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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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?

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

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’.

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?

If you’re a casual Facebook user and not too concerned about who sees your friends or what groups or pages you’re a fan of, you probably accepted the default settings presented to you when you logged in some time this week. In fact, Facebook said in one of their announcement that only 15-20% of people even change their settings – amazing.

I’ve been reading quite a few articles I’ll post links to, that suggest that Facebook isn’t really giving us that much more control over our privacy. If you check out the official Facebook Blog, you’ll see quite a bit of feedback people have given. The main objection is to the fact that now, all of our ‘friends’ are publicly available for viewing. This was not the case before.

Five Settings You Should Know On Facebook – San Francisco Chronicle

Facebook’s New Privacy Changes: The Good, The Bad, and the Ugly – Electronic Frontier Foundation

The Facebook Privacy Fiasco Begins – TechCrunch

How to Fix Facebook Settings – Webware

I was going to make a list of What Users Gained vs. What Users Lost for this article, but you can read that in my links. Since Facebook quickly makes changes in response to feedback, information here could fast become obsolete.

Instead, I’ll point out where you can go to check and change your settings to increase/decrease your privacy.

• Do you want your Facebook profile to be found if you are ‘googled’ or ‘binged’? You can choose to be ‘indexed’ or not. This is found in the privacy settings – then click on ‘Search’. Here you’ll find a place to uncheck a box to clear you from being indexed by search engines. I tried this and found I was removed right away, so that’s reassuring.

• Ability for others to view your friends. In the past, Facebook had a control to allow or not allow others to view who your friends are. Now this control is gone. A workaround for this can be found – but it’s not in your Privacy settings. Instead, you’ll need to click ‘Profile’ and go to your profile page. Along the left, you’ll see the box containing your friends. Click the pencil icon to open up the choices here. You can choose which friends to show up, a grouping of 6 or more friends, or to keep it completely private, uncheck the box ‘Show my friends on my profile’. You can also choose to not show your gender or home city in your profile settings. So it seems if you remove yourself from being indexed and remove the option to have your friends to be viewable on your page, then no one would be able to see that information. That’s the way it worked for me, although I’ve read others had different results.

If you use the options above, it seems you can pretty much remain as invisible as you can be without deactivating your account. The casual user probably has little concern over these things, but folks who want their private lives separate from their work lives have reason to be concerned. We’ve all heard the stories of how potential employers search out publicly available information on social networks on job candidates and these candidates were not given offers because of the poor choices they’ve made in publishing their activities.

One other area of concern is in the ‘Third-party Apps’ that I see many of my friends using—you know the ‘What Harry Potter character are you’, and the ‘Farmville’, etc. apps that so many people use and scatter invites to get the rest of us to join. Here’s an article from TechWorld that succinctly points out that we no longer have the ability to decline access to our profiles and information that these app developers get. Who are these people? We just don’t know. I participate in very few of these – so sorry friends – but this is why I decline or ignore these kinds of requests! You can remove apps you’re not using in the ‘Applications and Website settings’ from within your privacy settings, but I think they probably have your information unless developers purge this information at set intervals.

I hope this article will prompt everyone to check out their privacy settings and adjust them to your needs. If anyone has tips or suggestions, please leave them here.

Do you have a Facebook Fan or Business page and want to get the word out that it’s there so more people will find you? Maybe you want to promote someone else’s fan page on your website or blog.

Facebook has made it so easy with code to copy and paste into your website or blog.

First, you’ll need to be an administrator of the Fan Page you want to promote. So log in and look on the left for editing options and you’ll see the ‘Add Fan Box to your site’.

Click on Fan Box and it’ll take you to the next page where you’ll select either to add a Fan Box or a Fan Badge to your site.

You’ll see choices of Blogger, TypePad or ‘Other’, so choose the appropriate one and then you’ll be taken to another page where you’ll either sign into Blogger or TypePad, or you’ll be taken to the ‘Other’ page where you’ll see a box with instructions. Just put your cursor in the box and it automatically will select all the text. Click Ctrl+ C to copy and then you’ll need to paste it into your website or blogsite.

If you have a hosted WordPress account (you have wordpress in your url), this won’t work for you. I found it only works in the self-hosted wordpress.

Since I don’t have a Business Page, I tried this with the Technology Innovations Fan Page I administer and it worked great. I added a text widget and pasted the code in it, added a heading and it was finished. I did have to tweak the width settings a bit as the default of 300 was a bit too wide for my current theme. I set the width to 200 and it fit. When you paste the code in, you’ll see it says ‘width=300’, just change the number if you need to. The length will automatically adjust for you. If you prefer a Facebook badge, follow the same instructions except for selecting the badge part.

The code can be added to a traditional website as well. Here’s a short video by Rich Brooks that explains the process for you.

Try implementing this simple, but powerful marketing tool from Facebook.

This functionality will save the busy business owner having to duplicate postings. Even if you have a ping.fm or other aggregator account, it didn’t link to Facebook business pages, only personal pages. Just make sure having the same message appear both in Facebook and Twitter is strategic to accomplish your objectives.

Instructions

Simply go to your Business/Fan page and at the top you’ll see the above notification to link your page to your Twitter account.

Click the link and you’ll be taken to a screen where you fill in your Twitter name and password.

Then you’ll have the choice to edit your settings. Here’s where you decide what all you’d like to have on Twitter. When finished, save and you’re ready to post!

I tried it out with a client and it showed up in Twitter almost instantly. If you decide this type of linking isn’t for you, simply click on the set-up and select the ‘unlink from Twitter’ option. It was easy and just took a few minutes. Try it out!

Looking at the graphic below, when you want to share ‘what’s on your mind?’, you’ll see a drop down menu with some default settings, Everyone, Friends & Networks, etc. Below that, you can choose the ‘edit’ button and choose a specific friend list(s). Maybe there’s something you want to pass along just to family members or a group of business friends you have. Simply select the appropriate friend list and it’s done!

It’s almost like sending out an email to a group – and depending on how people have their settings configured, they’ll be notified via email when they get a new FB message. In addition to your message, you can attach a link, video or picture. If you’ve set up your ‘NetworkedBlogs’ from within Facebook, you can attach one of your blog postings. Now your friends don’t need to worry about opening attachments in their email, or having to download pictures. This is really great! I wonder if Twitter will come up with something similar? Right now, it’s post to all or completely private with Twitter.

Set Up A Friend List

So, now you want to get some friend lists set up so you’re ready. Here’s how:

1. From any page in Facebook, click on ‘Friends’ at the top of the page and look at the column on your left
2. You’ll see ‘Lists’ in bold and at the end of the column you’ll see ‘create’. Click on it.
3. A box pops up and you name your list.
4. At this point, you can scroll through all of your friends (could be a daunting task), and click on the ones you want, or you can start typing someone’s name and it’ll appear quickly.
5. When you’re finished, click ‘Create List’, and you’ve got it.  Feel free to go back and edit any list you’ve created.

For myself, I’ve felt a bit conflicted on trying to use Facebook for personal and business, so I’ve used it mainly for personal use.  I know I get tired of seeing everyone’s game status, who they are most like, etc. I also tire of seeing constant business updates. So I hope you know who you are and will take appropriate steps!

I liked this recent article by Tina Jacobson, owner of a media, publicity and consulting firm. She humorously takes us through some of the do’s and don’ts of Facebook Faux Pas. It is so true that when we get together with our friends and talk about Facebook, we usually complain about the things that irritate us about it first – human nature, I suppose.

This post will focus on what’s new with Facebook Pages. I’ll first go through the various new  features and explain what they are and how to find and use them. Then, I have some great links further down from the Duct Tape Marketer and Mashable as well as a link to a Business Pages guide Facebook has published you can download.

Key New Features

• Enhanced Wall – this is a huge change and makes Facebook more ‘twitter-like’, according to many bloggers. This is the place you can post pithy & pertinent updates about what’s happening with your business. Big take-away: These messages are then streamed to your fan’s newsfeeds which means your messages and updates will be viewed by your fans without them having to visit your page. You can direct someone to click on a particular tab at your site to read about an upcoming event or special promotion you have.
• Tabs have been added – similar to the personal side of Facebook. Use them to organize and customize your site It’s rather like a mini-website. Have a video, picture, notes, events tab and keep content fresh. I believe sometime in the future, you will have the ability to name your tabs.
• Boxes – think of this as your very own customizable module. You can activate ‘Facebook Static FBML app, or use your own html skills here. You can add up to 10 boxes and use them for designing your own forms, etc. The boxes section also contains a Discussion area and Reviews – where your fans can post comments about a product, your site, or whatever. Your Favorites (pages you are a fan of), are also in this section.
• Stats for your review – Facebook gives you a page of stats relating to number of visits, people who have come and gone as a fan from your site.
• Facebook Pages are searchable and are indexed by search engines. Pages are also viewable without having to be logged into Facebook, but to interact with a page, you do need to be logged in. This isn’t a new feature, but worth noting.

Where Are the Pages?

You’re logged into Facebook and you want to find someone’s page (or even your own page)—but how do you get to them? I’ve seen several ask this question – both before and after the update. Here’s how:

Click on Public Profiles

1. Type the name of the page you’re looking for in the search box
2. If you are a fan of a page already, you will see the Public Profiles flag under your news feed from your home page. Click on that to be taken to the pages you are a fan of.
3. If You have a page either published or in the editing process, look down at the lower left hand corner when you’re logged into Facebook and click on the little facebook icon to be taken to your page for editing/updating, etc.
   

   click the little icon

Conclusion

I keep hearing stats—175 million on Facebook. When someone’s logged in, they spend an average of 20 minutes on the site. Why not build a page for your business and let your friends know about it?

If you decide to build or enhance your current page, you will be challenged. Things to think about include:

• how to keep your page fresh. It’s rather disappointing to visit a page that hasn’t been updated for months
• how to update your wall (and feed your friends and fan newsfeeds), without becoming annoying
• how to adjust page settings to allow for just the right amount of fan interaction

Resources

While researching this article, I came across two great articles and a guide by Facebook that you’ll want to read for yourself.

Duct Tape Marketing – Informative Blog article on Facebook pages

Mashable – great summary of what’s new with the Facebook pages

Facebook – I was excited to find this 10-page guide published by Facebook in pdf format. Feel free to download or share

Please post any tips or insights you’ve found while using Facebook pages!

Since then, Facebook has made some enhancements and changes so I wanted to pass along a few more thoughts on the advantages of having a page:

• It’s like having a free and mini-webpage that you have complete content control over. It’s pretty easy to add video, pictures and even your logo to this page
• Your Facebook page is public—meaning no one has to have a Facebook account to view your page. It can be ‘googled’ and instantly viewed. This also means it can be indexed by search engines.
• When folks become ‘fans’ of your page, you can send them updates when you have something new to announce.
• When your updates go out to your fans, it will appear in their newsfeed. This gives you extra exposure because as people casually scroll through their friends news, they will see the update and may decide to become a ‘fan’ of your page as well!

New Changes Coming to Facebook Pages??

While doing the research for this article, I came across a posting from February 26th by one of the blogs I follow, TechCrunch. According to ‘a source’, there will be some major redesign changes coming next week (March 2, 2009). It seems that Facebook likes to make these major changes with little or no warning. According to TechCrunch, they may be implementing this new redesign as MySpace is starting a business application very soon.

Make a note to check out the Facebook Pages next week to see if it happened!

Post from June of 2008

Last week, we looked at inserting your blog as a note and adding a screenshot of your web page right on your Facebook page.

Those are tasks you can do that show up in the ‘casual’ part of Facebook. BUT – did you know you can also set up a Business Page, or section of your Facebook and from there, there are many viral things you can do to promote your business.

Log in and page down to the bottom of the screen and click on ‘Advertising’. That will bring up a form you can start filling out to create and customize your business page. Put some time and thought into this. You want it to be engaging and inviting–you want people to read it!

After you create your page, Facebook will automatically adds the ‘Page Manager’ application to the top of your application list (right at the top and left side of your log in page). Click this to enter your business page to manage, edit and create more content.

What can you do with a Business Page?

• Advertise any events or accomplishments
• Post pictures relevant to your business
• Start and be a host of a Discussion Forum from within your page. Get it started by posting a thoughtful question or comment regarding your business or industry that will generate discussion
• Post a Video. It doesn’t even have to be one you made. Find something of general interest to your audience…for example a video on time management (who doesn’t need that). Just make sure it’s worthy
• Reviews – this is a default application that allows people to comment on yours or someone else’s page or business. Each user can write only one review (although they can come back and edit it). Also, anyone can write a review on your business page, not just a ‘fan’, or someone who has subscribed to your page.
• Wall – a feature of every user’s profile, it appears here as well. Only your fans can write on your wall

If you have a small OR large business, set up your Facebook Business page, it’s free! More information can be found here.

Evidently, Facebook has a way to monitor activity in people’s accounts and if it looks too ‘spammy’, you’ll get whacked.

Facebook has two apps that can be used to make a backup of all your friends. One is called Friend CSV.

I used this program and it downloaded it and emailed a .csv file to me. I figured it was a good thing to do and probably good to run every few months to keep it updated. I’ll also run the program for my clients who are on Facebook.

You will notice that there is no checkbox for email or phone numbers. This is a source of consternation and concern for many Facebook users. There are ‘underground’ apps out there that you can install and run to capture the missing data, but from what I’m reading, you do so at your own risk. Take a look at this blog post from January, 2009  by Eric Eldon where he talks about blogger, Robert Scobler’s account being disabled  The program in question is My FB Contacts 1.0 I’ve been reading stories about how some people are hesitating to use it, thinking they could get kicked off abruptly.

The other app from Facebook, is called Fonebook. I’m not even linking to it as the feedback was abysmal for this app.

Evidently, Robert Scobler didn’t hold any hard feelings after his account was disabled (I believe it was reinstated), as you can read his article from a couple of weeks ago where he spent some time with Facebook founder, Mark Zuckerberg at the recent World Economic Forum. He spoke to him about his feelings on Facebook’s policies. So we’ll see where that goes.

Happy Facebooking!

I blogged a couple of weeks ago on how Facebook added a chat feature where you can see how many of your friends are on-line from within Facebook and initiate a chat with them.

Just recently, I saw that Digsby (a chat aggregator, along the lines of Meebo), has a feature where you can chat with your Facebook friends without being logged into Facebook! Check out the screenshot below. Not only can you use Digsby as a chat aggregator, you can also add Facebook, MySpace and Twitter to Digsby to consolidate and manage most of your social networking sites in one place! They say other social networking sites are coming soon.

Here are the social networking features Digsby offers:

• Stay up to date with everything happening on your Facebook, Twitter, or MySpace account (other network support coming soon).
• Receive alerts of events such as new friend requests, messages, group invites, etc.
• The social network InfoBox gives you a real time NewsFeed of what your friends are up to. Everything from new photos, to status updates, to upcoming birthdays is just a click away.
• Set your Facebook and Twitter status right from Digsby.

Go to the web site and and download to your desktop. Digsby also has some other cool features that we will explore at a later time. Enjoy!