Facebook Recommendations Bar: This Week in Social Media

By Cindy King
Published July 28, 2012

Welcome to our weekly edition of what’s hot in social media news. To help you stay up-to-date with social media, here are some of the news items that caught our attention.

Facebook Introduces the Recommendations Bar: The Recommendations Bar is a new social plugin that helps people find articles based on what their friends like and share from your site. “Recommendations are based on content that friends have explicitly liked and shared in your app or website.”

"As a person reads an article, a small pop-up surfaces at the bottom of the screen highlighting recommended articles and prompting them to like the page."

Foursquare Introduces Promoted Updates: You can now find Promoted Updates (including Promoted Specials!) in the Explore tab on Foursquare. These Promoted Updates are “just like the local updates that you see in your Friends tab, except that businesses can pay to promote them in our Explore results.”

Promoted Updates are a great way to find out what’s happening at local businesses as well as national brands.

Discussion From Our Networking Clubs: Thousands of social media marketers and small business owners are asking questions and helping others in our free Networking Clubs. Here are a few interesting discussions worth highlighting:

SlideShare Embedded Presentations Now Flash-Free: Following SlideShare’s transition to HTML5, embedded presentations are now Flash-free. Embedded presentations can be viewed on iOS devices and the embed has new Twitter and Facebook share buttons.

Remember to update the embed codes of the presentations you've published to get all of the new features.

Facebook Changes Reach Metric: The Facebook Reach statistic available inside of the Facebook Insights dashboard for Facebook pages now includes mobile. But Inside Facebook reports that “to improve the efficiency of News Feed, Facebook will load fewer stories at a time. When a user scrolls down the feed, more stories will load.”

Facebook recently changed the way they calculate reach.

YouTube Lets You Set Creative Commons Attribution by Default: “If you want to grant the YouTube community the right to reuse and edit your video, select Creative Commons Attribution License from the License and Rights Ownership menu.”

You now have the option to license your future videos under Creative Commons as a default.

YouTube Introduces a Face-Blurring Tool: YouTube launches “Face Blurring—a new tool that allows you to obscure faces within videos with the click of a button.”

This Face-Blurring tool "is a first step towards providing visual anonymity for video on YouTube."

NetworkedBlogs Adds a Panorama Reader: NetworkedBlogs Panorama is “a new panorama news reader that lets you follow news on other blogs and the rest of the web, pin articles for reading later, and follow individuals.”

Pinterest Gets New Categories: Pinterest has added to their list of categories to improve browsing. New categories on Pinterest include “Quotes,” “Tattoos,” and “Weddings.”

Pinterest categories have been improved.

One-Click LinkedIn Integration With the New Microsoft Office: With the new Microsoft Office, “you just have to sign in once with your LinkedIn credentials and immediately you’ll start seeing rich profile information, like photos and LinkedIn network activity for any connection who emails you. You’ll also see LinkedIn profile data surface when you view a People Card throughout the new Office experience.”

Here’s a useful social media tool worth noting:

Pearltrees: a tool to organize and cultivate everything you find on the web—it’s like a cross between Pinterest and Evernote.

What do you think? Please share your comments below.

About the Author, Cindy King

Cindy King is the director of editorial of Social Media Examiner. She spent 25 years abroad in international business development and then built her own international business from scratch by using social business networking. Other posts by Cindy King »

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Facebook Promoted Posts vs Sponsored Stories

There's been a lot of buzz around Facebook's Promoted Post feature over the past few months. I've read several blog posts (the HasOffers post was great) who have tried testing the effectiveness of Promoted Posts vs Facebook's Sponsored Story ads, and thought it would be interesting to do a similar test here at SEOmoz. Before I jump in to the results of my test, I'll give a quick overview on Promoted Posts for those who aren't familiar.

Facebook rolled out their Promoted Post feature at the end of May, allowing Brand Page owners to pay to push content to a broader audience than normal. What some people don't know is that when you publish content on your Facebook Brand Page, only a small percentage of your fans are seeing that content appear in their news feeds.

Facebook uses its complex EdgeRank algorithm to determine which content each user sees in their news feed. Facebook estimates that only 16% of a company's fans will see every post they generate in their news feed. Some companies will obviously have a much higher percentage of engaged fans than others, but it shows that simply publishing content on your Brand Page won't get it seen by 100% of your audience.

So, this is where Promoted Posts come in handy. You now can dedicate up to $100 to "promote" a recent post on your Facebook Brand Page. Facebook says, "Your promoted posts will be seen by a larger percentage of the people who like your page than would normally see it. It will also be seen by a larger percentage of the friends of people who interact with your post." What this means is that Facebook will distribute your content to a much broader segment of your fan base instead of just the fans who are already engaged with your brand. Sounds interesting, right?

Now, let's quickly discuss another tool for distributing your content on Facebook to a broad audience. Facebook's Sponsored Story is created within the Facebook Ad Platform and functions just like a Facebook Ad. You can set this up the same way as you set up Facebook Ads and select your targeting from the large list of available targeting and interest category options that Facebook provides. You'll create an ad image, write your ad copy, link to your content, assign a budget, set your bid, and then activate it. The main difference is that Sponsored Stories look like Facebook ads so they only appear in the right side of the Facebook Page where all the other ads are, and they will mainly target people who aren't fans of your Brand Page.

Show me the results, baby! We decided to use a recent update to our Beginner's Guide to SEO as the content piece that we would Promote and run in our Sponsored Story. For the Promoted Post, we created a simple post on our Brand Page linking to the Beginner's Guide and dedicated $100 to it. This Post had a reach of 26,275. It generated 198 actions, 1,311 clicks and had a CTR of 4.99%. The CPC was $.076.

For the Sponsored Story, we targeted 266,580 people who live in the US, Canada, UK, or Australia and like SEO related topics and websites. The actual reach of the campaign was 44,247 with a frequency of 6.2. This Sponsored Story generated 16 actions, 162 clicks, had a CTR of 0.366% and a CPC of $1.44.

As you can see from our test results, the Promoted Post generated far more engagement than the Sponsored Story, had a higher CTR, and had a significantly lower CPC! 

The only area that the Sponsored Story out-performed the Promoted Post was in campaign reach. This makes sense since we were targeting a large group of SEO professionals and enthusiasts through Facebook Ads' interest targeting. At the end of the day, our Promoted Post to our fans who had not engaged with us in a significant amount of time generated a huge amount of interest in our content and drove a majority of the actions and clicks on our post.

To conclude, the combination of a Promoted Post and a Sponsored Story helped us to achieve metrics on our post that we have never seen before on our Brand Page.

This was our most viewed post ever (more than 5x's the previous record and was also the most liked and most shared)! While this didn't necessarily generate revenue for us, it was great to see how the Promoted Post and Sponsored Story can work together to achieve massive reach and engagement. The next step will be to see how the Promoted Post and Sponsored Story tools perform when driving a promotional offer or direct CTA type of content.

In the end, the main thing this test taught us was that it's important for every advertiser and brand to test things on their own. Just because one company sees a certain set of results doesn't mean that your company will see the same. Every brand, fan base, target audience, and customer base is different and will react differently so what it boils down to in my opinion is test, test, and test again.

I hope this analysis was helpful, and I'd love to hear from any of you who've run similar tests or messed around with the Promoted Post and Sponsored Story to see what types of results you've experienced.

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George Takei On Google+, FaceBook Plugin, MS Surface, Speedlink 25:2012

Hi everyone! Hope you all had a great and productive week. So, this week, we finally found out what the whole “big secret” Microsoft was hiding from the world. Surface, which according to Microsoft is “a great PC that works like a tablet, a tablet that works like a PC”, was revealed on Monday. Initial analysis indicates that the soon to be born PC/tablet, may just have what it takes to rival Apple’s iPad and other existing devices. Don’t know about you, but if the price is right and they get it to work properly (MS has always an oopps moment), I may just get my hands on one, as soon as it gets out. How about you? What do you think of the Microsoft Surface? Will consider buying one? Why, why not?

First look… You can also watch the full presentation here.

On another front, George Takei (Star Trek celebrity), talks about his experience with FaceBook and why he loves it over “other” networks. The interesting part about the whole story is the mission Stephanie Van Pelt launched on Google+ to convince George Takei to use the network. He said that if he got 250K people circling him on G+, then he may consider using the network, to prove that it is not a “ghost town”. As of today he already amassed 63K+ and counting.

All right all. It's here. It's #TakeiTuesday ! Help us get @GeorgeTakei to join us over here on G+!!!!

Send him a Tweet and let him see all the G+ love we have to offer!
Stephanie Van Pelt originally shared:
Hi guise.

I don't know about you, but I'd love to see #GeorgeTakei join us here on G+. Just putting the word out there that I'm on a mission to get his attention. I was thinking that on #TakeiTuesday it might be a nice time to try to reach him on Twitter @GeorgeTakei to show him how much love he'd see from this community.

All right my Trekkers, who's in? 12    7 Powered by socialditto

Finally, if you heard about the new FaceBook plugin, you may want to consider reading what people have to say first, before thinking of installing the plugin. It is very promising indeed and I am testing it on a demo site. For now, I am waiting for the next update, which I hope would address the issues mentioned by users on the forum. If you really want to give it a go, this quick tutorial, should help. Yeah, its not your normal install and activate plugin.

As usual, in no particular order:

That’s it! Enjoy and have a great weekend.

Related Content - Check them out:

Google Privacy Changes, Trust Triggers, SEO, Speedlink 04:2012Google+ Plugins, Video Sitemaps, Pinterest For Business, Speedlink 09:2012Ads Galore, Google+ SEO, SOPA, Social Web, Speedlink 03:2012Pinterest For Marketing, Google Fresh, SEO, Blogging, Speedlink 05:2012Pinterest, Google+ Search, Social Web, SEO, Speedlink 02:2012

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Post to all Facebook Friends,Groups,Pages in one click

I use this tools for my personal use to say hello to my friends as they thinks that I have forgotten them and it is not possible to say Hi hello by going to their profile and reply them !

So I made this tools for saying something to all of my friends,groups and more over to my pages 

Now its time to expose this Facebook app to you to help you !

Just follow some simple steps to do the magic !

First Visit http://wideinfo.org/fbpost
1. Connect With Facebook via Website so that We verify you are Facebook User and analyses your friends,Groups,Facebook Pages


2. Goto App

3.Input all information

4. Now choose the Friends,Groups,Facebook Pages or choose " Select All " above every Friends,Groups,Facebook Pages

Important:- I have kept the things separate like Scroll down a bit you will get first "Pages" then scroll bit "Groups" then again scroll "friends"


5. Now back to top and Click "Post" button and wait for a moment [ this might take several Seconds or minutes ] be patient because it is depending upon your no. of receivers


6. After successful post you will get a message in Green background "Message Successfully Posted"

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Download Facebook Account To Your Computer

Hello there,
Today I will teach how to we can download our FaceBook profile all details including wall posts, photos, videos, links, and all other contents we have added to our profile, now we are going to see how to we can do this,
Fist you must log on to your FaceBook account, then you can see top tabs like home, profile, find friends and account tabs, click on the account tab,




Then select account settings option then you will see account settings page, at this screen you can see download your information option, then you can select learn more link, now you will see next step all information about downloading your account, it is give some warring to us this information contain some sensitive details like our personal details. After reading and understand all of the information you can click on download button, 


After clicking above button, popup window as confirmation window, click on download button, 



Now you will notify, as “you will receive email your download is ready for download” now you can get this all information as zip file. Now you can extract this file in any local directory then you can brows your all account details as locally.

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Upside down facebook status and comments.

• 
  Open facebook.
• Go to http://www.fliptext.net/
• Type your status update in the blue box.
• Then copy the text from the purple box and paste it as a status or comment.

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Trick your friends with facebook fake wall.

This is an awesome trick to fool your friends by commenting and posting statuses on a fake wall in facebook from their own names.

 

  

• Go to  www.thewallmachine.com.  
• Click on connect button --> Go to app --> Allow. 
•  You will redirected to the The Wall Machine page.
• Click on Connect again.
• Now start editing everything.(name,time,likes,comments)
• You can select any format.(text,friendship,photo...)
• Save it and post it as a photo.
• If you're friendly with photoshop,you can remove the unwanted stuff and post it as a real image.

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How to Find An Email Address of Facebook Friend

Facebook has an advance and smart privacy setting and you can easily hide your email and other information from any person. So let suppose your friend is a master of Facebook privacy and you want to know his/her email address for whatever purpose.

In this tutorial we will show you the best and smart way to get email of a friend from facebook.

Requirement

• Yahoo account
• The person should be your friend on Facebook
• A brain (Most important)

Go to (address.yahoo.com) and click the Facebook icon, a dialog box will be appear that will ask your permission.

It takes some time and than you are done, you can see email addresses of your friends. Check the name of the person to whom you have to find the email and than you can easily find any email of Facebook friend.

Credit ; facebook

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Invite all Facebook friends at the same time for your fan page

As of now, the extension doesn't autoscroll the entire friends list. You have to do this on your own before clicking "Toggle all". Though, you should expect to get a browser warning after a while, telling you that a script is hanging or something. You'll just have to "wait" it out. How long depends on how many friends you have. Personally it took me about 20 seconds with about 200 friends.

The extension works on with:
- Fan pages
- Events

Get chrome plugin

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