Pic from http://sdow.semanticweb.org

Facebook Privacy seems to be a question that gets raised in nearly every presentation we run, and it’s a no brainer why!

One thing you all should know. Everything you post on facebook is automatically open for anybody to see! That’s every status update, picture and video you upload!!! It can be pretty daunting for some people as for others..they couldn’t care less.

Before we nail the privacy controls, remember this. Every single bit of content you put up on Facebook is a choice….so be wise in what you share.

Facebook Privacy is an educational process for every person who decides to utilise the platform, whether it be for business or for a personal account. It’s now an easy platform to nail, ensuring you’re not pumping out content to everyone and anyone. Facebook in the distant past was known to over complicate the privacy process and it’s great news for us as now, thanks to the “master switch” you can tighten things up in the shake of a lambs tail, controlling all your content at once in the same spot. The main thing to highlight here is you can protect all the content you have ever processed.

What better way to learn than from the second biggest search engine in the world! Soak up this quick Facebook privacy video “how to”.

Other things to remember:

• When you “like” or “share” any content then it’s automatically feed onto your wall too, for all your friends to see. GREAT  viral exposure for brands/products etc and we feed off this quick and easy sharing facility yet if you’re not keen for your mates to see this then simply – take the tick off  “Allow select partners” in your privacy settings (held in your account bar – top right)

• If a person tags you in a picture then it goes straight into your pictures. Great if it’s a flattering photo Yet if it’s one you’re not sure if you want your mates/the world to see (privacy settings) then make sure you untag yourself.

• Last one – have a quick look through all the pages you have liked. Facebook is lapping up the business and community pages and is always looking for ways to utilise this info to link in with specific advertising. They index the business page/community page with info of your profile. So if you’ve liked a page that you’re not keen for other people to see then probably best to punt this one into space!

Facebook is obviously hotter than the sun right now…and it’s one of our favourite social networks for biz and pleasure! The reach is huge and the facebook insights and targeted messages step all over Google analytics. It’s a platform full of potential, yet with huge opportunities there are always risks.

What are your thoughts on how facebook shares your information? If you’re a brand/biz then can you see how this is possibly the most targeted way to connect with your market? If you’re on it for a personal aspect..are you finding to find that brands are finding you now? Hit us up with your thoughts below, we’re keen to hear more.

(via Social Media Examiner)

The Facebook business page, as I’m guessing you all know by now is HOT HOT HOT ! From it’s community building features, sales channel opportunities, sharing capabilities, customisable application development to competition role outs and so much more it’s certainly a platform to keep your eye on, and embrace if it’s part of your social media strategy. You’d be crazy not too!

We are always looking for ways to integrate a businesses experience/sales channel into the Facebook Page  and Matt @ttam (Our Head Developer and Strategist) is constantly coming up with new ideas for businesses, building them into applications for this power platform. Here’s a great example of a world first developed by Matt on Facebook http://bit.ly/aqM0Su ( I just had to mention a quality staff member in this post – he totally deserves the acknowledgment) Anyhow, these applications are available to purchase via Thinktank Media, however we love to share the free ones too!

If you are looking for employees then this free application is a ripper….. and it’s so easy to install into your page. With the “work for us” application you can post jobs on your Facebook Page for FREE and receive potential employee applications using this. To take a look at how you can use the app then check out the Fit n Fast Gyms page – one of our fantastic clients also

You can also link the “work for us” application into your facebook advertising campaign by the click of a button.

So, how are we using this app with our clients for successful results?

1. Install the application here http://bit.ly/9Ykinn

2. Update the job roles

3. Share the link (in a http://bit.ly link – so you can track clicks) on twitter/linkedin, facebook and any other social networks you have. Also you can put this in your email signature and in your email marketing campaigns if you’re keen.

4. Post on your facebook wall any pages/forums where your target employees maybe hanging out – be careful not to spam though.

5. Warm up your alliances and get them to assist you in promoting this also via the bit.ly link you have set up – driving traffic to your Facebook page. This also plants the seed you have a page, what your services/products are and gives a warmer opportunity for people to “like” your page.

So, what do you think of this application? Have you used it yet? Are you considering it? Hit me up with some comments below peeps

Can I hear a whoop whoop! Seriously, how fantastic is it that we can now video live content from the comfort of our facebook page or profile. The amazing people at Vpype have built us an application that has been on many business owners facebook wish list for a while.  Vpype Live Broadcaster

What is Vpype Broadcaster?

This is a free application for your facebook page or profile. All you need to do is install this and add it to the page you want to broadcast from. You can add as many pages as you are admin for. Once installed, vpype will show up under the “shows” tab at the top of your page.

Once you configure your mic and camera then you can start to enter in specific info about your broadcast. Then share this with your twitter and facebook friends/fans for even more exposure. Remember, as soon as you hit broadcast you are LIVE…so be prepared!

OK, so why would you want to live stream from your facebook fanpage?

Firstly, people are comfortable with the facebook platform and in some cases it feels safe to them. This new application makes it easy for your community to join in and take part.Here are a few hot points that spring to mind on why to use this powerful application:

Video seminars - free sessions you may put on for your community. This is also fantastic to build up more fans by making them aware you have a page and for them to become a fan and take part.

Annoucing winner of your online competition - we did this recently with a client of ours  – AFL Players Association and it worked a treat! Many people hopped onto their page and started interacting to hear if they had won. We did have some trouble towards the end as the internet went down – ekkkk…so, please note: this application needs a good internet connection and always have a back up plan of how you intend to connect with your viewers if things don’t go to plan We decided after this minor set back, to announce the winner via the facebook platform and record this immediately on the iphone then updated the page. AFLPA fans still stayed with us throughout the whole recording and the comp was a hit!

Sharing an experience – live! Eg. the release of a new product/service or a pre buzz campaign.

A demonstration of  “how to” eg. how to download your slideshare presenation from your website/blog.

I’m sure you can think of many more ways to utilise this!

Why do I love this application? It makes things even easier for us! As users of the social web we are always looking for ways to integrate a social experience to our brand/product/business. This app enables us to connect with our community – audio and visual LIVE and gives  them the opportunity to interact back (typing) via their facebook/twitter accounts. This interaction is also shared in their news stream/wall if they choose it to…making it even easier for us to get the word out about the broadcast. I also love the fact that if someone missed the live broadcast, then that’s ok, they can watch the recorded version in their own time.

So what do you think to this new application? How do you think you may use it? Hit me up below

There has recently been an increase in the places businesses are choosing to spend their dollars marketing and advertising new products and services.  Facebook is now one of the powerful places where marketing $$$ are moving . This simply makes me beam! We can now roll out campaigns that are creative, catchy, have a reasonably low budget and the golden key – get connected, engage and stay connected with people by a quick status update.

Let’s look at one of many successful Facebook campaigns that have been rolled out recently.

IKEA, in Sweden, have been reaping the rewards from their new showroom campaign.

How did they do this?

Forsman and Bondenfors were asked to engage people in the opening of the new IKEA store in Malmö. IKEA wanted to spread the word of their new store fast whilst creating awareness well beyond Malmö.

Instead of recreating the wheel, they decided to utilise a platform that was already there: Facebook, the largest Social Network Platform in the world, with well over 325 million active users…..half of which log on daily for 25 minutes an average session.

They also used the most popular function Facebook has in their strategy  – TAGGING!

After creating a Facebook profile for the store manager, they then uploaded pictures of their showrooms to his photo album.

The person that tagged their name on a product first, won it. The demand for more new pictures from IKEA spread quickly growing thousands more people through their profile page, news feed and links.

This in itself is powerful. Why get a person to look at a banner with furniture, when you can get them to personally promote IKEA.

Watch the video to gain a greater understanding of how this worked.

In a nutshell, Facebook is a powerful, engaging and connective place to raise awareness of a brand. When a campaign strategy is executed correctly, Facebook is well up there with many other successful marketing campaigns. Are your motor neurons firing yet?

I usually spend a chunk of time on a Sunday researching through a list of new plugins for our blog and wowzers, I have a great one for you this week. It’s a pretty new plugin and it makes it extremely simple and easy for your readers to share your posts on their facebook accounts. This possibly means more traffic for you plus your post gets in front of many more eye balls. I also love the way you/your readers can tell how many people have shared this by simply looking at the plugin interface. WINNER!!!

It has similar functions to one of my fav plugins for twitter – tweetmeme and makes the whole sharing process easy by one click.

We are MASSIVE fans of wordpress at Thinktank Media and so if you have a blog/website built on this platform then this plugin is certainly one to consider. As part of the Thinktank “luv our clients” service, if you have had your site/blog built by us then hit me up and I can get our super savvy web developer – aka – Matt Bannon to install this for you.

Enjoy!

You can download the plugin here: DOWNLOAD

Are you luving this plugin or what??? share share

The wonderful world of the web these days (WEB2.0) enables us non techies (well that’s just me in the Thinktank Media team!!! ) to control our websites, blogs and social networking sites without the constant assistance of our web developer. FREEDOM! From updating content, adding applications and inserting pictures…we thank you Web2.0!

The purpose of this post is to share some top widgets (pieces of code) that you can add to your blog/website/social networking site to interlink them with Facebook and Twitter. The more you share ways to connect with your target market the easier it is for them to keep up to speed on what you are up to…..and just as importantly, the more you can listen and provide… connecting back with them.

So here they are peeps!

Twitter: 

These widgets named below let you display Twitter updates on your website/blog or social network page

Simply choose where you would like to include it, then embed the nifty piece of code – hey presto …..a visual badge or stream will appear.

Here’s the link : http://twitter.com/goodies/widgets

BUT WAIT….there’s more….

FACEBOOK :

From personal profile widgets such as profile badges and photo badges (new app) to website and business widgets, fan box, live stream box and page badge – these pieces of code assist you to open up the doors to connect even further!

Check out the latest free widgets on offer here from the facebook widgets store!

http://www.facebook.com/facebook-widgets/index.php

We just love making things super easy for you at Thinktank Media, please hit us up if there is something you want to know re: website/blog/social media and social networking platforms….we’d love to write a post here to help you and I trust heaps of other biz heads out too.

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Wowzers, what a juicy month this is turning out to be. 

Being a huge fan of www.search.twitter.com to engage with my target market (real time ), has been a big step up in building up strong relationships and interacting with people who really want to “get this space” ….. leading to some healthy business. Search.twitter is so bloody fantastic as it’s not just about talking in this space, it’s about listening, engaging and then providing outstanding quality.

Now facebook is onto it too (no surprises there) . By Facebook opening up their search, this is only adding to the mix of  social media engagement and building a solid strategy.It now allows people  that want to engage,  like me,  to go in and search the key words relevant to their business . It then gives us the opportunity to start to talk to people, making conversation and interacting! Hugely powerful, considering facebook has a healthy number of users…commenting every second of the day. 

You can either utilise this by typing into your search box – ( in the top right hand corner) , a key word. Say for example I am a florist. I could type in eg. flowers – and then see everyone who is talking about flowers. From here I simply look to the left hand side of my page and will see “post by friends” and “post by everybody”.

If you click “post by friends” then it will pull up every single person talking about flowers, in your friend list. You can then see by their status who’s saying what. This option gives you a very warm introduction to start engaging.

You will also see a “post by everyone”. You can then see everyone who is talking about flowers – fantastic to engage with new people (non-friends). The limitation right now with this is, compared to search.twitter,  you can’t engage with these people if they are not your friends.

Also, this function is  not available on “business pages” (fan pages) yet, however I’m guessing facebook has this coming very soon as it will be a huge string to their business bow!

I can’t wait for this to roll out, as it will certainly be  a huge part to our social media engagement strategy. Search engagement is extremely powerful and big cats like twitter and facebook are on the ball, making it easier for us to interact specifically with who we want to! Woooharrr!

What are your thoughts here?

I’ve been presenting at quite a few big companies recently.Social Media is hot on the tongues of many organisations and businesses… the main question:

• “how can we utilise the power of social media within our marketing strategy”.

Another question that gets asked frequently:

• “is there any way we can update all these social networking sites from one place” “can we upload content from one place instead of going into individual sites”?

How many times have you gone into your individual sites to update or upload content? From facebook to twitter to flickr….phew, it can be pretty time consuming.

I know there are quite a few sites out there like ping.fm and Hello Txt where you can update your status from one point AND organise your feeds, yet this platform really does cut the mustard.

Introducing FEEDALIZR… it’s a very powerful platform.  Not only can you update your status to multiple social networking sites…you can also upload content to feedalizr, it then pumps it out to the most popular social networking sites. I’ve found it to be easy to install and simple to use, once you have hooked it up with your social networking sites… then notice how much time you have left in the day to invest within other marketing tasks.

Go try for yourself….. http://www.feedalizr.com/

Thanks to Matt bannon for introducing me to this @ttam

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This Web2.0 space is bursting with growth and it’s only ever increasing. The numbers below highlight to all businesses how much opportunity is out there on the web right now! Stop crying and start working harder in this space! 2009 for small business owners has never been so great! 

Hold onto your hats and fasten your seat belts!

Internet

1,596,270,108 people are actively using the internet (Internet Usage and World Population Statistics are for March 31, 2009)

Google

 1 trillion URL’s are indexed on Google –  Source 

Here is how Google grew in terms of number of indexed URLs :

1998 : 26,000,000 (26 million web pages)
2000 : 1,000,000,000 (1 Billion web pages)
2008 : 1,000,000,000,000 (1 Trillion web pages)

Google has done 2 billion searches a day, or about 700 billion a year Source

Top 100 google hot trends - http://www.google.com/trends/hottrends

Blogs

133,000,000 - is the number of blogs Technorati has indexed since 2002

A new blog is created every second, totalling 80,000 new blogs every day. 

900,000 blog posts are created daily

Blogging grew 68% in 2008

346 million people worldwide read blogs

77% of active web users read blogs

The average blogger in the US:

• 51% male 
• Aged 35+ (58%)
• Aged 18-34 (42%)
• College educated, 74%   Source

Twitter

Number of tweets as of right now! - 1,691,543, 819 - ( click here for an up to the minute count)

At the start of 2008 Twitter had only around 500,000 monthly visitors

Growth rate for Twitter was 752%, for a total of 4.43 million unique visitors in December 2008  Source

Twitter.com is a top 500 site that reaches over 4.1 million U.S. monthly people. The site attracts a more educated, slightly more female than male, young adult audience. Quantcast, March

Twitter is receiving 8million unique visitors in the month of March 2009.Compete (via Nick) March 10

 Melbourne’s top 100 twitter users

Facebook

• 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 those 35 years old and older

• More than 20 million users update their statuses at least once each day

• More than 1 billion pieces of content (web links, news stories, blog posts, notes, photos, etc.) shared each week

• There are more than 30 million active users currently accessing Facebook through their mobile devices.

• http://www.facebook.com/press/info.php?statistics

• Inside Facebook says: “the number of Americans over 35, 45, and 55 on Facebook is growing fast. In the last 60 days alone, the number of people over 35 has nearly doubled. Developers and marketers may want to think about how to serve this group of new users.” Inside Facebook, March

• “Women over 55 remain the fastest growing group, and growth among the teen and college-age set has been relatively paltry. In absolute numbers there are now even slightly more members between the ages of 45 and 65 than there are 13-to 17-year-olds.” Wired Magazine, March.

YouTube

You tube nears 5 billion views Source

 Average internet users watch 2 YouTube videos a day

The average video length, according to comScore.com, was 2.7 minutes.

YouTube Insight, a free tool that enables anyone with a YouTube account to view detailed statistics about the videos that they upload to the site. 

One of the most watched videos on youtube in 2009 – set to break youtube records! 

This illustrates how web clips are mixing with TV shows and bringing in a bigger audience. 

Mobile usage

63 million on mobile internet daily

Significant growth in the numbers of people accessing the internet from their mobile phones vs. a year ago. The company says that today there are just over 63 million mobile web users in the US and 35 percent of them are online via their handset daily. Source.

I trust your mind had been sparking off like a new years eve fireworks show! Here are the numbers, now where are you seeing the opportunities within your own business?

Social Media…WOW.…. how these two words hold so many meanings! A buzz marketing term? An exciting platform to connect with your target market on? A term that confuses you?..or maybe overwhelms you? A concept you are eager to hear more about? So many meanings are added to these two words with many emotions attached to them!

It’s a super Sunday, and I planned to write a super special post on “The power of using video in your business”. However, due to the amount of  “ HELP ME mail”  I received on Facebook and Twitter this week, I have chosen to listen to my audience (as any good business owner does).   In this post, I aim to shed some sunlight and inner calm on this whole Social Media thing! 

Before I answer by far the most popular question asked this week (” Where do I start with Social Media..I’m confused? “), I feel it’s best to give you a few definitions.

•  The super social savvy Brian Solis shares that “Social Media is, at its most basic sense, a shift in how people discover, read, and share news, information and content. It’s a fusion of sociology and technology, transforming monologue (one to many) into dialog (many to many.)” 

• ” Social media is a type of online media that expedites conversation as opposed to traditional media, which delivers content but doesn’t allow readers/viewers/listeners to participate in the creation or development of the content” claims Susan Ward

• And me….Sam Mutimer’s definition :-) – “ Social is the communication, interaction and relationship building part of the process.  Media is the platform in which these conversations, interactions and relationships take place (e.g. Twitter, Facebook, Youtube, FriendFeed ). It’s just like the old media  - newspapers, magazines, radio and television, however the new part to this media is using some of the platforms I have mentioned above to communicate your message”.

One more definition if you are still a little hazy, from the trusty Wikipedia -   Social Media Wikipedia

So where to start within your own business? I say, as my old PE teacher used to harp on about  “keep it simple”. Take one step at a time and start to build up your connections and platforms at your own speed. There is no race here ( I have only just learnt this!). Do what’s best for you, with the time you have available. Anything is better than nothing!  If  you already have a blog set up, then good on you! I would say you are in front of many business owners in Australia. For those of you that haven’t…..this would be an ace place to start! Blogs are a fantastic place to begin.

To give you just a few benefits in short :

1. Blogs give a personal touch to your business as they are usually a more friendly place to connect with your target market,  as opposed to a colder website platform.

2. They can help to place you as an expert in your field, building up trust, confidence and a fan base for your brand/personal brand!

3. Search engines LOVE blogs and you can get a nice little ranking in places such as Google.

There are many more benefits of having a blog and I will go into more depth in the ” Why blog for business?”  post.  My favourite reason to blog is to share some great content and I hope to enthuse, energise and empower small business owners to get excited about web2.0! Its power to the people at last and we all have the opportunity to grow here in a cost effective and fun manner!

Are you a little clearer now? Click the comments section below to share your feedback! I’m pumped to read your thoughts! Whoop whoop!

High fives…. to your Social Media super success!