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Besides entertainment and sharing emotions, Facebook is actually and widely used for business promotion. Social networking promotion can be that simple. If your content engages your audience, then a little work with Facebook will take you a very long way.
Let’s get started with some of the basics to share news or any information you would like to share with your Facebook friends.
Join a Network
After signing up on Facebook, joining an appropriate network will help centralize Facebook around your area of focus. You can join one main area and add other networks. However; if your focus is not in one particular area, it would be a good idea to keep changing your network as is appropriate. You can change your area twice within any 60 day period.
Once your organization is popular enough, you can make your own Network, which will enable more people to interact with each other who can in any way relate to and benefit from your organization.
How to have lots of quality friends.
The more informative and attractive your profile is, the more chance of gaining friends. Put as much information of yourself and your company as possible. Put the website address and your blog address. Link your blog through RSS feed to your Facebook profile.
Of course having more friends on facebook means more exposure, but you do not want to spam, that may cause your account to be terminated. Remember with Facebook, quality is better than quantity.
First, determine your focus as what is the product you are promoting? What is the brand you wish to create? How should it look? How should it feel? Let’s take an example that you are selling IT related products through a website. You would now need to focus on what people will be more interested in about your product. No question, for this example, your answer is people who are related to IT! So now you will need to find IT related people.
1) Groups and Pages:
The best way to find such people would be joining the related groups and become fan of pages. You can join maybe groups called Window7, redhat, VoIP, C++, or MCSE. You can be more specific depending on your product. It is better to be active on these groups, you can write on groups wall, add pictures or videos, depending on what group is allowing you.
When adding friends, make sure you send a personalized message. The more attractive your message will be, the more chance you have to be accepted. Remember, try to make minimum request for most output. You do not want to go over 20 to 25 request a day, otherwise Facebook may think of you as a spammer and close your account.
Later I will discuss in detail how you can launch you Groups and Pages.
2) Sharing:
You can share informative articles or videos which you think other may like. Following are some of the things which you originally can share and further when it is shared by your friends will actually contain your name.
A. Notes- You can write you own tips or something worthwhile sharing.
B. Pictures- You can upload a funny or informative photos
C. Videos- Your own uploaded videos will contain your name, regardless how long is the chain goes.
When people who are not in your Facebook list, see and like what you share, they may request to join you. There is no limit for receiving friend request.
3) Socializing:
Social networking is all about socializing with friends, families and business partners. You need to be friendly, you can not succeed by only asking people to buy your product or talking to them about one thing all the time.
A. Status- Status is what your friends updated about you. Keep your status attractive and catchy, so your friends are always forced to read. You can update giving some information on your product or some time just a casual update, like what you are doing at this time.
B. Comments- Leave comments on other updates, pictures, videos or any sharing. Those who are not in your list but are in your friends list can also see your comments and may send you a friend request.
As mentioned above let now discuss to major Tools Facebook provides for you to keep your customer around your area of marketing. Facebook groups and Facebook pages. Both options offer you to create your companies or product profile or description.
A major difference in a Group and a Page is a Group can be created by any user and about any topic, as a space for users to share their opinions and interest in that subject. Pages can only be created to represent a real public figure, artist, brand or organization, and may only be created by an official representative of that entity.
Group:
To create a group go to facebook.com/groups/create.php and then fill in information about the type of group, and decide if it is open to a particular network (such as a and Area or an University network) or all of Facebook. You can set permissions for people groups so that they are either open to anyone, closed (where users must get administrator approval to join) or secret (that is you invite only). Open and Closed group can be found via search.
Groups have administrators that manage the group, approve applicants or invite others to join. Administrators can also appoint “officers” who are nominally in charge – however, being an officer doesn’t mean the person has the ability to administer the group.
Few things you can do when you have a group.
1. You can invite all your Facebook friends and than your friends and send a bulk invitation to their friend and their friends to their friend and so on.
2. A discussion wall is there, where you can engage members in discussing your product and keeping them updated.
3. You and our friends can add pictures and videos.
4. You can send message to all the member of your group.
5. Gorups can be shared.
Page:
Facebook page looks and behaves more like a user profile (for example, http://www.facebook.com/pages/Muhammad-Shomail-Haider/107337662938?ref=ts), where it promotes your product, to be a brand or a celebrity. To create page go to www.facebook.com/pages/create.php Facebook user instead of Friends becomes fan and Page cannot see its fan’s full profile. Profiles can only be used to represent an individual, and must be held under an individual name. You can also use your account to manage Facebook Pages that represent businesses or other organizations. You may only create Facebook Pages to represent real organizations of which you are an authorized representative, and fans of these Pages won't be able to see that you are the Page admin, or have any access to your personal account.
When someone becomes a fan it is shown on their profile, which their fans may see and might be a fan too, so it goes on and on to a extent. More importantly updates, feed and interaction with fans are important. You do need to keep your fans engaged with updates and feedbacks, which is essential to know what is your customers needs and wants are.
Few things to keep fans engaged.
1. Wall posts, where you can discuss about your product or new add-ons.
2. Add Pictures.
3. Start Discussion related to your product.
4. Add Notes and tag people on that note.
5. Create Events and invite people have a presentation about what you are providing.
Facebook allows you to create a username for you profile, page or group. Www.facebook.com/username is where you can create a user name for you facebook profile makes it easier to remember.
One thing which is very important to keep in mind is that these social network are made to socially connect to Friend, Families, colleagues and business partners. We can use them for business purposes but need to respect the core intention. Most of them including Facebook do offer paid advertisement which is of course lot more effective which I will be discussing in my next article. For now without me spamming you, we (you and I) will get the best out of social marketing.
There are many stories of successful businessmen who been using facebook for marketing. You can listen to this interview taken by Suzanne Bowen of Super Technologies, Inc. from a businessman with the similar story, http://www.didx.net/podcast/?p=episode&name=2009-07-15_eskyjonathan.mp3
Above mentioned are only few major things out for so much more you can do from this. However; the key is to be very friendly, exhibit quality, and make real social friends to fully take advantage of social marketing.
Iran has blocked access to social networking site Facebook ahead of June's presidential elections, Iran's Ilna news agency and web users say. Ilna says the move is aimed at stopping supporters of reformist candidate Mir Hossein Mousavi from using the site for his campaign. Facebook, which says it has 175m users worldwide, expressed its disappointment over the reported ban. So far there has been no comment from the Tehran authorities. 'Access not possible' "Access to the Facebook site was prohibited several days ahead of the presidential elections," Ilna reported.
It said that "according to certain Internet surfers, the site was banned because supporters of Mir Hossein Mousavi were using Facebook to better disseminate the candidate's positions". CNN staff in Tehran reported that people attempting to visit the site received a message in Farsi that said: "Access to this site is not possible." Facebook expressed disappointment that its site was apparently blocked in Iran "at a time when voters are turning to the Internet as a source of information about election candidates and their positions". Mir Hossein Mousavi, a former prime minister, is seen as one of the leading challengers to incumbent President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad in the 12 June elections. His page on Facebook has more than 5,000 supporters. | ||
SURABAYA: Muslim clerics are seeking ways to regulate online behaviour in Indonesia, saying the exploding popularity of social networking sites like Facebook could encourage illicit sex.
Around 700 clerics, or imams, gathered in the world’s most populous Muslim nation on Thursday were considering guidelines forbidding their followers from going online to flirt or engage in practices they believe could encourage extramarital affairs.
Facebook says Indonesia, a nation of 235 million, was its fastest-growing country in Southeast Asia in 2008, with a 645 percent increase to 831,000 users—outpacing China and India. And with less than 0.5 percent of Indonesia’s citizens wired, there is a huge potential for growth.
‘The clerics think it is necessary to set an edict on virtual networking, because this online relationship could lead to lust, which is forbidden in Islam,’ said Nabil Haroen, a spokesman for the Lirboyo Islamic boarding school that is hosting the event.
Though followers could still be members of the networking site, guidelines dealing with surfing the Web and Islamic values are urgently needed, he said.
Facebook officials did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
An edict by the clerics would not have any legal weight. But it could be endorsed by the influential Ulema Council, which recently issued rulings against smoking and yoga. Most devout Muslims adhere to the council's rulings because ignoring a fatwa, or religious decree, is considered a sin.
Facebook is the top ranked site in Indonesia, ahead of search engines Yahoo and Google, according Alexa.com, which tracks Internet traffic. Nearly 4 percent of all Facebook visitors are from Indonesia, making it the largest source of visitors after the United States, the United Kingdom, France and Italy.—AP
User photographs can still be found on many social networking sites even after people have deleted them, Cambridge University researchers have said. They put photos on 16 popular websites - noting the web addresses where the images were stored - and deleted them. The team said it was able to find them on seven sites - including Facebook - using the direct addresses, even after the photos appeared to have gone. Facebook says deleted photos are removed from its servers "immediately". The Cambridge University researchers said special photo-sharing sites, such as Flickr and Google's Picasa, did better and Microsoft's Windows Live Spaces removed the photos instantly. To perform their experiment, the researchers uploaded photos to each of the sites, then deleted them, but kept a note of direct URLs to the photos from the sites' content delivery networks. When they checked 30 days later, these links continued to work for seven of the sites even though a typical user might think the photos had been removed. Lazy approach Joseph Bonneau, one of the PhD students who carried out the study, said: "This demonstrates how social networking sites often take a lazy approach to user privacy, doing what's simpler rather than what is correct. "It's imperative to view privacy as a design constraint, not a legal add-on." But a Facebook spokesman defended the company's approach saying; "When a user deletes a photograph from Facebook it is removed from our servers immediately. "However, URLs to photographs may continue to exist on the Content Delivery Network (CDN) after users delete them from Facebook, until they are overwritten. "Overwriting usually happens after a short period of time." Users of Facebook staged a revolt recently over rules which would have given the site permanent ownership of their data. | |
"In the '90s, scammers used e-mail," says Michael Argast, a security analyst at Sophos, an antivirus software company. "Today, it's social networking." Argast explains that although people have been trained not to click on suspicious e-mails, they don't operate with the same sense of caution when presented with a link on Facebook or Twitter. Maybe that's why the number of phishing attacks on these kinds of sites — in which people are fishing for account information, as opposed to infecting your computer with a virus — has skyrocketed recently, from 4,600 attacks in 2007 to 11,000 in 2008. This year doesn't look any better, with 6,400 attacks in the first three months of 2009. (Read "How Not to Be Hated on Facebook: 10 More Rules.")
Like anything on the Internet, Facebook has never been completely scam-free, but its privacy settings may create a false sense of security: most users can't interact with one another unless they are "friends" or belong to the same general network. The site at first glance would also seem less of a gold mine for swindlers since unlike financial websites, which offer access to victims' bank accounts, there is no direct financial gain from hacking into a Facebook account. But the bad guys know that many of us are lazy or forgetful and use the same password on multiple sites. In early 2008, Facebook noticed a marked increase in the number of scams. "We're the most effective distribution platform on the Internet," says Ryan McGeehan, the company's incidence-response manager. "The level of person-to-person connection doesn't exist anywhere else. And as we get bigger, we become a bigger target."
Facebook monitors users' activity, and when someone goes from a few wall posts a week to hundreds of messages within a few minutes, the security team can logically assume that the account has been hacked. They'll notify the user, reset the password, and the whole issue is usually resolved within a few hours. But when thousands of users are hacked at once — and then their friends are hacked, and their friends' friends are hacked — it can take a few days for Facebook to fix the problem. That's what happened on April 29 and 30, when users found themselves accidentally logging in to a website called FBAction.net. Designed to look exactly like Facebook, the evil doppelgänger took their info and hacked their accounts.
When MarkMonitor, an outside security company employed by Facebook, shut down the fake website, the scam popped up again on a different site, FBStarter.com. (It too has since been disabled.) "My guess is this was a pretty organized group of people," says Fred Felman, MarkMonitor's chief marketing officer. Felman says the phishers, whoever they were (Internet scammers almost never get caught), were not using the most up-to-date technology, but their creativity and speed makes him think that they have experience and will probably do it again.
A similar phishing scam established a toehold on the website in January. And last year hackers broke into accounts by convincing people to click on links posted on their profile walls. Another common Facebook scam is to hack someone's account and then send messages to friends asking for money (like the old Nigerian businessman scam, but with a hey-it's-your-old-pal twist).
Facebook won't say how many accounts were compromised last week, but a rep notes that the site has never had a scammer hack more than a small fraction of its accounts, adding that the company's security team — which has more than 100 analysts, engineers and programmers — can handle whatever comes their way. "We're going to be attacked again in the future," says McGeehan, "and my role is to be prepared when it happens."
The White House on Friday added the features to its main Web page, whitehouse.gov. The sites contain information about combatting swine flu and will be updated with information on other topics as time goes by. (TIME 100: The Twitter Guys.)
White House new media director Macon Phillips said the administration will not be able to reply individually to people who send messages via Facebook, MySpace or Twitter. But, he said, "people who join these groups can speak to one another, and we can see what they're saying."
Phillips said President Barack Obama has a separate Facebook profile that will continue to be maintained by the Democratic National Committee. (Read "Facebook's Big Move Toward the AfterWeb".)
http://www.time.com/time/business/article/0,8599,1895426,00.html
