Category: Facebook

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Yes That Is Facebook Stalking You Online

Now that Facebook has encouraged you to share every single detail of your life with timeline, and some of you have, and now that you have used your Facebook login to supposedly easily login to sites around the web, Facebook can now stalk you with ads online. Unfortunately, we’ve no one to blame but ourselves by over-sharing all our likes, where we go online, and what we are doing.

Whispering a secret about you!
Whispering a secret about you!

Facebook is now using every single thing that you ever shared on its platform to tailor ads to your specific needs and likes. But it isn’t just happening on the Facebook platform, now that we have shared and used our Facebook logins on other sites, Facebook knows even more and is sharing this information with other advertising platforms to target us in ways we never really intended by simply connecting with our friends and family on the Facebook website. If you’ve enabled Facebook Graph Search, and sorry to say it is a one way trip in, now you can even see more information about those in your network, including photos, that you may have never really wanted to see. This total loss of privacy is unfortunately of our own making. By trading away privacy for cool birthday apps on Facebook, or allowing games to see our settings, or by trying to uncomplicate our lives with one universal Facebook login, we’ve created an ad selling monster. Just wait until Facebook really ramps up its ad serving program, nothing will be private and in fact things about you may be revealed or shown to others in order to sell them products or services, using your own words, photos, or online activity without your express knowledge or agreement.If you didn’t know or remember, it’s all about the money.

“Facebook remains under pressure from its investors to make more money and advertising has been one of the social network’s main focuses. The firm brought in $5 billion in advertising revenue last year. Facebook also continues to push mobile advertising  — it made 23 percent of its advertising revenue from mobile in the last quarter, up from 14 percent in third quarter.” Read the full article.

The unfortunate thing is that once we’ve shared as deeply as we have, we now are being used to make advertising profit.

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Never Buy Facebook Likes or Twitter Followers

Don't buy Facebook Likes or Twitter followers.
Don’t buy Facebook Likes or Twitter followers.

You’ll do more damage to your brand and reputation that you can realize when you buy Facebook Like or Twitter followers! It seems like a no-brainer really that there are some things that you just shouldn’t do, but I get asked over and over as to why a business should NOT buy likes.Here’s Why You Should Not Buy Followers:

1. The quality of likes and followers you will buy are poor. In some cases you are buying just number and not accounts owned by real people.

2. You may be buying spammers – likes and followers who are really spammers are of no value to you. They will want to @ message you to get exposure on YOUR wall or news feed to spew out their own service and products. They have no interest in connecting to you.

3. Many of these purchased likes and followers may be involved with pornography. You do not want to take a black eye for having followers and comments from those in a “bad neighborhood”. Take a look at the profile photos of some of these people who were bought as a like or follower. Many will be dressed in sexy or revealing outfits. Do you really want these icons appearing on your family-friendly newsfeed or wall?

Don’t be tempted with easy results, when you try to take a short cut to build your followers or fan base, you don’t want your brand to be damaged in the process. It is by far better to take it slow, build a thoughtful strategy, and work your own plan.

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Facebook’s Graph Search – Instant Search Only Better Kind Of

This past year Google created Instant Search, you know those suggestions that pop up under what you are typing at Google.com that recommend finishing your query based on other popular searches that Google has seen and recorded. Well you could consider Facebook’s Graph Search like Instant Search for Facebook, but with a twist – it delivers results from friends, friends of friends, and friends of other friends.

It’s kind of cool to have really personalized results from people who you may trust more than a search engine algorithm. You’ve got to enable Graph Search on Facebook first to use it. Once you do, Facebook inserts a search bar on the top left of your Facebook page. Results are personalized based on your friends and if your friends don’t have the answer, the answers come from Bing.

I did a search for best Chinese restaurants in Waldorf and got ratings on two from friends of friends. The page of the restaurant actually even showed images of people eating including children, shared ratings, and the location.

After reading the information I thought I’d better check my Facebook privacy settings as clearly anything you post, images you share, or locations you log, Facebook is now using for their Graph Search results. I am not so sure I want everything I do and say used in a personal search engine. As a result, I blocked many of the things that I allow Facebook to share so you probably won’t see my comments in a Facebook search in the future.

With Facebook Graph Search you are just losing another piece of privacy that can now be used to sell products, encourage shopping or visits to a restaurant, even if you didn’t even know your comments were being used. Kind of scary when you think about it.

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Did You Know That Share-ability Impacts Who Sees Your Facebook Updates?

Did you know that most likely only 15% of your Facebook Business Page status updates are actually seen on your fans’ walls? Scary isn’t it, to know that the time you spend in keeping your Facebook wall updated may actually have marginal impact. Why? It’s about EdgeRank and share-ability.

Just like Google has an algorithm to rack and stack websites to determine where they appear in the organic or unpaid search results, Facebook has an algorithm to determine when your updates will appear on the walls of subscribers and fans. Not everything you write will be shown, but why such a little amount and how can you get more updates to show?

A great article that explains this topic further and really digs into EdgeRank can be found at SiteProNews.

The bottom line is that the higher your EdgeRank the better your chance that others will actually see what you write and post to your Business Page’s wall. A very simplified explanation of EdgeRank is share-ability. If more people comment, like, link to, and share an update you’ve posted on your wall, the higher the EdgeRank and the more likely this update is to appear on the wall of people who have liked you or subscribe to your news feed.

One way to work to raise EdgeRank is to be specific in a status update and let the reader know what action you really want them to take upon reading your update. Do you want them to share it? Ask them to do that. Do you want them to like your update? Ask them to click like! If you are linking to a download back on your website – ask them to click in and download your paper. Be specific and make the action simple and easy to do.

Improving your EdgeRank is all about action that people take when they read your post. Make sure you are doing your part to help to raise your own EdgeRank by changing your wall post to be more share-able and actionable. EdgeRank will rise when you do so and are successful in engaging reader activity.