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Posts Tagged ‘facebook’

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Facebook Connect and The Data It Shares

In Uncategorized on May 31, 2011 at 8:40 pm

I did a little bit of reading today on Facebook connect when someone asked me some questions about it.

Their question:

when you register and sign on to something by just entering you facebook details do you get all the info? How does facebook share this stuff?

And my response…

You are given some of the information they’ve provided facebook when they login through that route.

Took me a few minutes to find it, but here’s the complete list of information that is made available through ‘facebook connect’:

Things on this list that say “no access_token required” means that anyone can access this information (the person doesn’t even have to click your facebook connect button), while things that say “no access_token required” means that if they click facebook connect on your website you’ll have access to that info. Other things like email require a special level of permission.

If you want their email and request that permission, it’ll show a large permission request blurb when they click facebook connect that looks like this…

If you read over that User Graph object link, you’ll notice address isn’t a part of it, so those fields will have to be entered manually by your visitors, of course, if you’re planning some kind of e-commerce app. They have a nice little setup for grabbing that info too.

If you’re interested in Facebook Connect… and WordPress… make sure to check out Otto’s Simple Facebook Connect plugin.

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Facebook Simple Like: A No-Mess Facebook Fan Page Like Button [WP Plugin]

In Uncategorized on May 24, 2011 at 9:48 pm

Want to boost your Facebook fan page subscription rate? This WordPress plugin makes what should be an easy task, but isn’t, an easy one. It enables you to use a shortcode to place a small like button where ever you like without the ordinary clutter: stream, faces, count, and all of the other junk that comes with the “fan page like box” ordinarily. Basically, it generates a fan page subscription button that looks *identical* to the one ordinarily only for *sharing* a page (as opposed to actually subscribing).

Download Now

 

Installation Instructions
All you need to do is unzip it in your wp-content/plugins folder and then activate it in the wp-admin area of your blog.

Like this plugin? Want to contribute?
If you like this plugin there’s a few different ways you can contribute.

 

Screenshots!

 

The Facebook fan page like button with the default white (#FFFFFF) iframe background (generated with the shortcode), contrasting with the ordinary look of the Facebook "like box."

The settings/configuration page for Facebook Simple Like.

The profile pictures section of your facebook fan page, which is where you find the requisite "profile id" of your fan page.

 

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Migrating Your Friends to a Facebook Business Page

In Uncategorized on April 8, 2011 at 4:11 pm

The other day I saw something that came as kind of a surprise. Someone who I was at one time facebook “friends” with had converted me into a fan of their fan page and in one fell swoop removed me from their personal profile. Though I hadn’t heard an announcement of such a tool, I knew it had not been done by magic so I did some researching and figured out how they did it through a little post published in March at insidefacebook.com:

For the first time, Facebook now allows personal user profiles to be converted into official business Pages, turning all their friends into fans. The “Profile To Business Page Migration” tool will help people who either created a personal profile for a business before Pages existed, or accidentally started accumulating fans as friends instead of Likes. (via.)

I guess I kind of wonder how long this tool will stay around. It seems like it would be easier to accumulate facebook “friends” than fans, and using a tool like this could be one way of amassing a big fan page quickly. Not that I think that would be a particularly polite tactic, but it certainly seems plausible.

It appears that they’ve also created a merge appeal tool for those that have changed their mind about the conversion. For more information on the whole process view their help center page on the conversion process, and make sure to backup your profile before doing anything first.

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Viral Linkbait Example Success: Ron Paul Sticker Car

In Uncategorized on March 28, 2011 at 8:43 pm

This wasn’t actually linking to any website, but I thought the outlandishness of it is a really good example of entertaining content that can get some traction quickly.
Ron Paul Car

I spotted this one in my Facebook feed. Good one, dude.

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Firesheep: A Firefox Extension to Hijack Your Social Media Sessions (Uh Oh)

In Uncategorized on March 9, 2011 at 6:08 pm

Earlier today I was listening to the SitePoint podcast #87 when they started talking about a new Firefox extension called “firesheep.” Apparently this program makes use of packet sniffing to hijack open, insecure session over unprotected Wi-Fi access points.

In and of itself the threat of packet sniffing is nothing new, and really the only protection against this is to either never use open Wi-Fi points or only log into websites that use https and possess an SSL certificate. What is new, however, is that this program makes it far more easy to hijack open sessions than it was in the past so that almost anyone can do it.

Firesheep, I suppose, was released with the intent of forcing developers to make sessions more secure, but in doing so open the door to a much greater number of people being able to grab up people’s private accounts at least temporarily for nefarious purposes in public places like coffee shops. If you use FireSheep you’ll literally be able to see everyone on your open networking that’s logged into sites like Facebook, and by clicking on their name and picture log directly into their account.

Firesheep Firefox Addon

In response to Firesheep’s release, however, another firefox addon has come out specifically for detecting when someone on the network is using Firesheep called BlackSheep. This gives you the opportunity to at least have a fair chance of catching, and smacking that nerdy kid looking kid across the room that’s messing around with your interwebs.

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Timing & Frequency of Blog Posts, Facebook Shares, and Tweets

In Uncategorized on December 16, 2010 at 7:32 pm

Perhaps I should become a Problogger reader, because this post a friend of mine shared with me is pretty much pure dynamite: When’s the Best Time to Publish Blog Posts?

In this post Dan Zarella comes to a few conclusions which I will simply summarize:

  • The greatest amount of re-tweet activity occurs around 4pm EST each day. This is, perhaps the best time for you to tweet your new posts.
  • Articles get shared more on Facebook when published on Saturdays and Sundays — this is probably because many workplaces have Facebook blocked.
  • Articles tend to get shared more on Facebook when published around 9AM. (So publish at 9am, and tweet at 4pm.)

And his last point… which I think struck a a little closer to home (based on my own tests) and seemingly over-shadowed the rest in terms of things to tuck away and make a rule of thumb:

  • Frequency of publishing posts seems to be the largest predictor of blogging success.

Read up on my own experiment involving posting frequency at: 61 posts in 61 days.

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Identifying the Interests of Facebook Friends

In SEO on August 15, 2010 at 7:40 pm

Facebook has put me into a conundrum. Recently I’ve made the observation that I get less interaction on my personal facebook profile each post than I did a year or so and 450+ friends ago. I believe the reason is, as my list has grown I’ve begun interacting with other people in my various “niches” (i.e. marketing), but because many of these people I’m interacting with have a unusually large friends list themselves, often on a post-by-post basis I get less reciprocity from them. But, never the less, my interacting with them has caused facebook to show these big-lists proportionately more than other people that may have in reality reciprocated more.

The good part of this whole situation is I have found the cure to my problem: the answer to this problem is lists. Lists allow you to sort your stream based on your list. Using this I can make categories or groups of people centered around topics of interest. So, instead of only paying attention to my default stream, I can use the lists to sort my stream based on what group I feel like needs to be interacted with at that moment.

Big Hint: Choosing the part of my network that needs to be engaged will have a lot to do with what my most recent status update pertained to. Who do I want to see it? If it’s an “SEO” update, I’ll probably want to spend a little time “giving back to the community” and engaging some of my SEO friends. Usually this is done by scrolling down that SEO list I’ve compiled, and checking out and commenting on everyone else’s recent updates and links. Golden rule at work!

But this left me with an important question… Now that I have nearly 1,000 friends (as of this posting) how do I go about categorizing the niches of interest that they are in? Thankfully, facebook recently changed *all* interests/activities into fan pages of their own. While at first I was very averse to this… I now see the light. You can visit virtually any “interest” or fan page and IMMEDIATELY identify who among my friends has “liked” that topic/brand/fanpage.

So, let’s say for example I want to build a “social media” list… What’s the next step? I’ll visit the Mashable fan page, open up a new window to my lists page in a new browser which I’ll sidle up next to my browser with the mashable fan page open, which… conveniently… lists all of my friends that have already liked that page! Since Mashable is a “social media” hot spot this makes it very easy to rapidly identify just who belongs to that “social media” list I’m creating.

Now go forth, blog, and engage that niche of your personal network that actually cares about the topic you’re writing about.

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14,000 Newsletter Subscribers + Facebook = ?

In Uncategorized on July 11, 2010 at 2:02 am

My brother (who recently launched his own ecigarette kit business) and I worked together on introducing my parents’ business to facebook and social media. So, he made the following graphic, which we sent to their 14,000 members strong newsletter:

Image We Sent To 14,000 Subscriber Newsletter

The whole graphic was a link to the newly made facebook fan page, which, at this point, had zero fans. The email subject was, aptly, “Budget Billiards is on Facebook!”

The email was sent using Aweber, which, thankfully keeps track of email opens and clicks through! It was set up as an autoresponder at the end of the sequence, which means it actually didn’t hit the entire list, and as a consequence it was only sent to 10,000. I might move it up in the sequence to hit the rest of the list in a few days but here’s the results so far on the click through and open rate:

Woah! What happened to that open rate?

At around the exact same period of time these statistics were gathered from Aweber — ~48 hours after the initial emailing — I also grabbed this snapshot of the number of people who had signed up on the facebook page:

So ~246 clicks with an open rate of 14% looks like 99 people on Facebook.

Not bad for a brand new page. It hasn’t finished bringing in people just yet for two reasons: Several people have joined in the last few hours even now, and also because there’s still another 4,000 or so that haven’t received the email just yet.

However! There were…

Possible Tweaks
In retrospect, the subject and email itself could have had better incentive of some kind for opening. The mere thought of interacting with a company on a new medium may not be enough to get them to even open the email. “We’re on facebook!” … and the recipient thinks: “Go you? Have a cookie?”

Of course, I typed the title. So. Yeah. Go me.

Additionally, the newsletter itself hasn’t been regularly updated. There has been a significant length of time between the creation of those first three autoresponders and this recent forth. Meaning, many of the subscribers currently on there may not have received any correspondence for some time. So, at this point, they may not even recall ever having interacted with the website at all. This is problematic, too, because they may report them for spam thereby hurting deliverability and seriously pissing off Aweber.

Feel free to drop in and become a fan of Budget Billiards on Facebook!

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Stephen Colbert’s Reddit Love

In Uncategorized on July 3, 2010 at 4:17 pm

Reddit worships Stephen Colbert, and he recently announced on his show that he uses reddit.com. So yesterday I was on facebook and noticed that @kn0thing (Alexis Ohanian), one of the founders of Reddit, posted this picture to his blog: http://digg.com/d31VjIK

So I submitted Alexis Ohanian’s blog post showing a picture of Stephen Colbert groovin’ on Reddit shwag to digg, posted the link to Alexis Ohanian’s facebook status, and he dugg it and reposted it for others. Awesome.

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Top or “The Best” WordPress Plugins – Dan Picks!

In Uncategorized on May 26, 2010 at 8:03 pm

This is my list of top wordpress plugins that are absolutely must have, and I generally install on every single blog I setup.

  • Subscribe to Comments Reloaded – This plugin is excellent for boosting a blog’s stickiness. It lets readers subscribe to a comment thread.
  • wp-db-backup – A plugin that automatically backs up a wordpress database.
  • WPTouch – Instantly create a mobile version of your blog.
  • Simple Tags –
  • Breadcrumb NavXT – A wordpress plugin that adds some nifty navigation/link hierarchy thats useful for SEO and usability.
  • WP-Cumulus – Not particularly SEO friendly since it’s flash based, but a truly visually stunning tag cloud.
  • Subscribe2- An excellent email subscription plugin allowing people to get digest emails of your blog updates on a daily or weekly basis. See the guide for pictures and the other options I didn’t bother to mention.
  • Topsy Retweet Button – This button retweets your post, much like the more common tweetmeme variety. This one, however, adds in a nifty post ranking (top 10k, top 5k, etc.) that is generated by topsy’s specialized algorithm. In all other respects functions identically to the tweetmeme retweet button.
  • WP-to-Twitter – This plugin allows you to setup wordpress to tweet either a default or custom tweet to an account of your choice, complete with bit.ly shortening, at post time.
  • TwiBadge – This plugin enables a widget that can be dropped onto a sidebar that shows a twitter stream. I like this particular one because it looks really cool, and has a few different color options. There’s a million different plugins that serve this same feature, however.
  • Facebook Fan Box – This plugin adds a facebook fan box widget letting you advertise your facebook fanpage with ease.
  • Share and Follow – Creates social media buttons both for sharing posts, and to allow users to follow you. Very customizable and has a level of functionality that is the equivalent to a combination of other plugins.
  • Google XML Sitemaps – This outputs an xml file to be given to google to increase indexability of the website. Presumably a boon to SEO.
  • Contextual Related Posts – This inserts a short bulleted link list of “related posts” to the end of every post. Good for SEO, and giving people more to read about automatically.
  • DISQUS Comment System – This plugin integrates the Disqus comment system into the blog. Disqus adds really cool features like avatar import from and posting to facebook, and twitter. Additionally it allows for subscription to posts, and inserts the comments into the actual wordpress database for easy removal if you later decide Disqus isn’t for you.
  • EzineArticles Plugin – This allows you to submit EzineArticles directly from your blog, as well as monitor their status from the administrative panel.
  • WP Super Cache – This plugin is so important it’s actually automatically included in all wordpress blogs setup at my webhost provider, Dreamhost. It can prevent a website from crashing when suddenly receiving a large number of hits (like those sent from a story going popular on Digg).