Facebook posts

How desperate are you for your favorite celebrity to read your letter? The Guardian reports the introduction of a new initiative by Facebook that allows users to send a celebrity a message, but at a price. How do they calculate the fee? In this test run in the UK, a Facebook message to a celebrity can run anywhere from 71p to £11, depending on an algorithm that determines the celebrity’s online presence and fan base. Facebook’s new initiative is only in a test phase, running for a small percentage of users. Previous tests in the US included a $1 to contact non-friends and $100 to send a message to…

Facebook has been a promising venue through which to market a local business ever since it reached a high level of popularity back in 2008. Back then, it was just breaking the hundred million user level and was showing signs that it would be able to be business-friendly in contrast to its rival MySpace. Now, it’s 10 times bigger and commands more time of humans than any other website. The problem is that it’s not the easiest marketing platform to master. Unlike Google, Twitter, and other players that are used on a daily basis, Facebook has algorithms that keep businesses from finding success. Google…

President Barack Obama’s team is very active on social media. The Facebook page that carries his name has new posts twice a day on average with a mix of hopeful messages, political statements, and personalized views into life at the White House. On Twitter, they post several times a day with links, pictures, and quotes from the President. Google+ is a different story. It was only mildly active during the election campaign. After a peak of 19 posts in August, 2012, it started falling off quickly. In September, there were 11 posts followed by 5 in October. November, the month of the election, saw two…

Forget Apple versus Samsung or even iOS versus Android. The real mobile war is (and always has been) over capturing the attention of the users. We simply didn’t know it until Facebook released Home. Android phones can be turned into Facebook devices with Home. It’s that simple. Rather than being an Android device that has apps, Home makes Facebook the driving force of the device, moving the apps and other features of the phone under the Facebook shell. You’ll be able to get notifications and interact with your Facebook friends from any other app at any point other than during phone calls themselves….

In the digital age, there are plenty of challenges popping up for parents. The ever-connected world opens doors to risks that parents have never had to cope with in the past. The need for digital manners is just one of the major negatives associated with raising children today. Thankfully, it’s not all bad. Opening up lines of communication and bringing together resources across the internet (and thus the scope of human understanding) is a big benefit that many parents can use. Below is a sampling of a thread from Facebook that points to some of the benefits of social media for parents. It wasn’t…

When Facebook rolled out threaded comments last week, there was a clear lack of excitement from most of the social media blogs. It was a news item, nothing more, for most of them. Cool feature, about time, yadayadayada. What the majority of them missed is that this is arguably the most important change that Facebook has made for businesses this year. The touch factor is back. By that, I mean that businesses and organizations now have the ability to interact directly with questions and comments, making the comments made by others more useful and enabling longer comment threads to make much more sense…

Around 5:00 pm on Thursday, reports started flying in about child pornography being circulated on Facebook. This isn’t anything new – psychos around the world upload terrible things to all of the social media sites every day. It’s a constant flow but most sites have protocols to keep the exposure limited and few people share them. Yesterday’s incident was different. It was shared by 16,000 people according to a report on Buzzfeed. According to one source, by 9 p.m. Thursday night, a pornographic video of an infant had over 16,000 shares. For something like this to happen, it is clear that the original…

In an ideal world, marketing content through social media would be an extended process because we would all have the time to do it the right way. We could focus on positioning it, nurturing it, and timing everything out exactly like it should be timed. Unfortunately, this isn’t a perfect world and we have to maximize our results while minimizing the time and effort to achieve them. There are plenty of shortcuts that make promoting content on social media faster and easier and there are plenty of techniques used to make the promotions more effective. The real key is to find the right mix of the two to…

On the surface, Facebook seems like the perfect venue on which to build a service, even a business. It’s wildly popular, easy to develop on, and is the source of viral spread for many apps and services. If you cross a certain line, though, Facebook becomes that pretty face with an axe behind its back ready to hack your business into bits and pieces. The new MessageMe app isn’t the first victim of Facebook’s jealous blade, but it’s one of the most bizarre because it doesn’t appear to be the type of thing that Facebook would chop up. They did, though, cutting off access to Social Graph today and giving yet…

This is a topic that has been covered so many times that one might wonder how it keeps popping up. The reality (from a content perspective) is that Facebook posting best practices is the gift that keeps on giving. It’s frustrating to businesses and annoying to bloggers, but at the end of the day there’s one simple truth: whatever worked yesterday may not work today but may work again tomorrow. That’s Facebook. It’s social media in general from a business perspective. There are three dynamics at work and they rarely do more than lightly influence the other two: Facebook and other social media sites…