Monthly Archives: February 2014

Solve your Facebook problems with these hacks

Below are some hacks (or tips) that will help you solve some pesky Facebook issues. I’ve called them hacks as most aren’t documented by Facebook and some you won’t have read about anywhere else.

How to break the link between Facebook and Twitter
Do you want to stop your Facebook posts being published automatically on Twitter? If not, you should! The most common way (5 million+) of linking the 2 social networks is by using the Twitter app but it can be difficult to uninstall and break the link. The easiest way is to go to http://facebook.com/twitter and uninstall or uncheck options as appropriate.

How to invite all your Friends to a Facebook Page event
To invite all your Friends or everyone on a Friend’s list, install the Facebook Invite All extension to a Chrome browser. Select the Invite Friends button then Search by Name or a list. Scroll down to the very bottom of the list, and then click the extension icon on the top right of your browser bar. All Friends will then be invited and you can uncheck those you don’t wish to invite. If you’re inviting several hundred friends the browser might appear to crash but if you wait a minute or so it should complete the task.

How to get Facebook Graph Search
Frustrated that you haven’t yet got Facebook’s new snazzy search that was launched over a year ago in January 2013? Go to the cog symbol on the top right and select Settings then under General switch to English (US). You should be able to use the new and improved search straight away. Read 5 ways to use Graph Search to attract visitors.

How to contact Facebook about a Page problem
Here’s the form you need to contact Facebook about an issue with your Page, but don’t expect an immediate reply. Facebook has just over 6000 employees but there are 1.3 billion users.

Unable to add a Facebook Admin?
If you are unable to add an Admin to your Page make sure that the intended Admin has Liked your Page. If you still have no joy then the hack is to friend the person you are trying to add. If you only have a business connection with them, you can always unfriend them afterwards. If you’re still having problems then try adding using their email address, but make sure it’s the address they use to login to Facebook.

If there’s something else you’re struggling to do on Facebook let me know in the Comments below or contact me.

Valentine’s Day Social Media Massacre

Interflora’s Facebook and Twitter accounts have taken a hammering from unhappy customers, plus intended recipients of Valentine’s Day flowers, complaining about late deliveries and flower bouquets that failed to arrive. There were also complaints about ’mouldy’ bottles of wine, underwhelming flowers and spelling mistakes on greetings cards.

Interflora had promised customers Valentine’s Day delivery on all orders placed before 1pm the day before but it appears from tweets and Facebook posts that they couldn’t fulfil their promise.

Their social media managers have been in overdrive with a continuous stream of apologetic tweets and posts to an army of unhappy people from around 4pm on Valentine’s Day. Not all complaints have been replied to and they still haven’t stopped.

@antoncymru Hi Anthony, We are deeply sorry that your flowers turned up 3 days late, please confirm your order number

— Interflora Flowers (@InterfloraUK) February 18, 2014

This episode shows that whilst social media gives you the opportunity to respond and resolve problems, you’ll need to ensure that you have the resources to manage and respond to communications from customers. Social media can’t resolve poor service or products. If you don’t fulfil your promises or live up to customer’s expectations, unhappy and possibly angry customers are going to be broadcasting their experiences across social media.

Here’s another example from Facebook plus one from Twitter:

Judging from their twitter acct, it looks like I’m maybe one of 100s of customers whose @InterfloraUK Valentines orders was never delivered.

— D. (@libertinegrrl) February 16, 2014

Thank you to @SueKelsoRyan for spotting this example and flagging it up. If you notice an interesting or newsworthy example of social media, please let me know.

Facebook is now bigger than Amazon

Here’s a roundup of the social media news items over the past 2 weeks that have caught my eye:

Facebook is now bigger than Amazon - With Facebook’s share price rising and Amazon’s falling, the social network is now bigger than the online retailer in terms of market capitalisation. This is calculated by multiplying the share price buy number of shares issued and last week Facebook’s market capitalisation was $170 billion and Amazon’s $165 billion.

Pinterest launches updates site and apps - Pinterest’s new mobile site includes an updated sign-up flow, new board page plus recent boards are now displayed in the board picker. Pinterest says the new mobile website offers a “great alternative” to the mobile apps with further updates to follow in the coming months. Visit www.pinterest.com on your mobile device to try it out. The mobile iOS and Android apps remain the fastest way to access the site and now display over 10 million GIFs that have been uploaded. The iPad app now supports place pins which contain geo-location information. Place pins can be used to plan travel or map out locations of sights, venues and restaurants in a city they are planning to visit, or keep a map of their favourite bars in their town.

Twitter introduce scheduling - Regular readers will know that I’m a big fan of Buffer and it’s scheduling features. Twitter have now introduced scheduling but only as part of its Ad Platform so you’ll need to sign-up for access although you don’t have to pay to promote tweets to schedule. Unfortunately, it seems impossible to change the Los Angeles time setting. If you’ve figured this out please let me know.

Twitter users are growing but not quickly- On Thursday 6 February, Twitter announced that it averaged 241 million monthly users in the 4th quarter ending 31 December, up 3.8 percent from the previous three months. The stock market considered this to be slow and Twitter shares dropped nearly 25%, wiping out about $9.8 billion in market value. This was despite better-than-expected 4th quarter revenue of $243 million. Meanwhile, LinkedIn is growing its membership at a rate more than double that of Facebook and nearly double Twitter. It’s monthly active user growth for the 4th quarter was 7% – faster that either Facebook or Twitter and LinkedIn monthly active users now number 277 million monthly active users.

And finally….a photo taken by Mikal Ludlow tweeted by @GlosEcho showiing the extent of flooding in Tewkesbury.

Echo photographer Mikal Ludlow has taken stunning aerial shots of our flooded county http://t.co/0JHh5Z7D8H pic.twitter.com/MA5F6Lanpg

— Gloucestershire Echo (@GlosEcho) February 18, 2014

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Happy 10th Birthday Facebook!

Love it or hate it, it’s been around for 10 years now. Happy Birthday Facebook! To mark the occasion here’s a milestone for each of the world’s largest social network’s first 10 years.

2004 - On 4 February, Facebook launched as “thefacebook”

2005 - Photos introduced

2006 - Facebook opened to everyone

2007 - Facebook Ads launched

2008 - Number of active users reaches 100 million

2009 - Status updates added to Business Pages

2010 - The Like button is introduced

2011 - Facebook becomes the world’s most visited website

2012 - Facebook is floated on the NASDAQ with shares traded publicly

2013 - Facebook launches Graph Search

2014 - On 3 February, Paper is launched

Have Facebook helped you in your business? Let me know in the Comments below. 

Take back control of LinkedIn

Are you getting too many emails and notifications from LinkedIn? Do you want to decide who gets to see your amendments and updates? Here’s how to take back control.

1. Stop others being notified of your profile updates - Generally, it’s a good idea that your network are notified when you update your profile, but it can be irritating for people if you are doing a major revamp over a couple of days and every few minutes they’re notified of a change to your profile. If you’re doing some major updating then go to Privacy and Settings/Profile then Turn on/off your activity broadcasts and uncheck “Let people know when you change your profile, make recommendations, or follow companies”. Don’t forget to turn it back on once you’ve completed your amendments. This setting is also useful if you are making changes to your an existing job title and you want to avoid LinkedIn incorrectly notifying people that you have changed your job.

2. Reduce the amount of emails from Groups - If you belong to several LinkedIn Groups, you can end up with a notification nightmare if you leave on the default settings which result in a Daily Digest Email from each Group. So if you belong to 25 Groups, which isn’t uncommon, that’s 175 emails a week! To switch to Weekly Digests go to Privacy and Settings, then select Groups, Companies and Notifications then for each Group you can select Daily or Weekly Digests or you can stop them altogether.

3. Keep your connections private - The default setting is that all of your first degree connections, or immediate network, can see your other first degree connections. In most cases, this can be really useful when it comes to networking as LinkedIn members can ask a connection to make an introduction to one of their first degree connections. However, you might have a good reason for keeping your Connections private. For example, if you work in sales and don’t want to reveal your customers to a competitor. To do this go to Privacy and Settings/Profile then select “Who can see your connections” and change from “Your connections” to “Only you”. It’s a shame that this is an ‘all or nothing’ setting as it would be more helpful if you could just block selected people.

4. Block a connection’s status updates - If you wish to remain connected with someone but their status updates irritate you, you can prevent their updates from appearing in your News Feed. Go to Home and then hover over the top right hand corner of the update, then select Hide. You can also remove offending Sponsored Updates in the way.

5. How to remove a LinkedIn connection - There may be occasions when you want to take the ultimate sanction of removing a LinkedIn connection from your network. This used to be really difficult and I’ve bemoaned the fact that it wasn’t possible to remove a Connection from their Profile but you can now do this. Just go to their Profile and select the down arrow to the right of the buttons underneath their name, then select “Remove connection”.

6. Browse people’s profiles without them knowing - (or ‘professional stalking’) - If you work in recruitment, are looking for a job or are involved in research, you might not want LinkedIn members to be alerted to the fact you’ve looked at their profile. If for any reason you don’t wish to show up in “Who’s viewed your profile”, go to Privacy and Settings/Profile then select “You will be totally anonymous”. There’s also a middle-ground setting that will display “Anonymous profile characteristics such as industry and title” rather than your full name and headline, which is the default.

Make sure that you are the one in control and not LinkedIn by ensuring that the settings above are how you want them to be. You’ll save time and become more effective when using LinkedIn for business.