click the gear icon next to “message,” and choose “See Friendship,” you’ll see a page that shows the way you and said friend have interacted over time, including when you became friends on Facebook, posts, events you both attended, and more.
An update like this tends to draw bitterness out of some and happiness from others, and funny enough, I think users’ reactions to it are much more significant than Facebook’s decision to make the change itself. Much like Facebook Friendship Pages, Profiles for Couples aren’t in your face — you have to navigate your way to them. Facebook is taking information you provide and assembling it to show a timeline, sure, and some people seem pissed about that. But it’s information you provide: if you don’t want it to exist, you have the option of not listing your relationship status on the site.
“You cannot deactivate the pages, but you can control what you share on Facebook using the privacy settings for each post,” Facebook’s Jessie Baker told CNN. “The friendship page respects the privacy setting of each post. This means the person viewing the friendship page may see each post elsewhere on Facebook, like on either friend’s timeline or in news feed. You can curate your friendship page by hiding stories you do not want to appear.”
For private types who don’t like their love lives chronicled across Facebook, these changes may draw some ire. Personally, the idea of setting up a page like this in place of a personal one does bother me, and because personal individuality is important whether you are married or not. Still, for those who opt to immerse their online identity in coupledom, it’s certainly their prerogative. On the other hand, the comedic value could be classic. Rather than sites like Lamebook having to keep an eye out for couples catfighting over the social network, they can now just surf over the the couples page and screencap the whole thing.
Nothing gets the honeys' hearts thumping like Senor Cardgage.While these couples pages seem fundamentally gag-worthy, they can provide a nice repository of the exchanges between you and your sweetie — viewing those memories is a great way to reconnect with your past (and that one Strong Bad cartoon you posted on their wall in 2007). But why not just leave that to the domain of “view friendship” pages? What makes romantic coupledom so important that it has to get its own specialized feature that already existed in the Facebook UI? The answer, of course, is pleasing the crowd: ever since the disastrous IPO, the ‘book has been frantically trying to connect with users on every level possible. Time will tell if their efforts are successful in retaining the goodwill of its 800 million strong user base.
Are you offended by the idea of couples pages, or indifferent?
At some point during the endless presidential election of 2012, you probably shared a political opinion on Facebook that you were wholly unqualified to advance. Facebook is one of those great and terrible places where totally uninformed people can share their feelings with everyone they know. There’s just no room for actual rational argument on Facebook — at least, that’s the biggest thing that I’ve learned during this past election cycle.
Here are five other things I learned about politics from reading my Facebook feed:
Everybody has an opinion, and you better not disagree with it.
Did you study political science in college? Do you have a degree in economics? Do you even know anything about the tenets of national socialism? No? Doesn’t matter.
Facts and emotions rarely align, especially when social media is involved. Your aunt, uncle, grandmother, high school classmate, co worker, and friend from the coffee house all know that they are absolutely correct. If you want to remain Facebook friends with any of them, the best thing to do is do not engage when they proclaim that a vote for Romney is a vote for the Lizard People, or that President Obama is going to sell the entire country to Lithuania.
Just smile and back away while not making any sudden movements.
Sometimes it’s legitimately difficult to tell if someone is joking.
I enjoy a well formed joke just as much as everyone else. I think it’s incredibly funny that Republicans took to referring to anything Obama said as “Obamaloney,” specifically because it reads as “Oba Maloney.” I came very close to writing a killer post about how everyone should leave my good old uncle Oba Maloney alone.
But then I realized I was opening myself up to anyone who could possibly interpret the obvious hilarity in a way that I hadn’t intended. That unwritten post probably would have ended up with as many comments from people choosing to expound on the truthiness of the President’s latest statements as from people who enjoyed the scintillating wordplay on my part.
Seriously, Oba Maloney. That just cracks me up.
When people say they are moving to another country on Facebook, they probably should.
Do you bloviate endlessly about the heinous misdeeds of those big bad meanies on the other side? Do you attack and browbeat anyone who opposes anything you hold to be true? Do you think women need to use birth control each and every time they have sex, and that having a prescription for birth control automatically makes a woman a prostitute? (Okay, that last one is optional.)
You are not a unique and special snowflake. You are not influencing anybody’s vote in any way. There is simply not a single scenario wherein one of those mythical “undecided voters” chose one side over the other because of a well-placed status update.
You have every right to express your political opinion on Facebook. I just want to let you know that it doesn’t matter. The people who agree with you may like it, and the people who disagree with you may remove you from their newsfeed. You will not, however, have any impact on the Electoral College at all. Sorry to burst your bubble.
Your friends hate it when you talk about politics on Facebook.
Seriously. This is always, always, always true. The only people who are worse than the self-appointed Facebook pundits are the idiots who shake yard signs at drivers in the middle of busy intersections on election day.
The bottom line is, while Facebook is a tool for personal networking, it’s no venue for political discourse. By keeping the commentating to yourself, you can avoid a whole lot of headaches and maintain your personal brand. Now that the election is over, let’s all find other things to talk about and fight about on Facebook. Like how Mickey Mouse bought George Lucas. Please?
My name is Steve Maloney, and I approved this message. Now go share it on Facebook.
All juiciness aside, some recent developments on the business end of social networking are sure to have a lasting impact on the way the average person uses these platforms. This flux goes hand-in-hand with the way advertisers and shareholders will have to go about making money off of the average person’s use of these platforms in the future. Unsurprisingly to anyone at least fleetingly familiar with the planet Earth in 2012, the central player in these developments are the perennial big poppa of social networks, Facebook.
As you’re probably aware, Facebook’s revolutionary IPO move several months ago arrived with financial expectations about as humbly understated as the dialogue in an Aaron Sorkin script. As you’re also probably aware, things didn’t actually end up going allthatwell. Regardless of whether or not this should have been that much of a surprise in retrospect, Facebook’s disappointing yield for shareholders will have a major impact on how other social media resources have to approach the development of their platforms in the future.
As The Atlantic‘s Derek Thompson points out, new pressures being placed on Tumblr to shift its focus from accommodating users to establishing and adhering to a strict and viable business plan marks the first step in what will likely be a sweeping change in the general philosophy governing social media:
The first few years of the social media revolution have been a golden age of tech utilitarianism, where maximizing users’ delight was considered, quite literally, the only currency that mattered. In Part II of the revolution, the desired currency is poised to change from attention to profit
It is not difficult to envision a pageview-centric future where quirky overnight Tumblr sensations like Dogshaming or McKayla Is Not Impressed are promptly equipped with chain pet store-sponsored submission forms or Kodak-provided stock photo templates of the moon landing and the Tiananmen Square protest for greater ease of Maroney-meme insertion. While such developments wouldn’t necessarily strip such silly internet curios of their fundamental entertainment value, instant monetization would definitely take a bit of the fun out of discovering such pages and watching them circulate and expand in popularity. Much of the appeal of these sorts of Tumblr pages — and all social media-generated sensations — involves the users’ ability to at least pretend that they or one of their “friends” were the first to discover a particular page or meme. Obviously, this illusion is immediately eliminated once sponsorship is pulled into play; it’s hard to envision any business model by which these sites could remain free to use without more deeply integrating corporate sponsorship into site content.
Meanwhile, corporate entities are starting to consider newly raised issues related to social media advertising on their end in the wake of a controversial decision by Australia’s Advertising Standards Bureau regarding Facebook user comments. Essentially, the Bureau ruled that (in Australia) a company must screen its page and posts to ensure the accuracy of all product-related information contained not only in its own officially posted content, but also in the content added via general user comments. The implications of such a decision could be outright devastating for the future efficiency of Facebook promotion, should such regulations be incorporated on any sort of broader international scale. I don’t think I’m going to shatter any advertisers’ utopian dreams by stating that the types of people who purchase and “like” your product aren’t necessarily the same people you’d want writing your advertising copy. And in the case of the Australian company in question, Smirnoff Vodka, they might well be the absolute last people you’d want having any impact on your legal standing.
This whole situation leaves companies in a quite precarious position. It seems like a magnificent waste of time and brainpower to constantly screen a boatload of throwaway Facebook user comments; however, disabling user interactions altogether would seem to fundamentally defeat the purpose of marketing on social media platforms. It’s not difficult to see how some companies could determine that it’s simply not worth the trouble.
What we have in place, then, is an interesting sort of standoff. I couldn’t possibly isolate any direct inspiration for this, but I like to envision the advertisers and investors as one grizzled old gunslinging action hero, with the anonymous multitudes of invisible social networkers seated at their computers represented, perhaps, simply by a single empty chair. Advertisers still salivate at social media platforms’ unprecedented access to consumers in age brackets and demographics they have been unable to effectively reach otherwise, but getting too close to these general users just might land them in legal trouble. Social media investors naturally dream of throwing their weight around to help shove these advertisers closer to these same consumers, since that’s the most logical way to enhance the financial prospects of their investment.
Of course, at stake is that essential feeling of “mine-ness” that drew users to social networking to begin with. Push advertising too hard on these users, and they could vacate the premises as quickly as that neon pink anime-style cat that wallpapered your big sister’s old MySpace page. General social media users, meanwhile, are facing a looming decision as to whether their enjoyment of the social networks they’ve become accustomed to using sufficiently outweighs the frustration of finding more and more of their personal lives either directly monetized or, at the very least, more strategically molded into streamlined business plans.
These problems are by no means new revelations, but the stakes are suddenly much higher. Facebook has proven that merely getting a ton of people on board and radically redefining the concept of “word-of-mouth” isn’t enough to make real, investor-friendly truckloads of cash. The Australian Advertising Standards Bureau has proven that the line between mingling and marketing is likely going to become a lot less blurry than it probably seemed for advertisers developing marketing strategies over the last few years.
If there’s one thing that’s fairly certain in all of this, it’s that a major shake-up is imminent. Sticking with the Facebook example, it’s unlikely that advertisers are going to coolly walk away from a massive, captive audience simply because it might be a bit of a hassle to adhere to ad copy standards thus far unenforced in most of the world. It’s equally unlikely that Facebook investors are going to calmly give Mark Zuckerberg back his old T-shirts, say “sorry it didn’t work out,” and shuffle home to listen to Morrissey records until they find another fish in the sea. Most unlikely of all, perhaps, is that Facebook users will coolly kick back and say, “hey guys, we’ll be here waiting for you no matter what. You just figure out what you think is best for us and let us know how it’s going to work from now on.”
Whatever happens, it feels like the optimal time for enterprising online marketers to start getting more familiar with alternate social networking platforms. Given the inherently fast-paced, fleeting nature of social media, the very fact that many of us might feel a sense of comfort or predictability with marketing on Facebook and Twitter should be some kind of indication that those bubbles are soon to burst.
Will the great user-friendly potential of Google+ finally be met with the corresponding cultural acceptance and ascribed relevance it has lacked to this point? Will users gravitate toward the conceptually alluring “private” approach to social networking, as demonstrated by the forever-in-progress Diaspora? Will users decide that they are serious enough about social media to begin paying to keep their online networking strictly social on a site like as many are starting to suggest? Perhaps in a few years, the very concept of unchecked social networking will have become a quaint little “two thousand-late” fad, just a laughably nostalgic relic of misguided youth like slap bracelets, Power Gloves and Britney Spea… oh. Right.
In any case, even if Facebook and Twitter users prove willing to endure a more thoroughly streamlined and business-friendly approach to their online interactions, this will likely lift many of the restrictions that currently define appropriate approaches to marketing on these platforms. If television audiences are still willing to revolve entire Sundays around roughly 11 minutes of football for every hour of commercials, it’s certainly possible that marketers can beef up their approach without driving away the very audience they’re courting.
I realize that this post has done more in the way of raising questions than providing answers, but that’s really the point. For businesses, marketers, shareholders and general internet users alike, the catch-all answer for everything has long been that “social networking is the future.” The recent travails of Facebook and the future implications of these troubles for other sites should be making everyone stop, take a deep breath and ask just what is the future for social networking. As a man much wiser than I once said, things done changed.
6 Ways to Use the New LinkedIn Features to Get More Business — Social Media Examiner
While some may view the right-hand side of their Facebook stalking experience as an uninteresting blob of text, Facebook was once the 
To boot, Facebook actively goads advanced advertisers to bend their rules. Regardless of your page’s subject matter, Facebook still beseeches marketers to “See Your Ad Here,” often showing a recent post. For a page that is already posting inappropriate content, this enticement throws down the gauntlet to get the ad to pass content review. Sometimes, it’s easier than you think.
To paraphrase whomever The Notorious B.I.G. was paraphrasing in 1997, 
What we have in place, then, is an interesting sort of standoff. I couldn’t possibly isolate any direct inspiration for this, but I like to envision the advertisers and investors as one grizzled old gunslinging action hero, with the anonymous multitudes of invisible social networkers seated at their computers represented, perhaps, simply by a single empty chair. Advertisers still salivate at social media platforms’ unprecedented access to consumers in age brackets and demographics they have been unable to effectively reach otherwise, but getting too close to these general users just might land them in legal trouble. Social media investors naturally dream of throwing their weight around to help shove these advertisers closer to these same consumers, since that’s the most logical way to enhance the financial prospects of their investment. 
Will the great user-friendly potential of