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Using Lists With Facebook

Sorting my friends into lists has revolutionized my experience on Facebook. If you have not started to use this relatively new feature then you really should consider doing so.

You need to access all you friends first. Go to the menu bar item on the left sidebar that says All Connections. On this page will will see a list of all of your friends and their photos. on the left side of their listing click the link there, as I have all mine in lists, my link says “lists”, yours may say something different. Mouse over create a new list and create a category for that person. I have my account set up with lists for Family, Friends, Work, and Acquaintances.

Work your way through your friends list assigning friends to one or more lists that you have created. Now, go back to your profile home page. You will see a new navigation feature under status updates with the name of your new lists. You can sort how your lists appear there by just dragging them into the order you would like.

For me, no longer do I have to wade through the wall postings and status updates of acquaintances that clutter up my home page, I can go to family and see immediately what my son or nephew is doing. Using lists is a huge time saver and as your Facebook account grows allows you to stay in control over what you see in a glance.

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Using the New Facebook Privacy Settings

Almost a month ago Facebook rolled out some new privacy setting features giving you greater control over who can see what on your Facebook account. It has taken me a while to get around to reviewing how to use these new settings and if you were like me, you may not have reviewed them yet.

First, you can access these settings once you login to your account by clicking privacy on the top links where you would access your profile settings. Mouse over the link called settings and a drop down box will appear with an option called “Privacy Settings”. You will have several options in each of the links that appear on the next screen. You will be offered setting updates for your profile, search, news feed and wall, and applications.

Work your way through each setting deciding whether you want videos and photos to show and to whom in your network. You can even select if photos you are tagged in will appear on just your wall or your friends’ walls. You can choose how much or how little to show in each category.

Additionally, the new settings allow you to control exactly what from your friends shows on your wall as well. For me, as I am friends with young people in my family but use Facebook for work and personal combined, I do not necessarily want business acquaintances to see what the young people in my network are doing and saying. Another really big thing that I have just started using, in addition to the privacy settings, is the Facebook grouping feature. I’ll talk about that Wednesday so make sure to check back.

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Using AdWords for E-Commerce Third Party Shopping Carts

I’ve just recently run into this situation and wanted to share some tips with you on how an e-commerce store can best use Google AdWords.

First, it is important that if you are using a third party shopping cart that you understand that you really must create shopping category pages on your own front end website under your domain name if you will be promoting your product categories using Google AdWords.

Here’s an example, let’s say your domain was www.ILoveShopping.com. Your main domain only had a few pages residing there, your about us page, contact us page, and your site home page. When someone clicked your “buy dog toys” category link in your website navigation they were sent to bigstore.giantserver.com/ILoveShoppingcom/dog-toys-for-sale.aspx.

For AdWords you could not point to this category page in your ads as the destination URL if you wanted your display URL to be www.ILoveShopping.com. You would instead have to have your Display URL be bigstore.giantserver.com/ILoveShoppingcom and the destination URL be bigstore.giantserver.com/ILoveShoppingcom/dog-toys-for-sale.aspx –  right?

Well, at least this is supposed to be how it works, but just recently Google would not even allow an advertiser  use this format. It may be the max URL count for the destination URL is over the 1024 that are allowed or that the shopping server really does not exist and is a redirect page set at the store server level. And besides that who wants to be doing AdWords and have customers lose confidence when they see a weird display URL like: bigstore.giantserver.com/ILoveShoppingcom instead of ILoveShopping.com?

So, without being able to link to the category page suddenly your quality score on dog toys slips to 7 or even 5 and you start paying a chunk of cash to promote this popular category for your store.

If this is your situation, before you start promoting your store on AdWords you really need to address this by creating a category page that is keyword dense and lists your products by name or categories and then from there links to the store. Not only will this help with your AdWords quality score, it sidesteps the Display/Destination URL problem mentioned above, increases conversions, and will even help your main front-end site place organically as now your parent domain has new keyword dense relevant content to what you are selling.

If you have tons of products and say nah, I am not going to do this, you may want to consider creating a landing page for the category you are promoting on your main website that then showcases only your top sellers and has a prominent link to the complete category page in the third part store. Whatever your plan, to send the customer for a specific category to your home page where there is no specific content on this category or products to buy is wrong and a fails miserably when it comes to building a great quality score and increasing conversion.