Archive for Facebook

Dec
09

Remove Facebook News Ticker

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Do you like seeing all the Facebook minutia scrolling on your screen while in Facebook? If so, read no further. However, if you’d like to get rid of that Facebook Ticker, read on. Here are ways to get rid of the constant scrolling with simple extensions and add-ins for both Chrome and Firefox. Internet Explorer 9 just came out with their method to remove the ticker, however, the steps are too detailed. I’ve decided to leave my IE9 browser alone for now. Perhaps later there’ll be something easier to use!

How to Eliminate Facebook Ticker From Chrome

To remove the Facebook News Ticker from Chrome – click here to go to the Chrome App store. Then simply click the ‘Add To Chrome’ button and just like that – no more Facebook news ticker! No restart of Chrome necessary either!

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How to Eliminate Facebook Ticker From Firefox

Firefox has also made it easy to eliminate the Facebook Ticker. It’s simply an add-in. Go here and add it to Firefox. You will need to restart your browser.

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If you’d like to remove a slew of Facebook notifications, such as when someone ‘friends’ someone, if someone ‘likes’ a page or updates their profile and all the little things like that, there’s a way to eliminate all of that too. Click here to go to Feed Filter where you can decide the kinds of updates you’d like to hide.

Eliminate Facebook Ticker From Internet Explorer 9

Internet Explorer 9 was the last to add this feature and it’s got a lot of steps to it. Pete McKenna did a great job outlining the steps along with screen shots on his blog, so if you’re interested in removing the Facebook Ticker from Internet Explorer 9, then check it out at his site.

Categories : Facebook
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If you muck around in Facebook for purely social reasons and you’d rather look at cute puppy pictures from your friends, this article may not be for you because I’m going to focus on using Facebook as more of a educational/business resource and to get answers to your burning Microsoft Office questions.

If you’ve ‘Liked’ business and other informational-type pages and like to read great articles or learn tips to be more productive and you use Office software (of course, you can apply this to other software or gadgets you’re interested in), then try asking your Office questions right from within Facebook. Below you’ll see some of the Office products I like.

 

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I just recently noticed while reading some wall postings that one of the moderators advised a writer with a question to use the ‘Support’  tab and that people were standing by to answer questions like hers.

 

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Here’s what you get when you click on the ‘Support’ tab. At first, I thought it was going to be similar to posting to a wall, but looking at the interface and noticing the search for answers and the post a question, I noticed that the page is linked to the on-line Microsoft Answers site. This isn’t a bad thing at all. It saves time because you don’t have to go and search for this site on the web. You will need to authorize the Facebook app to have access to your basic information, including your email. This also saves time because you don’t have to set up an account or sign in with your Windows Live ID. So all in all, it’s pretty handy to be able to do this from Facebook.

Other Microsoft Resources With One Click

In addition to the Support tab, there’s also tabs for videos and blogs for instant consumption and learning. Everything plays or you read it from right within Facebook.

Just for fun, I went to the Facebook Google Apps Page and there were no specialized apps, just a wall. Open Office was the same—just a wall to post on but no apps. Both were pretty boring.

Do you use Facebook to learn or do you enjoy reading articles coming through your newsfeed from businesses you’ve subscribed to? That’s probably my favorite use for Facebook.

Categories : Facebook, microsoft
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It seems many are searching for how to add a Facebook Profile Badge, Page Badge, etc. to their websites to promote their Facebook Fan pages. This is a great idea to cross promote and integrate your brand presence among all your social media.

Facebook Badges Available

I wrote about how to do this back in July of 2008. Looking back at this article, not a whole lot has changed. There are still the 4 badges shown below:

Profile – this shares your personal profile, not your business profile

Photo – if you want to share your Facebook photos on your website, this is the one for you (you only get 8 photos, not sure if they rotate to others you may have)

Like – this shows the pages you like, not a button to click for people to like your page

Page – this is the one I use and the one I think is most useful if you’re wanting to promote your business page from your website

 

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When you click one of these, you’ll be taken to another page where you can choose the page you want the code for. I use WordPress, so I clicked the ‘Other’ and then a pop-up box opened and next put your cursor in it and click on Ctrl+A to select everything in the box, then click Ctrl+C to copy everything and then take it to your website and paste it in the space you have set aside for it. For me, it’s a widget box – strategically placed. Then refresh your page and hopefully, everything has worked. If not, see the link at the end of this article for help.

 

Facebook like badge preview

Preview of what your 'Page' Badge will look like

 

Facebook Social Plugins

The social plugins were around 3 years ago, just a few more have been added – now there are 10. They are all below with links to tell you more about them.

 

The one I like best is the Like Box because of the information it shows. It shows your page’s name at the top in bold, then it shows your latest post (they are all brilliant, aren’t they)? The reader can click in the box and instantly be taken to your page where they can read more and LIKE you. You can do some styling of the box, which is great.

style your facebook plugin

Options to style your "Facebook Like Box" - use these!

 

You don’t have to limit yourself to one plugin – choose more than one and sprinkle them around your site – just be strategic about it and don’t overdo.

Need Facebook Help?

Here’s where you can go to get comprehensive help on promoting your Facebook page:

https://www.facebook.com/help/search/?q=facebook+badge

Categories : Facebook
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For those of you with a business, are you on Facebook? Did you build a Business or ‘brand’ page, or do you mix your business and personal together? I just published my Facebook business page this week, after having an unpublished draft gathering dust in my account for probably two years.

I’ve had a personal Facebook account since about 2007. I , like so many other parents, got on to keep track of what my child was up to and it was great for that. When it became the thing for businesses to have a page, I didn’t want to have one and ‘subject’ my friends to a stream of business news from me. I had been inundated by some ‘friends’ business pages and eventually had to turn them off.  I didn’t want to be a pest and annoyance to my friends so I stayed on the sidelines.

A Philosophy and Mindset Change

Time went by and I gradually developed more of an interest in the business side of Facebook. I started building Facebook pages for business and did a lot of reading on the hows, whys and marketing of a Facebook page. I found and observed how successful and interactive having and maintaining a page could be. I saw the great tools Facebook provides for connecting to Twitter and my website and I thought, ‘what am I waiting for’, and worked on my page for a few days and now I have a business presence on Facebook! Another tool that changed my mind is the ability to take a group of people from your Facebook list of friends and assign them to a targeted list. This way, I can send business updates to my business friends and not my personal friends – perfect!

Below is my landing page. It’s not in its final form, but I’m a believer in getting something out there and then tweaking it. I’d like to get your comments on my page. Does the landing page attract your attention? What about the colors and pictures? Most importantly, what about the content? That is the most important thing. Please leave your comments here at my site, or go to my Facebook page and make a comment there. I’d appreciate your ‘liking’ my page too!

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A Facebook Business Presence for All?

So if you’re a business and you’re not on Facebook, maybe reading this will get you to think about what’s right for your situation. I think a business or company should NOT get a Facebook business page unless they are committed to regular updates and maintenance. There’s nothing sadder than seeing a ‘dead’ page, i.e. one that has a smattering of postings months apart. If you don’t post, you die.

If you want a page or have a page that needs attention, check out my

Social Media Packages

here on my site. I have several packages – hopefully one will be right for you. Many small businesses don’t have the time or energy to figure out how to build a page that takes advantage of the newest Facebook tools, apps and landing pages. Email me at lynn (at)extremevirtualsupport.com, call me at 405-633-1770, or just leave a comment here on my site and I’ll be happy to talk with you.

Categories : Facebook
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Suppose you or a client wants some audio put into their Facebook Page –how would you do it? I had a client ask me and I did some research on how to add just an .mp3 file to the page. Here are instructions from Facebook on how to upload a .wav file (windows-type of file). I haven’t tried these instructions and from the comments, it looks like people were having problems with it. But this is not my focus today.

We’re going to add audio to Facebook and make it more interesting by adding pictures!

Instead of Just Audio, Use Audio + Video

It seems backwards, but I think it works. Instead of having just an .mp3 file that might get boring for your fans to listen to, why not add some video to it. Instead of building your project around the video, build it around the audio! That way, your friend or potential customer is fully engaged with both video and audio!

Since we’re talking about audio + video, it seemed to make sense to do a short video on how to get your audio posted to Facebook, a blog, etc. Of course, you’ll need to have your audio clip recorded and saved to your hard drive.

Then, you’ll need to match your message with your images. If it’s a product you are highlighting, take photos of your product and use those to make your message. Be creative, but tasteful. My sample video is not beautiful, but the purpose is to demonstrate the steps.

 

Now, you’ll have a more powerful, impactful message since you’ve gone beyond text or just a bland audio clip. Give it a try!

Categories : Facebook, Technology
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Aug
26

Facebook Places-Why I Won’t Use It

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The new Facebook Places was rolled out with a big fanfare August 18th. It’s a imagelocation based ‘service’ whereby you can use a smart phone (there’s an iPhone app-other smart phone users will need to go to http://touch.facebook.com. The places function works if you have a GPS enabled device. It worked on two of my laptops that ‘know’ my location.

I saw a video from Facebook proclaiming the satisfaction you’ll receive from checking in when you get to various locations. They say that sharing your location with friends enriches your Facebook experience and your life because all this sharing is what Facebook is all about—right?? Do we really need Facebook to do this for us?

You Must Change Your Privacy Settings To Deactivate Places

I have no intention of using Places, so I really didn’t pay much attention to the roll-out—that is until I heard that all Facebook users are automatically opted in to Places. I should have known – whenever something new is rolled out, the settings are left wide open and it’s our responsibility to check our privacy settings.

When I say ‘opted in’, that doesn’t mean that FB knows where you are and is publishing it without your knowledge. You have to ‘check in’ to a place. (see illustration below.) The FB default is that when you check in, it shows your location to ‘Everyone’. It’s up to you to go in to your privacy settings and change it (if you wish). I clicked on the ‘Places I check in to’ and changed mine  to ‘Only Me’. There is not an option to turn it off, but the only me setting makes it as private as you can get. I did this so I could experiment with how it works.

Then notice the “Include me in ‘people here now’ after I check in” section below. The ‘Enable’ box is checked (the default). If you leave this box checked, then anybody who visits a location you’ve check in at can potentially view that you’ve been there before.

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The other setting you’ll want to review is ‘Friends can check me into Places’ , then your ‘friends’ can check in to a place and then go crazy adding other people as being there with them. I saw on a friend’s location that she and 21 of her friends were at a hair salon all at the same time! It can be fun and silly, or it could be done to embarrass someone by putting them in a place they’re not know to frequent.

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While looking into Places for this article I found Lifehacker’s short video on how to change your Facebook Privacy settings. Take a look at this if you’d rather have visual instruction on how to adjust your settings.

Custom Settings

Facebook does allow for very granular custom settings. For example, from within your privacy settings, click on the ‘custom settings’ and you can really go to town and exclude or include certain people for Places (or other FB services). This is grand and glorious, however, you can spend a lot of time getting this set up. And it must be done for each privacy setting. What a pain.

facebook custom settings

Why I won’t Use Places

  • I really doubt that my friends have time to be continually checking FB to see where I (or others) am.
  • Places might be handy for a densely populated area with many locations/destinations close to each other, but where I live, that’s not the case.
  • Do I really want to take the time to  log into FB and do the check-in thing? Even two or three times a day might get to be tedious after a couple of days.
  • Depending on our settings, our actions and locations can be seen by lots of folks. Do all those people need to know when I’m not home so they can come over to my house. Do you really trust all those people we say are our ‘friends’
  • Think of how the marketers are salivating over how they will market to those using Places
  • That old ‘creepy’ factor that lots of people like to mention.

How To Use Facebook Places

Trying to figure out how to use Facebook Places wasn’t so easy (at least for me). When I did some searches, I found plenty of places that wanted to show me how to change my privacy settings, but no instructions on how to actually use Places.

If you are just getting started and don’t have an iPhone app, just follow the instructions below:

  1. Point your browser to http://touch.facebook.com.
  2. Tap the Places tab.
  3. When you are prompted to share your location, tap “Share Location.”

Then if you need more help (and I did), just check out the Facebook Places Help as it goes into detail and explains what certain things do.

What have your experiences been with Places – would like to see your comments.

Categories : Facebook
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Last October, I wrote about how to add a Facebook Fan Page to your website. Since then, many things have changed and been updated, so I thought I’d update my post to show what Facebook has available in July of 2010.

A few months ago, Facebook changed their terminology as it relates to ‘Fan’ pages. Instead of ‘Fan’, they now say we ‘Like’ a particular page. I still prefer ‘Fan’ to ‘Like’, but we’ll work with what we have.

At any rate, Facebook has added several types of badges available to put on your website. You can see below I’ve highlighted the Page Badge and it defaulted to a page that I’m an admin for. Then, you’ll be presented with 3 options – Blogger, TypePad or Other. I use WordPress, so I clicked the ‘Other’ button and copied and pasted the code it gave me into a widget in my sidebar.  It’s as simple as that. Of course, the graphic has a hyperlink where someone can click and be taken to your page. Or they can simply choose to click the ‘Like’ link and stay on your site.

Facebook Badges

Another way to add a badge is right from your Page site. You do have to be an administrator in order to get the code. Click on the ‘Edit Page’ link after you get to your Page and then look way over to the right side and all the way down the page and you’ll see the below.

get your facebook badge

To take a quick look at the other badges…The Profile Badge will show your current profile picture and a link to your Page.

copy and paste code for facebook badget

The Like Badge is for choosing one of the pages you’re a ‘Fan’ of and highlighting that page with a small badge on your site.

The Photo Badge puts up to 8 photos (random) from your photo albums on your website. I’m assuming they rotate, but I don’t know for sure.

Social Plug-Ins

In addition to the above Badges, Facebook has made it easy to get a number of Social Plug-Ins to put on your website.

Looking at these Plug-Ins, it seems like there’s a lot of information that can be put out for everyone to see, so check into the help section of Facebook so you will be aware of expectation of privacy. When you first get to this site, you’ll see several links (you’ll have to click about 3 times), to get to the place where Facebook explains, in detail, what is exposed. There’s even a video you can watch.

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Help Center & Other Resources

Since Facebook is always changing something, refer to their Help Center for what’s new, what they’re calling things and how to utilize it for your business or just personal use.

Do know that if you have a hosted WordPress account (you have wordpress in your url), inserting badges and plug-ins won’t work for you. I found it only works in the self-hosted WordPress.

I like Duct Tape Marketing for small businesses. They have some great resources – both free and paid. Here’s a free Video on Facebook for Small Business from Duct Tape Marketing. It’s about an hour long.

Facebook for Business from John Jantsch on Vimeo.

Categories : Facebook
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May
28

Facebook Privacy-Changes for May, 2010

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It’s been a turbulent couple of weeks for Facebook and its young founder, 26-year oldfacebook_icon Mark Zuckerberg. He and the Facebook policy makers have been under fire for the latest round of so called ‘privacy changes’ that were made in April.image

The more controversial changes included an ‘instant personalization’ feature that defaulted to opting people in to connecting their personal information  with third party developers. When this came out, there were only three companies in place to suck in all that data – Yelp, Pandora and Facebook docs. The other big change was that developers (of Facebook applications) would no longer purge data daily from their servers, instead, they could permanently keep the data,

The severe criticism apparently caught the clueless folks at Facebook by surprise and since then, they’ve been rethinking and rehashing what to do to address people’s concerns. Wednesday, May 26, they had yet another press conference to announce yet another update which has been pushed out to users. Have you seen the below yet when logging into FB?

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Here are some interesting stories floating around I thought I’d share:

  • ‘Quit Facebook Day’, which is set for Monday, May 31st
  • A project being developed to replace Facebook by some New York University students called ‘The Diaspora Project’. This is an open-source project depending on donations right now.
  • Zuckerberg mistakenly exposed over 290 personal pictures to the world and how a large number of chat conversations (including some of Zuckerman’s), were accidentally revealed to the world.
  • Prominent internet broadcaster, Leo LaPorte deletes his Facebook account on one of his shows and shares with his listeners that he believes, ‘Facebook is evil’.

Surveys have shown that the trust approval rating for Facebook has been declining for some time. People are distrustful because of ‘software glitches’, and default privacy settings that reveal too much information by default.

So, how is the every day Facebook patron dealing with all of this? Are you thinking of closing your Facebook account? Some may wish to do that and if you do, they say all your account information will be permanently deleted – but not for two weeks – just in case you want to come back.

I’ve not considered deleting my account. Instead, I’ve chosen to put very little in my profile, so you won’t see my favorite tv shows, books, hobbies, etc. I do have a number of albums uploaded, but have the appropriate sharing levels set on them. Most of the people I’m friends with on Facebook I actually know or have a tie with that is meaningful to me. I don’t have hundreds of friends which means what I post doesn’t have that big an audience and I’ve ratcheted back what will appear where.

New Facebook Privacy  Settings as of May 27, 2010

In Zuckerberg’s Press Conference and in his blog (there’s a link to it as you read through your new privacy settings), Zuckerberg promises this will be the last privacy update ‘for a long period of time’. So let’s take a look…

All these settings are located on one page

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Info accessible through your friends – This one always bothered me as it was out of my control. Before, friends who used various applications or games exposed me to third party application developers. So even though I didn’t play the stupid games, my information (little as it is), was still at risk. Now I have unchecked all the boxes in this area. Hope it works.

Game and application activity – this means who can see my activity with games and application dashboards. This setting can be tweaked to ‘everyone’, ‘friends of friends’, ‘friends’, or ‘custom’.

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Reassurance that applications don't get our data

Instant personalization – instead of burying this somewhere, it’s front and center. I checked and the setting I previously chose was preserved – as they said it should be.

Public search – this lets you visually check how your profile looks to the general public. This is nice as people may not realize something is exposed. Now you can take a quick look and then make changes if necessary.

Once you’ve made a change in your settings, it should stay that way, even if Facebook updates their privacy settings again.

It seems that there are fewer ‘granular’ settings, although they said they were still in there – I found a ‘customize settings’ hyperlink that is located on the ‘Choose Your Privacy Settings’ page that I clicked and looked at, but it didn’t seem quite the same as what I’d seen before.

I like these changes, I’ve checked them again and hope I don’t have to revisit them for awhile. I think we all have ‘Facebook Privacy Fatigue’, and are ready to get our settings put in and be able to use and enjoy Facebook now.

What do you think of the Facebook changes – like or dislike?

Categories : Facebook
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