Tag: Facebook

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What’s Happened to Facebook?

Ask any kid or adult what they think about Facebook and you may hear these comments:

  • I’m tired of the game spam.
  • I am not spending much time on Facebook anymore.
  • I am investing my time in face to face contact and moving offline.
  • I think Facebook is in trouble, I just am not interested in the things happening there anymore.
  • I think Facebook is a fad and has had it’s run its course.
  • My newsfeed is boring.
  • I couldn’t live without Facebook.
  • I only use Facebook to logon to sites I want to become a member on as the auto login is easy.
  • I like using the like button.
  • I like to poke people, play games, use the apps.
  • Many of my friends are leaving Facebook to go to Twitter.
  • I like the games, but I am strongly encouraged to use money to buy things on the games.
  • I find it complicated to use and don’t understand how to use it to connect or answer posts on my wall.

These are just a few comments from the people I polled for this post. Do you have a comment you want to add about Facebook? As for me I think Facebook is still a great place for businesses to be, but only until the next big thing comes along.

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Is Social Media Worth the Time? How to Tell

When you are busy there is no easier and faster task you want to drop than to stop updating your social media sites like Twitter and Facebook, but is that wise? Before you drop updating social media sites, make sure you are not hurting your web presence first.

How can you tell if social media is not driving traffic and activity on your site? It all starts with analysis. If you don’t routinely watch your website statistics on Google Analytics, you should. For my site, I watch the Social Sources in the Traffic Sources button to check my referrals. If you don’t see referrals from Twitter or Facebook there, don’t stop updating those services yet until you look a bit further.

I use HootSuite for my social updates and I can run link click and follower share reports in the control panel. This gives me a  more clear view of what is happening specifically with Twitter. To check what is happening with Facebook, I login as an administrator and review my Insights report.

Based on what you see, you may decide to cut back activity to a lower level if the numbers are not measurable, but I would not stop either service altogether. Google and Bing do look for social updates and sharing activity as part of their organic rankings. If social media is taking up too much time, I would ramp back first to a comfortable level.  Specifically, I might recommend one update a day for Facebook and three updates a day for Twitter.

Should you stop social media updates all together? I would only recommend doing so if you really cannot support the activity level, you see zero link shares, and no referrals when you review a six month period. I would be very slow to stop updating your networks all together. I have found that once you lose readership, after you have actively worked to build it for quite a while, that to get back in the game again is almost like starting from scratch. It is better to slow your activity than to stop totally.

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Microsoft Updates Name to Bing

This was announced recently: “…Our small and medium business brand is changing from “Microsoft Advertising” to “Bing.”” Although it appears that the advertising product will still be called adCenter, it appears that Microsoft is working to brand itself more consistently with the Bing brand. There may be additional strategies at play such as differentiating Microsoft’s online presence from its software presence. As to that, only time will tell.

In the meantime understand that Bing is much more than advertising on the Bing.com search engine. Bing results and Bing advertising is shown on the Yahoo, Bing, and even the Facebook platform. Of additional importance just this past week was Bing’s announcement that throughout the summer they will be rolling out a very tight search integration with Facebook.

From the images released, it appears that when you will search on Bing in the future, Facebook friends faces and comments about a product or place will appear on the left sidebar of your Bing search results page.

All in all, both statements are big news and let us know that in the bigger schemes of search there is some serious consolidation happening behind the scenes between the key social players like Facebook and Microsoft now known as Bing.

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How to Add Photos to Facebook Using HootSuite

If you use HootSuite, you may have found out that since Facebook has made some sweeping changes you can no longer add photos to your Facebook updates by clicking the attach file icon to a scheduled status update. For some this has really impacted their use of HootSuite.

Unfortunately HootSuite has not come out and directly addressed this in their forum, but has posted a work around that is not linked to the forum questions but one of our clients found and shared with us. Thanks to Suzanne Patterson of Esprit de Corp for sharing this HootSuite resolution.

  • Click the attach paper clip icon just underneath the HootSuite entry field.
  • Select a TWITTER profile, then select your correct FACEBOOK profile where you want the photo to actually go.
  • Click the upload photo icon under the update entry field.

Note the image will not be posted to your Twitter profile, only used to upload the photo as a workaround due to Facebook’s API.

You can see the visual instructions to perform these actions at HootSuite.