Balance Your Personal and Professional Selves on Facebook

More people use Facebook than any other social network, which means that you need a Facebook strategy for your career. This is especially true since we usually use our personal accounts when we’re on it. Here are some tips for managing your personal account in relation to your professional identity:

• Use your lists. Creating different lists for different groups of people – coworkers, friends, and professional contacts, for example – helps you keep track of whom you’re sharing things with.
• Target each post. Before you hit “Enter,” double-check who will be able to see it. Should the post be public? For a specific list? For only you?
• “View as colleague.” Use Facebook‘s “view as” feature to see what your profile looks like to other people. Make sure your colleagues, and your boss, see what you intend them to.
• Change your defaults. If you use Facebook on your phone, set your default privacy settings to the narrowest possible audience. It’s better to share too narrowly than too widely.

Adapted from Being Professionally Personable on Facebook | Alexandra Samuel | Harvard Business Review.

Social Media Infographic

With all of the various social media outlets that people are using these days, we thought it would be nice to come up with an infographic that breaks down each of the most popular social outlets into digestible snippets demonstrating advantages of each and how they can be best utilized.

Download a printable PDF of the infographic.

via Social Media Infographic | Leverage New Age Media.

Of Course Facebook Is a Utility!

[Mark Zuckerberg has] always called Facebook a utility. Here’s a quote from an article by Jeff Clavier on “The Facebook” from October 27, 2005, when the service had around 5,000,000 members and was open only to students in certain universities and invited high schoolers, and was pretty much the Snapchat of its time:

Mark said that he has not conceived the Facebook as a social network – which is a community application, it is a directory that he considers a utility that students use in order to find information which is socially relevant.

Zuckerberg’s vision has had its occasional blips, but for the most part it’s been remarkably consistent for almost a decade now, and he’s never wavered on the idea of Facebook being a utility. More than anything else, that might be the mantra which got the service to 1.19 billion monthly active users. It’s also helped make it into a real business. Among the lessons of the web: The fact that something is cool doesn’t mean that there’s any obvious way to make a lot of money from it, and the fact that something isn’t cool doesn’t mean that it’s doomed to failure.

via Of Course Facebook Is a Utility! | TIME.com

Facebook’s cool-kids problem: Instagram, Snapchat, and the anti-Facebook phenomenon.

Facebook’s cool-kids problem, then, is not an existential threat. Rather, it seems to be an inherent limitation in the concept of a social network for everyone. You can have everyone, or you can have the cool kids, but you can’t have both. I’m guessing Facebook will settle for everyone.

via Facebook’s cool-kids problem: Instagram, Snapchat, and the anti-Facebook phenomenon | Slate

Facebook Update Tips For your Business

Nearly every morning I walk by a house that makes me feel more welcome than all of the other anonymous and generic houses in my neighborhood. Not only is it well decorated, but it sits alone, providing a dividing line between other houses and the cemetery. What makes this house so welcoming isn’t just the location or the decorations, but the fact that the owner goes out of his or her way to greet me.

Not in person, but through the words that they write on the sidewalk in chalk.

I have no clue who lives there, man, woman, child, or all of the above. All I know is that they go out of their way to greet passersby and make them feel welcome. The sidewalk chalk messages vary from time to time, sometimes just a word, like “Smile,” and other times full sentences. Once there was even a hashtag included in the sidewalk message, in true digital age fashion. At times I feel like knocking on the door, but I don’t want to disturb them. But someday I hope to meet whomever lives in that home.

As business owners and folks who manage Facebook business pages, we can learn a lot from this. We study the numbers and stress out over our messaging, looking for the best possible way to draw customers in and get them to engage with us.

And while our customers might connect with us on Facebook and other social platforms in order to show their support, or to get information on specials and deals, that’s not all they want. In fact, if all you give them is business related stuff, they might tune you out. Mix it up. Talk about the other things in life. Here are a few options on things you can talk about on Facebook that your customers might like, and might be enough to draw them in and welcome them.

via Facebook Update Tips For your Business | Inkling Media.

How to measure brand awareness on Facebook

“How do I measure social media?” is one of the most frequent questions I get asked whenever I give social media seminars.

However, it is difficult to give someone a one-size-fits-all answer as it largely depends on what you want to measure, and what you want to measure largely depends on your wider objectives in the first place.

With this in mind, I thought I’d put together a series of articles where each week I take a particular objective and offer some guidance on how to measure it.

I’m going to kick off with brand awareness – this week focusing solely on Facebook so as not to make the articles too long.

via How to measure brand awareness on Facebook | Econsultancy.

Building Brand Awareness on Facebook | 5 Critical Tactics

Here are some Facebook tactics along with insights on when they are or are not effective. This is not a formula; it is a set of tools that will broaden your social media branding arsenal. You need to develop your own unique social media strategy and discover how you can best apply these tools.

via Building Brand Awareness on Facebook | 5 Critical Tactics | Infinity Concepts.

Are You A Compulsive Networker? 10 Warning Signs

While career coaches and success gurus expound on the virtues of networking—especially in a down economy—some professionals take it too far. Management and addiction specialists say they are seeing more people compulsively attending events, obsessively growing the number of their connections online and wearing themselves out with little too show for it.

via Are You A Compulsive Networker? 10 Warning Signs | Forbes.

Social Media – Age, Not Gender, Drives Most Social Media Use

Though Facebook enjoys broad adoption among users of all age groups and genders, other social media sites do not have such ubiquitous appeal, according to a survey from Netpop Research.

Facebook, in other words, is not the norm, Netpop found.

For example, Facebook’s penetration among socially networked adults in the US is 90%, and the site enjoys roughly the same penetration among socially networked women age 18-34 (92%) and age 35+ (92%).

By contrast, YouTube’s penetration among socially networked adults is 56%, but the video sharing site is far more popular among younger, social women (66%) and men (83%).

The use of Wikipedia and Twitter is also higher among younger, socially networked adults:

• 65% of men and 48% of women age 18-34 use Wikipedia, compared with 40% of men and 28% of women age 35+.
• 34% of young men and 24% of young women (24%) use Twitter, compared with 17% of men and 10% of women age 35+.

via Social Media – Age, Not Gender, Drives Most Social Media Use | MarketingProfs Article.

Putting our Heads Together – The Awesome Power of Networking

Today, with the help of computers – PCs, tablets, smartphones, etc. – and the Internet, inter-human cooperation – networking – even with people on the other side of the world, has become much easier. Nothing illustrates our eagerness to cooperate with others better than the wildfire spread of Internet social networking. The special value to businesses of such instant collaboration tools has only recently been fully appreciated. Facilitating the pooling of an organization’s brainpower is increasingly recognized as an enormous productivity booster. That recognition accounts for the fast-growing popularity of a new type of Internet service called enterprise social networking – a sort of blend of Twitter and Facebook that’s secure and configurable so that it can be restricted to a predefined set of users or groups. One such enterprise social network operation is Yammer – a San Francisco based company recently acquired by Microsoft for 1.2 Billion – whose revenue is reported in The Economist to have grown by 132% last year alone.

via Putting our Heads Together – The Awesome Power of Networking « Jeff Robinson – Contrarian’s Mind.