12 Ways You Can Get Your Facebook Account Disabled

By: jaime | Published: April 20, 2010 · View Comments

While I was researching this article, I visited a section of Facebook’s blog that I call “Facebook Purgatory”. This is where the poor souls who have had their accounts disabled go to desperately plead with to Facebook to reinstate their accounts. Most have no idea why their account has been disabled, and some have been waiting for weeks without a response from Facebook about whether their accounts would be reenabled. Facebook Purgatory is a sad place and I hope you never end up there.

Since Facebook is a private company they can do what they like with their site. They set their terms and conditions, and if you breach them they choose if and when they will reinstate it. The best defense you have is to play within their rules, otherwise you risk losing your friends, photos, videos, notes and any other data you have shared.

There are at least 12 ways you can get your Facebook account disabled:

1. Using Your Personal Profile for Business Purposes

Facebook wants you to use the Page profiles for business and keep your personal profile just that – personal. They state “You will not use your personal profile for your own commercial gain.” Therefore promoting your products and services through your personal profile could get you thrown out.

2. Using a Fake Name

Facebook wants to interact with real people and doesn’t tolerate fake names, business names or abbreviations (such as using one letter as your last name) on a personal profile.

3. Changing Your Name Too Often

Most people change their names very few times, if at all, in their lifetime. Facebook uses multiple name changes to flag people who are breaking the “fake name” clause. If you legitimately change your name, you have nothing to worry about.

4. Sending Too Many Friend Requests in a Short Period of Time

It seems counter-intuitive that a social networking tool would limit how you can add friends, but they do. After you initially join and upload your address books, they think your friends should grow organically and slowly. So how many friends are safe to add per day? They don’t share this useful information with us, but I would suggest adding no more than 20 friends a day.

Whatever you do, never ignore messages from Facebook that warn you to slow down on adding friends. If you receive a message from Facebook, don’t add any new friends for a couple of weeks.

5.Overuse of Your Inbox

It seems the Inbox feature is not your average mail client. Facebook doesn’t want users sending a lot of bulk messages from the inbox. You can only send a message to a maximum of 20 people. If you send the same message to multiple groups of 20 people, or send bulk messages often, you may get flagged as a spammer.

6. Being Reported for Spam

Each message you send includes a “report as spam” button. When someone clicks this button, Facebook reviews the message (and probably all of your other activities) to determine whether or not they consider it spam. All promotions that occur outside of a Business Page could be considered spam. I’m going to share a dirty little secret here: some people would rather hit the “Report as Spam” button than ask you not to send them information or unfriend you. It’s easier and anonymous. Be conscious of what you send, since you are always at risk of someone reporting you.

7. Engaging in Suspicious Behaviour After Time Away

If you haven’t used Facebook for a while (say for over a month), there might be a backlog of friend requests to process. From there it seems natural that you to want to message some people and add some other new friends. However, people in Facebook Purgatory report being banned from Facebook after a hiatus because they added too many new friends or sent too many messages. Remember to space out your activities.

8. Resending the Same Message to Your Friends, Event or Group Members

Facebook doesn’t like duplicate messages – they think it’s Spam. This means resending a message as a reminder to your friends, event invitees or to group members is a big no-no. Instead, Facebook recommends adding more people as administrators to an event or group. The extra administrators can send messages to their friends, rather than having you resend the same messages to the same people. Facebook has automatic flags that notify them of this behavior. If they check your message and see that it’s for “commercial gain”, you can kiss your account goodbye.

9. Using Inbox Messages to Chat

Facebook says, “The inbox functionality is not intended for the purpose of having live conversations with people. If you would like to do this, we recommend using the Facebook chat feature.” Multiple messages to the same person in a short period of time could be classified as Spam.

10. Multiple People Block You

Each profile has an option to “report/block this person.” While Facebook would regard the occasional block as part of human relationships (like bad breakups), flags go up if the number of people blocking you is abnormally high, or if you are blocked a lot in a short period of time.

11. You are Reported

The report part of “report/block this person” function prompts the user to give a reason for their report. Reasons include nudity or pornography, fake profiles, racist/hate speech, threatening behavior and unwanted contact. Unwanted contact is pretty vague. Facebook will review any report and look at your activity to see if it’s legitimate. If you’re using your personal profile for business promotions and you are reported, your account will be disabled.

12. Using Faulty or Intensive 3rd Party Applications to Access Facebook

You can access Facebook via different websites or applications such as mobile clients. These are not developed by Facebook, but by 3rd party developers, and interact with Facebook using your credentials. If they have been poorly developed, or they refresh often (for example every 5 minutes), Facebook may see this as spammy behaviour and suspend your account. A big culprit seems to be SkyBook, a Facebook client for Windows Mobile so avoid that one. Limit how you connect to Facebook by using their website and one trusted mobile application.

If your Account is Disabled

If you ever have your account disabled, visit http://www.facebook.com/help/contact.php?show_form=disabled to request your account is reinstated. Be patient, multiple requests are reported to slow the process down and Facebook is notorious for taking their time to review disabled accounts.

To learn more about how to protect your Facebook account, check out: Facebook Business Breakthroughs.

Categories: Facebook - Tags: ,

The Truth About Twitter Automated Direct Messages

By: jaime | Published: March 23, 2010 · View Comments

When I was a teenager, my friends hated McDonalds pickles. Pickles aren’t really an Aussie thing. Or maybe they just aren’t a teenager thing. They would pick them out of their burgers and throw them against the wall to see who could get their pickle to stick for the longest.

Automated Direct Messages (auto DMs) are like pickles on Twitter, no one really likes them, yet everyone is throwing them against the wall to see what sticks.  In case you don’t know, they are generic little messages sent automatically to you after you follow someone on Twitter. They generally say something like “Hi, thanks for following me. This is what I do. You can also check out my website/blog/facebook”. People send them in hope that, if enough people receive it, someone, somewhere will visit the website/blog/facebook page.

Are Automated Direct Messages Effective?

I’ve very rarely read and never responded to an auto DM.  Since they really aren’t personally sent to me, I categorize them as SPAM. If anything, the only action I’m likely to take from an auto DM is to unfollow someone if the message has made enough of a case that a relationship between us isn’t right (for example they show they are a Spammer).

To figure out if Auto DMs are effective, I did a little research.

  • I looked at 40 automated direct messages with a link from bit.ly that have been sent to me in the last couple of weeks.
  • I recorded the number of followers the sender had.
  • I looked at the number of clicks for that Auto DM link on bit.ly’s statistics and subtracted any links not from Twitter, leaving on any clicks from external Twitter clients for the benefit of doubt.
  • I removed any clicks that were from Tweets and not Auto DMs.

There are elements that I couldn’t account for like:

  • If the Auto DM was set up at the beginning of the Twitter account meaning every follower actually received the message.
  • How many people unfollowed as a result of the Auto DM.
  • If there is a difference in response between Auto DMs response without link or that don’t use a URL shortener.

Obviously it’s not an exact science, but it does allow you to see some patterns.  For example the people who only used the link in Auto DMs had zero URL clicks.

Click Rate Chart The Truth About Twitter Automated Direct Messages

Based on my findings the average click-through on direct messages is 0.8%.

My in-home physicist worked out that the error margin for my little study was 0.8. Meaning that the best case scenario for a click-through on a Automated Direct Message is 1.6%.

Is 0.8% effective? Personally, I think not.  Why bother with something so ineffective that just labels you as a Spammer?  But if you disagree with me and still want to use them, here are some best practices for making the most of your auto direct messages that will hopefully lower the annoyance rate.

Auto Direct Message Best Practices

1. Understand the function of an auto direct message

The point of the direct message isn’t to thank someone for becoming a fan – it’s meaningless, everyone does it. Instead you should try to intrigue your follower enough to check your Bio and Tweets more carefully (ideally liking what they see and adding you to a list) or to build some trust and credibility, which hopefully has the same result.

2. Be Original

If you say something different, you have a chance of catching someone’s attention and improving your response rate. Almost every Auto DM I’ve seen tries too hard, and is about the sender instead of the follower.  Be in service instead of asking for something from your follower so early in the relationship.  Send your best tip – one that got a great response when you tweeted it.  Remember, at this stage you aren’t trying to sell anything but your point of view. Showcase that and give them an opportunity to see what you are made of.

Here are 2 Auto DMs I really liked:

1 Tweet The Truth About Twitter Automated Direct Messages

This is a great example of being in service, rather than asking for something early in the relationship. Of course it only works if they actually follow up. If you offer something, make sure you deliver.  With this Tweet, there is an added problem that people can only reply to a Direct Message if the receiver is following them already, so unless this guy auto follows everyone back, people can’t actually DM him, making this tweet pointless.

I would change it to:

“I’d love to tweet to my followers about your business. Send me a tweet telling me what to say and I’ll share it sometime this week.”

Others you may like The Truth About Twitter Automated Direct Messages

This Auto DM is brilliant for 2 reasons – it’s another example of being in service to your follower and it aligns the reader to position the sender in the same category as the other well known bloggers. I would change it to:

“For more blogging tips check out @problogger, @patflynn and @johnhaydon. Send me your blogging questions and I’ll tweet about them.”

Top 7 Auto Direct Message Mistakes

  1. Trying to sell or trying to get someone into your sales cycle. It’s too early in the relationship.
  2. Trying to get them to visit your website, join your Facebook fanpage or download something.
  3. Using URL shorteners. There are lots of warnings about people’s accounts being hijacked from links in Direct Messages. If you must add a link, use the proper URL.
  4. Using TrueTwit Validation. No one wants to validate themselves for you, it’s obnoxious.
  5. Pretending it’s not a Auto DM. Avoid saying something generic like – nice profile.
  6. Asking for a DM. Unless you are following them, they can’t send you a DM.
  7. Thanking people for following – it’s a waste of space. Use it more productively.

Categories: Twitter - Tags: ,

How to Download Your Facebook Friends’ Email Address

By: jaime | Published: March 12, 2010 · View Comments

Recently Facebook and Yahoo formed a partnership of sorts and with it came an exciting new feature – the ability to download your friends email addresses.  If you don’t have a Yahoo Mail account, you can sign up here.

This is great for businesses owners because it means we can get our connections off Facebook and into our Address Books allowing us to protect our network in the unlikely event that our Facebook account is banned for some reason, or Facebook stops becoming the social network of choice.

Now remember, with great power comes great responsibility – so don’t add these people to your mailing list without getting their permission first.

Import Your Contacts From Facebook

  1. Go to address.yahoo.com and log in to your Yahoo account.
  2. Select “Import Now”.

    3. 1. Import email addresses from Facebook How to Download Your Facebook Friends Email Address

  3. Select the Facebook icon.  If you aren’t already signed into Facebook, you may be prompted to log in.

    4. 2. Facebook import icon How to Download Your Facebook Friends Email Address

  4. Allow the Yahoo Contact Importer to access your Facebook Account.

    5. 3. Allow Yahoo Contact Import Access to Facebook How to Download Your Facebook Friends Email Address

  5. Once the download has completed, return to the Contacts home page by selecting the contacts Menu.
  6. Select the Fix Duplicates entries option.

    7. 4. Fix Duplicates How to Download Your Facebook Friends Email Address

  7. In the Clean Up Duplicates, select Merge All Exact to remove Exact Matches.

    8. 5. Clean up Duplicates How to Download Your Facebook Friends Email Address

  8. Examine any left over similar matches and decide whether to merge them or skip them.

Export your Contacts from Yahoo Mail

Assuming you don’t use Yahoo Mail as your primary mail client, you’ll want to export your contacts so you can import them into your primary address book.

  1. From the Tools menu, select Tools -> Export.

    2. 6a. Export Contacts 1 How to Download Your Facebook Friends Email Address

  2. Select Export Yahoo! CSV and Export Now.

6. Address Book Export How to Download Your Facebook Friends Email Address

Mac Users: The file will be saved into your Downloads folder.  The file should be called something similar to: yahoo_xx.csv (it depends on the first 2 letters of the last name of your first contact – in my case the last name is Abel, so my file is yahoo_ab.csv).
PC Users: You will be prompted to save your file to you local machine.

Import Your Contacts into Your Address Book

Mac Users: Import Your Contacts into Your Apple Address Book

  1. In your Address Book select the File Menu -> Import.
  2. Select the yahoo_xx.csv file from your Downloads folder to import the contacts.  Press OK to import.
  3. Once the import has completed, remove duplicate entries by using the Card Menu -> Look for duplicates.

PC Users: Import Your Contacts Into Outlook

  1. In Outlook select File Menu Import and Export.
  2. Make sure Import from another program or file is highlighted. Click Next.
  3. Now make sure Comma Separated Values (Windows) is selected. Click Next.
  4. Use the Browse button the select the file you downloaded from Outlook.
  5. Select Do not import duplicate items. Click Next.
  6. Select the Outlook folder you want to import the contacts to. This will usually be your Contacts folder. Click Next.
  7. Click Map Custom Fields. Make sure all columns from the CSV file are mapped to the desired Outlook address book fields. You can create new mappings by dragging the column title to the desired field. Any previous mapping of the same column will be replaced with the new. Click OK.
  8. Click Finish.

Categories: Facebook - Tags: ,

The Secret to Getting Great Linkedin Recommendations

By: jaime | Published: March 9, 2010 · View Comments

linkedin recommendations The Secret to Getting Great Linkedin RecommendationsLinkedin allows you to stay in touch with your network, build relationships and keep up to date with important changes to your contacts’ situation – such as employment changes or business developments. It also has the ability to help build your credibility with new connections and potential prospects using the Recommendations feature.

Recommendations are testimonials added to your Linkedin profile by existing connections in your network who have worked with you and want to share their experience with others. A good recommendation can be an extremely powerful marketing tool because it can highlight things about your product, service or company that you couldn’t say yourself without sounding overly self promotional or too salesy.

Many of your clients are probably willing to give you a glowing recommendation, but getting them to sit down and actually write it for you can be a challenge. Even if they do write one, not everyone is a gifted recommendation writer and you may end up with a single paragraph, or a recommendation that sounds nice, but doesn’t help show the benefits of working with you.

Make It Easy For Them

The best way to receive the kind of recommendation that helps sell you in the best possible light is to have a third party interview your client and then write the recommendation for them. Clients often are more generous with their praise to a third party and many people find it easier to talk about an experience, than to write about it.

It may seem like extra work, but interviews are actually the best way to guarantee well-written recommendations and usually turn out a lot quicker in the long run.

The best time to ask a client for a recommendation is right after working together, so the experience is fresh in their mind and they are still feeling very enthusiastic about your services. Ask your client if they would mind giving you a testimonial through a 5-10 minute interview with a third party. Let them know once the interview is complete, your third party interviewer will compile the discussion into a 2 – 4 paragraph testimonial in your clients’ own words and send it to them for final approval.

To do this, you can hire a virtual assistant or copywriter to conduct the interviews and write your recommendations, or simply ask someone you know who is a great listener and will be able to identify the important keys to the interview and put it into the right format.

7 Questions that Guarantee Great Recommendations

Have your interviewer ask the following questions:

  1. What problem or situation where you experiencing before working with ABC Company?
  2. What other options did you explore before you decided to work with ABC Company?
  3. Did you have any doubts or concerns before engaging ABC Company and how did they overcome them?
  4. Why did you choose to work with ABC Company over their competitors?
  5. What results did you get from working with ABC Company?
  6. What most impressed you about working with ABC Company?
  7. What type of person or business would you recommend works with ABC Company and why?

Once the questions have been answered, your interviewer should use the words and unique voice of the person giving the recommendation to ensure they are happy with the result and will post the recommendation to Linkedin.

Adding the Recommendation to your Linkedin Profile

Once the recommendation is completed, you need to request the recommendation from Linkedin with these steps:

  1. Visit your personal Linkedin profile.
  2. From the Profile Menu, select Recommendations.
  3. Select the Request Recommendations Sub Menu.
  4. Choose the position to be recommended for.
  5. Enter the connection/s to request.
  6. Add a personalized message requesting they add the recommendation.

Once the Recommendation has been sent to you, you’ll need to approve it so it updates your profile.

Categories: Linkedin - Tags: , ,

Top 5 Tweets of the Week – March 1st – 8th 2010

By: jaime | Published: March 8, 2010 · View Comments

Every week I tweet a lot of tips and information about Social Media and I look forward to finding out to what my Followers find interesting – especially when it’s a surprise, like this week’s Top Tweet – a comic.

In case you are interested, my Tweets of the Week are based on Retweets, click-throughs and comments.

The best way to keep track of my tweets, is to follow me – @jaimealmond, as this is just a small section of the Tweets that I shared last week. Make sure, you let me know what tweets you like by Retweeting them.

1. Your Website Has 4 Seconds to Get Your Visitors Attention before they leave

4 seconds for your website Top 5 Tweets of the Week March 1st 8th 2010

2. 6 tips for treating your customers like friends

5 Tips for treating your customers like friends Top 5 Tweets of the Week March 1st 8th 2010It was supposed to be 6 Tips, but I tweeted about 5 and my Followers found themselves with a bonus tip (perhaps surprising and delighting them?).

3. Get the most out of LinkedIn

Get the most out of Linkedin Top 5 Tweets of the Week March 1st 8th 2010

4. Statistics About the Ages of Social Network Users

According to this study, the average age for Social Network users is 38.  I guess that it makes it totally uncool.  Luckily I stopped wanting to be cool when I turned 30.

ages of social network users Top 5 Tweets of the Week March 1st 8th 2010

5. Free Social Media Monitoring ebook

Social Media Monitoring ebook Top 5 Tweets of the Week March 1st 8th 2010

What Were Your Top Tweets?

I’d love to hear what your followers were interested in this past week.  What were your top Tweets?

If you aren’t sure how to track this information check out Bit.ly and register for an account.

Categories: Tweets of the Week, Twitter - Tags:

The 5 Step Twitter Maintenance Guide

By: jaime | Published: February 2, 2010 · View Comments

twitter maintenance guide The 5 Step Twitter Maintenance Guide


This week started to notice weird spam accounts Tweeting to my Twitter feed and since I check everyone I follow, I had a feeling some random application out there was adding these SPAM accounts, most likely an application that I had tested out and gave my password too (naughty, naughty me).

So I’ve been motivated into doing the following 5 steps for a major Twitter maintenance:

1. Remove SPAM Accounts

Register yourself a free trial of Twitsweeper. This great little tool checks and removes followers that just Spam and does it so easily. What I love is there are 3 levels of automation: Full, Auto Remove after 72 hours or Manual. Twitsweeper suggested I had 250 spammy accounts (where did the rascals come from?) and I checked a bunch to make sure that they were infact spam.

They’ve done a great job with their filters and hopefully they’ll add the ability to check your following list so I’ll never see another tweet about teeth whitening or improving my downline with Donald Trump.  Tweet them to add this at @twitsweeper.

2. Remove Inactive Followers

UnTweeps is a free service that let’s you bulk unfollow accounts that have been inactive for over 30 days. It has a Whitelist so you can give your favourites a free pass, however, I’m pretty ruthless – yeah maybe they could be on vacation, in the hospital or have a legitimate reason for not tweeting, but more likely they are just lazy. Get rid of them.

3. Back up your Twitter Account

Get yourself a free account with Backupify (until Feb 15th) and start automatically backing up your Twitter account (and Facebook, WordPress and a bunch of others) daily to Amazon Web Services. Once you set it up, it will run daily.

4. Remove connections to your Twitter account.

Each time you use OAuth to authenticate an external application with Twitter, it adds a connection to your account. Since I test out a lot of Twitter apps, I suspect that this could be one of the possible culprits for how I mysteriously follow rogue spam accounts.

Either way, it’s good practice to regularly remove connections you aren’t using or you don’t 100% trust with your first born’s life. Visit Twitter Connections and remove them all – don’t worry they’ll reconnect again when you reuse the service.

5. Change your password

Ah yes, we all hate doing it, but it’s really the best way to protect your Twitter Account from being hijacked. There’s a reason I put this one last too – because since we’ve used services external from Twitter, by removing the connections and changing our password last you’ve ensured the services you used in the previous steps won’t have access to your account unless you reinstate them.

Twitter password change

Repeat regularly for a squeaky clean, protected Twitter account.

Categories: Social Media, Twitter - Tags:

41 Twitter Resources for Small Business

By: jaime | Published: January 4, 2010 · View Comments


This Twitter Resource list isn’t meant to be a comprehensive list of everything available, instead it’s a list of tools and applications that I’ve used and liked.  If you know of something better or something I’ve missed, please add a comment and I’ll check it out.

Finding Available Twitter Names

  • Tweexchange – checks names and availability and shows if .com is available.

Automate Following Twitter Accounts

It’s important to use discretion when automating following users.  Go for quality, not quantity.  I only automate following of people I have strategically searched for.  I don’t auto follow back anyone who follows me as I want to make sure that I only follow people that I’m actually interested in.

  • Tweet Adder - Simple interface, 1 time fee.  Use the coupon code – IMCASHSAVER (20% off).
  • SocialOomph -  More advanced than Tweet Adder with loads of options. Reoccurring monthly fee.

Tweeting – Scheduling and Management Consoles

  • CoTweet – my favourite Twitter client.  Simple interface, allows you to manage multiple accounts and schedule Tweets.  The features I love about CoTweet are it tracks conversations you’ve had, so when you click on someone’s profile it will tell you all the Tweets that you’ve exchanged with them and it allows you to archive tweets easily.
  • Hootsuite – a very popular management console.

Schedule of Twitter Chats

Client to participate in Twitter Chats (using hashtags)

  • TweetChat – simple interface to follow 1 hashtag per window.
  • TweetGrid – follow up to 3 keywords or hashtags in the same window.

Temporarily Unfollow A User

  • Twick Twock – allows you to schedule an amount of time to unfollow a user when they filling your feed because they are at a conference or talking about something you aren’t interested in.  Options are 5 min, 1 hour, 8 hours, 1 day, 1 week.

URL Shortening

  • Bitly – register an account and this great tool will not only shorten your URL, but track will also track how many people clicked on the link.  Most Twitter clients like CoTweet allow you to add your API Key so Bitly integrates automatically to shorten your links on the fly.

Delete inactive followers

  • UnTweeps – Since Twitter make Twitter Karma remove the Bulk Unfollow tool, UnTweeps has become the next best thing. It will allow you to search for inactive followers and delete them.
  • Twitter Friends – a tool with lots of interesting statistics.  Check out the Inactive tab to see who hasn’t used Twitter recently.  Unfortunately, there is no bulk select, so to unfollow you have to go to each Twitter user’s page and select unfollow.

Sources for Finding Content

  • Delicious.com – bookmarking site allowing you to see popular and recent content that has been bookmarked.
  • Daily RT – shows trending tweets.
  • Twitt(url)y – tracks and ranks URLs that people are tweeting about.  Make sure you sort by language.
  • Digg –  shared content that is voted on by the community based on quality.
  • StumbleUpon – community that discovers and rates web content.
  • Squidoo –  community generated pages (called lenses) on anything and everything.
  • Google Alerts – emails you updates about keywords you specify in news and on the web as they happen, daily or weekly.

Alerts – tracking conversations and keywords

  • Tweetalarm - free alerts for Twitter with options to receive emails as they arrive, twice daily, daily and weekly,
  • Tweet Beep – this alert service is able to keep track of who’s tweeting about your blog or website even if they use a URL shortener.  Free hourly alerts and premium option available to be alerted every 15 minutes for a monthly fee.
  • ListiMonkey - receive alerts for when a keyword appears in Twitter Lists you are monitoring.

Finding People to Follow

  • Listorious – directory of the best Twitter Lists and their members.
  • Twellow – Twitter Yellow Pages
  • GeoFollow – user directory by location.
  • Twibs – user business directory.
  • Tweep Search – allows you to search by location and Bio

Research and Measuring Results

  • Bitly – tracks how many people clicked on your links
  • Twitter Advanced Search – options to search based on keywords, people, places, dates and more.
  • Twitter Analyzer – includes graphs of daily tweet volume, RTs, reader reach, chats, mentions, subjects, hasthags and more.  Can give you insights into what your competition is doing on Twitter, or how you are stacking up.
  • TwitterCounter - some pretty cool statistics and allows compare your account activity with others.
  • TweetStats – graphs on analysis of your tweets.  With pretty colours. Win.
  • Twitter Grader – Get your Twitter ranking.
  • Tweetaholic – simple,but good statistics on your growth.

Back up your Twitter accounts

  • Tweetake – backs up to .csv file your followers, friends, favourites, tweets, direct messages or everything.
  • Backupify – backs ups Twitter, Facebook, WordPress and much more.

Create a PDF of all your Tweets

  • Tweetbook – creates a PDF file of all your tweets.

Share pictures on Twitter

  • Twitpic – share pictures on Twitter from your phone or on the web.

Share videos on Twitter

  • VidTweeter – create a custom video profile that is synced with Twitter and and allows you to create and share video tweets, short bubble video messages, video greeting cards.

Stop Receiving Automated Direct Messages

  • SocialOomph Opt Out – this will only work with auto direct messages that are configured with SocialOomph, so it won’t get them all – it’s still worth doing.

Create Twitter Coupons

  • twtQpon – offer exclusive coupons to your followers.

Categories: Social Media, Twitter - Tags: ,

Facebook Pages now Target Fan Location or Language for Status Updates

By: jaime | Published: November 21, 2009 · View Comments

Facebook has a great new feature for Pages that will be a blessing for businesses with a following larger one city, especially if they host regional events and marketing initiatives.  Status updates can now be posted by location or language, making it easy to share relevant information with audiences in specific locations.

As someone who runs local workshops and events, I think this is fabulous.

Creating a Status Update by Location

Start by entering your status update and then select the options button beside share and select customize.

Facebook Page customize location Facebook Pages now Target Fan Location or Language for Status Updates

In the choose the Choose your audience box, you can enter the country (or language) for your status update.

Facebook Pages Status update location Facebook Pages now Target Fan Location or Language for Status Updates

Once you have chosen your city, you further target by state/province or by city.

Facebook Page Choose Your Audience Facebook Pages now Target Fan Location or Language for Status Updates

What I love about this feature is you can drill down to city and select multiple cities if necessary, which avoids having to send out multiple updates if there is more than one city targeted for the update, making it a very well thought out feature update.

Categories: Facebook

4 Lessons of Social Media I Learned Living In An Indian Meditation Resort

By: jaime | Published: October 30, 2009 · View Comments

lotus 150x150 4 Lessons of Social Media I Learned Living In An Indian Meditation ResortA few years ago, while I was working in corporate IT jobs, I decided to go to India for 3 months and do a Work as Meditation program. The basis of the program was that I would work for 7 days a week, 6 hours a day in a job that I didn’t pick for 3 months, with the purpose of learning how to bring meditation into every area of life, specifically, the one I spend the most time doing – work.

At the time, I had just finished a particularly intense contract and wanted to find peace and balance in my life. The whole experience was a rollercoaster of inner transformation, and I realized the 4 key lessons I learned there apply perfectly to getting started with social media.

Lesson 1 – Do What You Love

Since the Work as Meditation program was Karma Yoga (or selfless service), I didn’t get to choose my own job, but when I arrived when there was a vacancy at the information desk, so my job turned out requiring me to sit under a gazebo in the lush, green paradise and talk to guests about the resort. I Loved it.

After a month, there was an opening for a graphic designer. With my IT background, they gave me the choice of staying where I was or moving into the new role. Since I wanted to learn how to love the job I hated but paid my bills, I felt the new job would give me experience that was applicable to my “real” life. Groan.

Funnily enough, instead, the lesson I learned was to choose what I love. The next 2 months were very challenging, and I fought with myself numerous times about dropping out and leaving early.

To get started with social media, start by sharing your passion. It takes time to see results and success with anything, and your passion will keep you going. It’s also important to start with strategies that compliment what you already enjoy. For example, if you like writing, you might want to start a blog, or contribute to Squidoo or Knol. If you enjoy talking or teaching, try making videos and sharing them on Youtube or Vimeo.

Lesson 2 – To Thy Own Self Be True (Be Authentic)

Even in a small spiritual community in India, people voice opinions about your life and how you’re living it. Since I felt like a total novice to spirituality, I let others’ opinions have way too much influence on my life.

This led me to discover my the second gem my experience in India had to offer – the only way to happiness is to find answers within myself, because trying to live by anyone else’s standards drives me a little crazy.

To be part of social media, you have to share yourself, your ideas and opinions. For some people, this can be really scary. If you are worried about privacy, overly concerned about what others think or you’re too focused on seeing results and making money straight away, you’ll struggle to be successful with social media.

Authenticity is a huge part of what makes people attractive online. Others can sense whether you’re genuinely interested in them or if you’re just trying to sell them. Choose authenticity.

3. Time and Focus are Required

On top of working 6 hours a day and I was required to attend a 2.5 hour meeting each night. After meals and a morning meditation, I was left with 1 – 2 hours of personal time each day (although, I was constantly reminded by others that all the time I spent there was personal time and I must stop segmenting it).

The point of this intense schedule was to teach us how to live for the moment, rather than living for the future (weekends). This highlighted the value of my personal time. If someone asked me to do something, instead of automatically agreeing, I would stop and consider if I really wanted to do it.

One of the biggest challenges you’ll face getting started is where to put your time and energy. Remember, not only will it take time to see results from social media, it will also take time for you to learn how to use it effectively. It’s better to start with one strategy, focus on it until you master it and measure the results before starting another strategy.

Lesson 4 – Let Go

To be perfectly honest with you, the first month I was at the resort I did very little serious meditation. Actually, I considered myself to be bad at it. I have a tendency to resist any authority, even if that’s my consciousness trying to exert authority over my mind.

After a particularly upsetting situation, I was feeling a baseball of stress sitting in my chest with the hitter, anxiety, stepping up to the plate to take a swing. A few people I knew were taking a night off their spirituality and heading into the town to do some serious drinking and for a moment I considered going too, even though I had quit drinking a couple of years before.

Stressed as I was, I realized where that was going to end, a few hours of release and monster hangover and no resolution. I decided to take a new road – instead I got up at 6am and did the craziest meditation I think ever invented, involving being blind-folded while screaming, jumping up and down, dancing, standing like statue. Something I had mocked only 2 weeks before.

But it worked. I was able to let go of my pain that day and see things in a new light. I even continued that crazy meditation every day for the rest of my time there and found some peace in the madness. That choice to start something new was an incredibly pivotal point for my time in India and my life.

Social Media is not a get rich quick strategy, it’s a long term medium to build relationships with others. It’s the gift of an open channel for communication with people you may never be able to reach traditionally. Regardless of the technology, building relationships is the same online as it is offline, it takes time to build rapport and trust. Doing that requires some selflessness on your part, helping when you can and while having no expectations of getting anything in return.

As a business owner, it’s important to separate your social media strategy from immediate sales goals. Some self promotion is ok as long as it’s deeply surrounded with service to others. By letting go of expectations, you allow yourself to be open to the serendipity of social media, while those who only try to promote themselves shut themselves off to all the opportunities out there.

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How To Change The Live Feed Settings On Facebook To Show All Friend Updates

By: jaime | Published: October 25, 2009 · View Comments

Facebook How To Change The Live Feed Settings On Facebook To Show All Friend UpdatesFacebook does love to redesign their site, often much to the chagrin of those who use it.  After hearing lots of feedback from users after the last redesigns, Facebook has made changes to the homepage and how the News Feed works, many of them this time, definitely for the better.

Now, there are 2 feeds on the Homepage instead of one:

  • Live Feed which gives you updates as they happen
  • News Feed which is now the revamped Highlights section

What was Highlights in the right-hand side bar, has now been added back into the News Feed view and has been causing some confusion, because like the Highlights section it doesn’t necessarily show updates in chronological order, but rather in what is popular or what Facebook thinks you might find interesting.  I really can’t wait until Facebook lets us customize what we would like to see based on what we think is interesting rather than just guessing for us.

The Live Feed view has some welcome re-additions, bringing back when friends are tagged in photos, RSVP for events, join groups and make new friends. Thankfully, birthdays are again more visible and I won’t have to feel so guilty for not sending my birthday wishes.

With the addition of the Live Feed, a new default setting has been added that only allows 250 friends to show updates in your feed. Since you can’t actually choose which 250 friends, you may want to change this setting. To do this:

1. Make sure you have Live Feed set.

1. Facebook Live Feed How To Change The Live Feed Settings On Facebook To Show All Friend Updates

2. Scroll to the Bottom of the Live Feed screen and Edit Options.

2. Edit Options How To Change The Live Feed Settings On Facebook To Show All Friend Updates

3. Change the Maximum number of friends shown in Live Feed to 5000 (the maximum friends that Facebook lets you have).

3. Change Newsfeed Setting How To Change The Live Feed Settings On Facebook To Show All Friend Updates

Don’t forget to save the changes.

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