Are you admin for pages on Facebook? Facebook are advising you to back up your old page insights in preparation for them being phased out from December 15th.

From then the social network will no longer collect data from the old page insights and insights as we know it, will disappear completely on February 15th 2012.

On the old page insights they advise you to back up your information as this will be deleted on February 15th but your data from December 15th will be collected in the new improved insights.

Have you also noticed…. on your personal Facebook page how you can fine tune what you see or what people see of you? If you are tired of seeing what everyone is listening to and reading, change the settings. You now have multiple choices for handling this overload of information in your news feed, by hide,delete,unsubscribe,unfriend, report or block options. The button to the right of a post drops down to give you all these options and a much calmer way to handle the regular (far to regular) postings of some. You can then still decide to visit their feed when you choose rather than your page be overloaded.

You can click to view all updates, or most or only important ones too, so again you can refine individually, what you see according to how much you want to see of friends. Further changes can be made on a friends’ profile where the subscribe button allows you to customise even more precisely. Options are here too, to add friends to particular lists; Places of work,schools,residences and family relationships.

How to hide yourself away…on chat. The follow on from all this privacy and hiding of other people’s posts, leads me to this option. On the chat screen there is a small settings button which gives you the option of, to chat or not to chat, primarily you can see who’s on line and they can see you are available to chat. If you want to refine this, limited availability can be optimised and you can restrict who can communicate with you at any point in time, alternating between your various lists.

Do you need any help with all the things that Facebook keep changing? Email us or telephone Tamara on 0203 468 8594 to find out how to optimise your pages

QRC - Emarketer predicts a growth to 17.3 million mobile internet users in 2012 and 18.6 million in 2013 with the potential for the use of QRC to increase at a similar rate, we need to look at integrating them into our marketing. The additional software necessary to read QRC is widely available and easily downloaded to a phone. Similarly there are programmes available to generate the codes.

When using QR codes in marketing remember:
Your customers will be accessing your link/information from a mobile device so make sure that this is mobile friendly too.

Keep the amount of data you encode brief, the general advice being less is more:
Create a business card with QR code that will transfer your contact details straight to the phone that has scanned the code
Link to Google maps, as mobile users are increasingly using the Google Maps app
Embed a telephone number, ideal for taxi companies and no more mis-dialed numbers

Using a URL link shortener has the added advantage of the data being kept at a minimum together with the benefit of tracking the response to the code via analytics.

Link to:

An excellent resource for information on how people are using QR code for marketing is 2d-code.c.uk. Check them out for help and inspiration. Where have you seen QR code used?

Need some help to make your website mobile friendly? Email us or telephone Tamara, on 0203 468 8594.

QRC – Quick Response Code is a type of barcode and was created by Toyota for the automotive industry in 1994. The idea was to be able to track vehicles through the various parts of the manufacturing process.

The most popular type of QRC are two-dimensional and allow the contents to be decoded fast. Their use is gradually being taken on board by major brands and allows companies to ‘sell’ to a mobile customer base with the ability to scan the codes from smart phones (with camera).

How could you use a QRC in your business?

If your product requires installation, a code on your packaging that plays a video of installation instructions. Overcomes the problem of the manual not being in the box and so much easier to see how it’s done than just reading how to install.

Business cards with the code can import all your contact information.

Roadside advertising contains a code to take you to further information about the advert, a trailer for a film, product information for car or cooker.

QRC on an appliance – when your machine goes wrong you have a code on it that leads to the manual on line. How easy is that when you have no idea where you put the manual and you bought it so long ago.

In store signs carrying codes that can be stored or sent to friends; to tweet, view a video about the product, share.

Apps – a code that takes you to the app download, so easy and fast, no need to spend time searching for the download.

Advertising – code that gives you the time, the date, the place. Where a product is produced, who by and when, so much more information than can be mentioned in a normal advert.

QRC can easily take your customers to a more comprehensive description of your products.

Can you think how you can use QRC in your business?

If you have an idea how you could use QRC, get in touch and we can help you put your ideas into reality. Email us, or speak to Tamara on 0203 468 8594.

Facebook have introduced more refinements so that you can decide just how tight you want your privacy settings.
Facebook made several significant changes to its privacy settings through the new inline buttons. The obvious changes, inline tag review and sharing buttons, affect much of the information you are likely to share on Facebook. Before the introduction anyone who could see content could actually comment and tag but now all tags can be approved. The new ‘view profile’ button lets you see how your profile appears to others.
The new settings for the sharing button mean you can share with everyone, friends,networks,friends of friends or customise to a select few. You can also choose to hide it from people too.

Tagging You can now tag by location and when tagging people who are not actual Facebook friends you can choose whether the tag shows in your profile or on your wall. Removing a tag has also become clearer with a choice of options, and an ability to remove and then block the tag creator.

Privacy settings
Within the home drop down button settings can be adjusted for how you interact with people. Privacy can be restricted so that only friends can see your posts and you can control your default privacy setting to public friends or custom.
Via the inline audience selector privacy can be controlled for status updates, photos and information, with the ability to use these as you share, or afterwards. It’s worth remembering that people you share information with can then share it with others.

The options are broken down into the following areas:

How you connect – who can -
look up your profile by name or contact info?
send friends requests?
send you Facebook messages?
post on your wall?
see wall posts by others on your profile?

How tags work
Profile review of posts friends tag you in before the appear in your profile. (Be aware they can still show up elsewhere on Facebook.)
Tag review for those that friends want to add to your profile.
Maximum profile visibility of tagged posts once they are on your profile.
Tag suggestions when friends upload look-a-like photos of you.
Friends can check you into Places app.

Apps and websites
Lists all the apps,games and websites you use and then allows you to individually edit all the settings. This allows you the opportunity to do some spring cleaning and clear out those that you no longer use.
Within this space you can edit settings that control how your info is brought by others to the apps they use. Use it to control the categories of the information.

Instant personalisation which allows you to see relevant information about your friend when you visit partner websites.

Public Search which controls whether a preview of your Facebook profile is visible when people search for you using a search engine.

Limit the audience for past posts although you can change this setting it means that any posts you have shared with everyone will be restricted to just friends. Maybe a more selective method is to choose the audience for your individual posts instead.

Blocked People and Apps

Don’t forget that you can run your account within a secure setting by going to account settings, security and enable secure browsing. Keeping your information safe while browsing on Facebook.

Too much information! Have a look around the settings and it’s not so daunting, but if you would like some help email us here, or speak with Tamara on 0203 468 8594.

It’s still a good idea to plan your strategy and decide which type of page best suits your needs. Facebook profile pages are intended for people, pages for businesses and groups for musicians primarily.

Top 7 apps for your Facebook business page

Poll This is the premier polling application on Facebook. Create polls for your pages and personal profile pages. Very simple and easy to use. Check it out!

Networked Blogs does what it says on the label. Promote your blog on Facebook, network with like-minded bloggers.

Twitter feed for pages simply supply your user name and password and your Twitter account links to your Facebook page.

Zoho online office store documents on line (Dropbox and Google Docs).

Facebook video supports higher quality video and audio than most video sharing sites.

RSS Graffiti centrally manage all RSS/Atom feeds from all your Facebook profiles and all your  pages.

My LinkedIn profile displays your LinkedIn profile or company profile on your  page.

Strategies to use when creating content

Constant interaction makes good communication. Keep the pages alive and up-to-date so that interaction is current and not dated. Tell people what you are doing, don’t sell to them but show how they can benefit from your product/service.

Top 3 tools to use to bring more traffic to your page

If you need help setting up your page, contact us either by email or telephone and speak to Tamara on 0203 468 8594.

Facebook are always making changes and just recently thay have introduced some more privacy buttons. Next week, Facebook changes and how to use them.