How to Use Facebook for Business (and non-profits)

An increasing number of non-profits are expanding their social media efforts with Facebook Pages and Facebook Groups.
And for good reason:

 Facebook is one of the largest social media sites on the web: 

· More than 200 million active users 
· More than 100 million users log on to Facebook at least once each day 
· More than two-thirds of Facebook users are outside of college 
· The fastest growing demographic is 35 and older And their users are very active: 
· Average user has 120 friends on the site 
· More than 4 billion minutes are spent on Facebook each day 
· More than 30 million users update their statuses daily 
· More than 6 million users become fans of Pages each day Hubspot, an inbound marketing company in Cambridge Ma., recently published a free book for businesses looking to use Facebook.
I was curious how useful “How to Use Facebook for Business” would be for my typical non-profit client, so I downloaded it (no email required!) and read through the 22- page guide.

“How to Use Facebook for Business” includes the following topics – all very useful for any non-profit: 

· Why you should be on Facebook – business value overview (also applies to non- profits!)
· Facebookʼs ad builder can be used to research potential supporters by filtering on age, location and interests.
· How to create an engaging Facebook Page to encourage wall comments – seen by all of commenterʼs friends.
· How to use the FBML application to add HTML content to your page.
· How to get search engine credit from Facebook with the HTML application.
· Using Facebookʼs analytics to measure traffic on your Facebook Page.
· A Facebook reference guide and glossary.

Facebook Groups and Pages – Features, Benefits And Killer Tips

Today I was asked again about the difference between Facebook Pages and Groups. The same question came up a couple of times during the Philanthropy.com chat that Chris Garrett and I conducted back in February. Pages, Groups and Profiles Facebook created Pages, Groups and Profiles – three separate applications – to help individuals and organizations achieve three separate goals:

1. Create a presence for a business, brand or non-profit on Facebook (Facebook Pages).

2. Organize a group of people around a common issue or interest (Facebook Groups).

3.Create a home base on the web for individuals to express themselves and connect with others (Facebook Profiles). Facebook Pages vs. Facebook Groups We know that profiles are for individuals, but whatʼs the difference between Facebook Pages and Facebook Groups?

Facebook Pages 

 

Facebook Pages are used to promote businesses, non-profits, celebrities and artists to Facebook users. Facebook states that “only the official representative of an artist, business, or brand may create a Facebook Page.” In other words, Pages are intended to be an “official” web page for your organization on Facebook.

- Facebook Pages are indexed in search engines – increasing the likelihood of folks finding your organization through a Google search.
- A Page can have multiple administrators. This lightens the workload of maintaining a page (groups also allow for multiple admins). Analyze Traffic. Facebook Pages captures data on visitors.
- There are no limits to the number of fans you can have on a page.
- Sending messages and updates to all your fans at once is quick and easy. And fans receiving those messages can easily forward the message OR post the message to their Facebook Wall. Tips For Using Facebook Pages:
- You can add Facebook Applications like Video or Static FBML to enhance the experiences fans have with your Facebook Page (Groups donʼt offer this option).
- Since each tab has its own URL, you can choose any of them as the landing Page for off-site promotion. You can also choose which tab to set as the default when users find your Facebook Page.
- Work your status! A frequently updated status with useful and interesting content keeps fans coming back. - Pages now have the same multimedia functionality as the Wall tab on a user Profile – encourage posting!
- Encourage fans to “share” Notes or Photos with their friends or post to their Profile.
- Using the notes application, you can import an RSS feed to drive more traffic to your blog.
- Using Static FBML, you can include an email web form to capture subscribers.

Facebook Groups 

 

Facebook Groups can be anyone interested in promoting and organizing people around a specific interests or cause. All members of a group have the ability to contribute content that appears on the Groupʼs wall – photos, videos, discussion threads.
- Active participation: Because members of the group actively contribute content and participate in informal but meaningful discussions, they are more likely to keep coming back.
- Groups come in three flavors: Open (anyone can join), Closed (group admin approves requests to join) and Secret (Only members and those invited know that the group exists).
- The Group name should make people want to join. Which name would make you join: “Letʼs talk to Coca Cola about saving the Worldʼs children” or “ColaLife“?
- Invite your raving fans to start a discussion on the group (you know who these people are, right?). Theyʼll feel a sense of pride and will likely invite new people to join the group.
- Upload photos and videos – encourage members to post these to their profile so that their friends can easily join the group.

3 Ways Facebook Will Radically Change Your Nonprofit

A few weeks ago, we had a conversation about the Facebook win against Google and what it means for you. We spoke about how weʼre now sharing more than searching, and how to create content thatʼs optimized for this change in behavior. Fast forward. The Age Of Facebook In case youʼve been living under a rock for the past week, Facebook was the only thing anyone was talking about. At F8, Facebook announced new tools and plans for how theyʼre going to make “people at the center of the web”. Just like when Microsoft dominated tech in the 90s, Facebook will dominate how you and your constituents not just share information, but how you experience the web. But donʼt take my word for it. Read Michael Arringtonʼs take on this new Age Of Facebook. 3 Ways Facebook Will Radically Change Your Nonprofit

The first steps will be to allow users to share their preferences all over the damned internet with the  implementation of “like” button (users take note of the privacy issue), a Recommendations Plugin and a Social Bar.

1. Instant Recognition. Facebook announced the Open Graph API, which will allow nonprofits to integrate a variety of Facebook user data into their website – without requiring users to be logged in to your site. This means that users will instantly share their Facebook data with your website site simply by visiting. For example, visitors could simply “like” a petition about an issue before congress instead of having to fill out a lengthy form.

2. Personalized Recommendations. Facebook has released aRecommendations Plugin, which allows your nonprofit to automatically recommend content on your site based on what a visitorʼs Facebook friends liked. In Mark Zuckerburgʼs words, “The power of the open graph is that it helps to create a smarter, personalized web that gets better with every action taken.”

3. Stronger Communities. Facebook will soon release a Social Toolbar allowing visitors to your website the ability to meet other people with similar interests, invite them to be friends, view and comment on their walls and even chat live. This will make it much easier for you to create a Facebook community space right on your website.The new Facebook Social Graph open API also means that developers all over the world will be creating new tools and plugins that you can integrate in your website – for free. This is very similar to the WordPress model, which has been very successful. And this is only the beginning…

How to Keep Your Faceook Friendships Private

Yes, I understand that you want the whole world to know that you are popular and have lots of friends! However, not all users want everybody knowing who their friends are and there are clear justifications for blocking others from seeing your Facebook friends. I’ve had a number of individuals visit my profile and then selectively pick off friends that are relevant to them for marketing purposes, or other reasons.

Voyeurism is a key component of Facebook and one of the most frequent activities of users is to browse through other users’ friends. Whatever the reason is, just know that users are doing it. While your friendships can show up in search engines, we’ve already highlighted how to make your profile invisible to search engines in number 3 above. If you want to take things one step further and prevent others from viewing your friends, you can follow these steps:

Step 1. Go to your profile page

Step 2. Click on the pencil icon in the top right corner of your “Friends” box

Step 3. Uncheck the box which says “Show my friends on my profile”

Now you’ve successfully hidden others from viewing your friends. Keep in mind that your friends list is accessible to any Facebook applications you use. It was also previously possible to view a user’s friends if you had access to their username however Facebook has fixed this privacy vulnerability in the past week.

How To Avoid Embarrassing Wall Posts on Your Facebook

While it’s nice to know that you and your friend had a great time getting wasted at the holiday party last night, it’s probably not something all your friends should know. Your friends may not use Facebook for connecting with professional contacts, and as a result they don’t think twice about casually posting something that should be kept more private. As such, it makes sense to control what’s visible to others. There are two places where you can configure your wall privacy settings: directly from your profile page and from the profile privacy page.

In order to edit the privacy settings from your profile page, click on the “Options” link directly under the publisher. The image below shows how to control your settings in three easy steps. The most dramatic modifications that you can make is unchecking the box which says “Friends may post to my wall”. Most users want to be able to communicate via the wall so disabling this functionality will prevent anyone from communicating publicly with you.

If you don’t want to take the most extreme step by blocking users from writing on your wall, you can customize who can view wall posts made by your friends by clicking on the drop down directly next to “Who can see posts made by my friends?” I recommend preventing all professional contacts from being able to view posts made by your friends.

How to Make Your Facebook Contact Information Private

I personally use Facebook for professional and personal use and it can frequently become overwhelming. That’s why I’ve taken the time to outline these ten privacy protection steps. Once I began approving friend requests from people that I hadn’t built strong relationships with, I immediately limited the visibility of my contact information so that only close friends could view things like my email and phone number.

If you post any of your personally identifiable information (phone number, email, or address) on your profile, it makes sense to limit who can see it. There are two ways to limit who can see your facebook contact information. The first is to visit the contact privacy settings page. From there you can customize the contact settings as much as you’d like. As I previously wrote, for each contact item that you have in your profile, you should set custom privacy settings so that contacts who you aren’t close to don’t have access to your email and phone number.

The second way to customize your contact privacy settings is directly from your profile. Click on the “Info” tab in your profile and scroll down to the contact information section. Once you mouse over the contact area, you’ll have the option of editing the content. If you click on “Edit” you will notice little lock icons next to each piece of information (as pictured below). If you click on the lock, you will be prompted with a box which says “Who can see this?” from which you can

completely customize who your information is visible to.

How To Control What Information Applications Can Access

The risk of having applications publish stories without your approval, which we covered in the last Facebook privacy guide, is being eliminated completely. However it’s important to understand what information applications can access. As Facebook writes, when you visit applications, they “may access any information you have made visible to Everyone as well as your publicly available information.” Publicly available information “includes your Name, Profile Picture, Geneder, Current City, Networks, Friend List, and Pages.”

The more restrictive you make your profile settings, the less information that’s available to applications. While applications must follow your existing privacy settings, your friends can also share information about you within applications. An example would be a greeting card application which uses your birthday to prompt your friend to send a card. Facebook allows users to control the types of information that applications can access when your friends use an application that you have not installed.

You can control that information (as pictured to the left) by visiting this page.

How To Avoid The Post-Breakup Facebook Effect

I’m seriously sorry to hear that you just broke up with your boyfriend. Do all of your contacts really need to hear about that though? Since posting our last Facebook privacy guide, I’ve seen countless people publicly update their relationship status as though everybody needs to hear about it. Relationship status changes have become such a large component of my Facebook news feed that I recently decided to write an entire post on The Post-Breakup Facebook Effect.

Strangely enough, there is a new mating ritual which has evolved on Facebook and often relationship status changes are part of that process. Often times after a female changes her relationship status to “Single”, a whole slew of new “potential suitors” start commenting on the relationship status change as well as post on her wall. Honestly, I see nothing wrong with this process and find it quite entertaining, however it probably is something that you don’t want all of your contacts to know about, especially your professional contacts.

While I’ve chose to avoid relationship statuses altogether, some users still want to have them displayed. While many people like to let the world know that they are in a relationship, you can avoid having a relationship status change becoming the talk of the town. While Facebook has now removed the feature which lets users control which actions generate news feed stories, you can still protect the visibility of your relationship status.

Simply go to your profile privacy settings page and change the “Family and Relationship” setting to “Only Me”. While it would be great to make that information public, it’s currently impossible to control whether or not a relationship status change creates a news feed story. As such, I believe it’s better to play things safe and block users from seeing your relationship status.

How To Protect Your Albums in Facebook

As I mentioned in the previous privacy guide, one of the greatest risks on Facebook is that you get tagged in a compromising photo. However it’s important to consider who you really want to have viewing your photo albums. Given Facebook’s custom privacy settings you are able to get as granular as you’d like with the visibility of each album. Thanks to the new publisher privacy settings, you can even get granular with every photo that you post if you really want to have complete control.

What privacy settings you choose for your albums is completely up to you, but if you do want to limit access to your albums, I recommend visiting the photos privacy settings page and limiting the access of each of your albums to “Only Friends” at the least. Unless you are a professional photographer, there probably isn’t much of a reason for making your albums visible so that the whole world can see them.

How To Avoid the Infamous Photo/Video Tag Mistake

Many users are getting smarter about their privacy settings, however I continue to hear horror stories of users who have their relationships damaged as a result of photos they’ve been tagged in. More than just having their relationships damaged, some users get fired as a result of photos they’ve been tagged in. There are a number of ways to work around this problem. One of the ways is described later in this guide, however there is an extremely easy way to avoid having compromising photos show up to friends.

Head over to the profile privacy settings page and go to the section which says “Photos and Videos of Me”. Then click on the drop down selector, and click on the “Custom” option. You can then select “Only Me” as displayed in the image below. Keep in mind that this will block all people from seeing any images or videos that you’ve been tagged in. Many users want their friends to see photos they’ve been tagged in though.

 So how do you work around this issue without putting your job or relationships at risk? The best way is to take advantage of the friend lists that you previously created (in the first setting) and limit specific people from seeing the images and videos you’ve been tagged in. For example, it’s probably not the best idea to have your professional contacts see the images you’ve been tagged in. If you have a professional list, you can simply enter that friend list under “Hide this from” in the custom privacy dialog box which is shown below.

How To Remove Yourself From Google Search

Facebook continues to receive A TON of traffic from displaying user profiles in search engines. Not all of your profile is displayed though. As was the case in our previous Facebook Privacy guide, the information displayed in the search profile is limited to: your profile picture, a list of your friends, and a list of up to approximately 20 Facebook Pages that you have become a fan of.

As many users have found out, your friend information is available in your public listings. To block that information from being publicly accessible you can block yourself from being indexed in Google and other search engines. Some people enjoy having their information displayed in search engines, as it makes them easy to find. For those that prefer to err on the side of privacy, it’s often a good idea to remove yourself from the search engines.

To remove yourself from the search engines, visit the search privacy settings page and simply uncheck the box next to “Public Search Results” which says “Allow Indexing”. You’ll need to wait for Google and other search engines to remove your information from their cache, so don’t be surprised if you still show up in the search engines for a few weeks.