Summary:

You assume that if someone “Likes” your business page, and you post a status update, that it will show up on their News Feed if they look quickly enough, right?

Wrong – Most status updates by business pages are not shown to most of their fans.

This is devastating to businesses, and most don’t know anything about it.

Details:

This is from a newsletter I wrote a year ago, in March of 2012.  To subscribe to my monthly newsletter, go to 617-PATRICK Social Media Newsletter

Facebook does not show every status post to everyone who “Likes” your page.  In fact, estimates are that when you first start to post, your posts are only shown to 7% (yep, seven percent) of the people who clicked “Like” on your business page.  Other estimates are that most business’ posts are only seen by 17% (not a typo, seventeen) of their fans.

Don’t believe me?  Google facebook edgerank 17

Why?

Zuckerberg didn’t tell me this directly, but conjecture is that Facebook’s philosophy is that it is a place for friends to hang out with friends.  Businesses can pay to advertise, but creating a business page is almost a free way to advertise to loyal customers on Facebook, and there’s no big upside to Facebook to support that.  Also, they worry about spam (even though you can control your “Likes”) and businesses that just do one way broadcasting communication.

What does Facebook want?

Engagement.  They want businesses to be interactive and engaging with their customers.

How do they measure?

They use a complicated, undocumented formula called “Edgerank”.  Google it, and you’ll see proof of what I’ve said above (which you still didn’t believe, did you).  It will annoy you and frustrate you, but it will help educate you.

What can you do?

There are a lot of things you can do, but here are two of the biggest:

• Post statuses that encourage Comments
• Post statuses that encourage “Likes”
  • Comments are more important than “Likes”, maybe by as much as four times
• Get people to “Share” you post by clicking Share
  • Facebook likes this more than anything

Bad example of a status post - “We are selling $50 restaurant gift cards”
Better example – “We are selling $50 restaurant gift cards.  What are your favorite restaurants to go to?”

Bad example – “We’re having our monthly open house on Thursday night.”
Good example – “We’re having our monthly open house on Thursday night.  If you’re coming, please click Like.  If not, please tell us in a comment so we can make adjustments for next month.”

The good examples encourage Comments and Likes.  If you want to see a great example of a business that does this well, follow the Phantom Gourmet at http://www.facebook.com/phantomgourmet

They are one of my clients, but they used this philosophy before I started working with them.

How important, powerful, annoying and frustrating is that?

For speaking, training or consulting on social media or internet marketing, please call (617)-PATRICK, i.e. 617-728-7425

Summary:

Name a word that starts with G and ends with E and rhymes with Hullible.  Its harder than you think!

No, it isn’t.

And here’s why they do it…..

Details:

Name a word that starts with G and ends with E and rhymes with Hullible.  Its harder than you think!

No, it isn’t.

Or, type “Jump” in the comments and watch what happens. Its amazing!

No, it isn’t.

However, you’re now getting 5 posts a week with something like that. Here’s why:

Facebook likes businesses that have posts with a lot of Likes and Comments.  They use an algorithm called “Edgerank”, and that algorithm loves Comments 4 times as much as Likes, so spammers will use any  annoying techniques to get anyone to put in any type of Comment.

They post a status asking you to put in a Comment with “a band name that doesn’t have an X in it”, and they end up with a post that has a lot of Comments and a lot of Likes.

Facebook will now put that business’s posts at the top of people’s news feeds, because they think that Facebook users are commenting because they like the posts.  Right now, Facebook isn’t smart enough to see this annoying trend and stop it.

These businesses then usually change the page name to be the name of their spam site, where they sell “blue pills”, but because of the posts that had a lot of Comments and Likes, they look legitimate from Facebook’s point of view, so their posts get seen by more people.

And their blue pills taste terrible, Gullible.

To fight back,

• go to the upper right of the post, click the down arrow, and click “Report Story Or Spam”
• Click “Share” and share this info with others

¸,☆*°´The More You Know ¸,☆*°´`°*☆,¸

Joe Ciulla just watched the Socialcam video “Great white shark eats gangster beating up girlfriend”

Don’t you hate it when your Facebook timeline is filled up with posts saying what videos or articles your friends are watching on

• Socialcam
• Viddy
• Yahoo reader
• Washington Post, et cetera

especially since you know your friends didn’t want you to see what they were reading/watching.

Here’s how you stop your friends from seeing what you are watching:

• click Facebook in the upper left hand corner
• in the upper right, beside Home click the arrow
• click Account Settings
• on the left, click Apps
• Yikes.  There are probably a bunch of them.
• to remove an app, on the right, click the X.  Great tip – to remove a bunch quickly, click the X, then when it asks for a confirmation, click Enter with your left hand, and that one will be deleted, but the next one will have its X under the mouse.  Rinse, lather, repeat.
• if you want to keep the app, but not have everyone see what you read, click Edit.  The 3rd line down says “Posts on your behalf”.  On the right, click Edit, then “Only me”.

Now the rest of the world can’t see your white shark gangster fetish.

You’re welcome.

P.S.  those videos are never as good as the posts make them appear to be.

You have extra season tickets for Red Sox games.  I’ll show you how to use LinkedIn to make great business connections, and maybe someday get some new referrals and sales.

Details:

A favorite client

One of my favorite clients, named Vology, in Tampa, Florida, is an award winning computer reseller, selling computer networking equipment like Juniper routers.  They brought me down to teach their sales people how to use LinkedIn and Twitter to make more sales.

They have season tickets to the Tampa Bay Rays games (3rd row behind home plate) and arranged the seminar so that I trained them during the day, and we went to see the Red Sox play the Rays that night.  Awesome.

I asked them what they do if they can’t find a client to take their season tickets for a game.  They said that they’d typically give them to employees or corporate friends.

Innovative relationship technique: use LinkedIn to make “influential friends” using your tickets

I gave them an idea that was worth the price of admission.   I said that they should find Chief-level officers from Tampa on LinkedIn that liked baseball, and ask them to the game.  How?  Do an Advanced Search with:

• Title: Chief
• Location: within 50 miles of Tampa
• Keywords: baseball or rays

This way, they could find anyone with the word “Chief” in their title who liked baseball so much that they put “Baseball” or “Rays” in their profile.  There are 11 matches.

Now track them down and make the most fun cold call ever:

You: “Want to go to the Rays game tomorrow night?  Third row behind the plate.  Free premium buffet.”
Them: “What’s the catch?”
You: “No catch.  We do this 10 times a year, and we make friends with other baseball fans.”

Think that some of them some might give you some great referrals?  Think you’ll have a great time regardless?

How cool is that idea?

Invite me to a game.

Join my newsletter

This is a tip that I sent out in my newsletter last summer.  Sign up for my newsletter of awesomeness and you could get tips like this before I put them in my blog.

Good luck out there.

If you use PowerPoint, and want to jump to slide number 51 quickly (instead of pressing the Right Arrow 51 times), put in slide number, then Enter.

Details:

I wanted to give you a quick tip from my newsletter last summer, which you could have gotten 6 months ago if you got my newsletters – so sign up in the upper right hand corner of this page!

In the video below, I show where I explained it at a keynote speech, and they applauded for it, admittedly after I told them to.

Problem:

When you get out of a PowerPoint presentation to show another file, like a video, internet site, et cetera, it isn’t always trivial to jump back to the slide number where you left off.

Solution:

In a PowerPoint Slide Show, if you want to jump to slide number 51, type in 51, then Enter, and PowerPoint will jump to slide number 51, as I show in the video at the top.

Cool, huh?   Be careful out there.

LinkedIn may now use your picture to advertise other products.  Change privacy settings if you don’t like this.

Details:

LinkedIn is doing “social advertising”, which means that they can use your picture in LinkedIn ads that are shown to your connections to advertise products that you might not endorse.  Your connections may be misled and think you endorse them, depending on how savvy they are.  (Facebook did this at one point, and most people hated it).

LinkedIn was probably using my picture to “get attention from the ladies”.

Here’s how you stop it:

1. Hover your cursor over your name in the upper right hand corner of your LinkedIn page
2. Click Settings
3. In the lower left, click “Account”
4. In the top middle, click “Manage Social Advertising”
5. Uncheck and Save

Call LinkedIn and offer to sell the use of your picture for $500,000 per year, as I did.

Still waiting.

Do you care if they use your picture?

You can start a YouTube video at some point other than the beginning by using the #t option.

Details:

I love this tip.

Problem:

You want to show someone a video, but you don’t want them to waste their time with the introduction, or you just want them to see a small portion, but its 2 minutes and 2 seconds into the video.  You could just tell them to start at 2 minutes and 2 seconds into the video, but here’s how you make them automatically do it.

Solution:

Add the option #t=2m02s to the URL, where the “2m” tells Youtube “2 minutes” and “02s” means “2 seconds”.  For example, there’s a very funny, short African frog video at

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WlEzvdlYRes

If you wanted to start it 7 seconds into the video, use the URL
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WlEzvdlYRes#t=0m07s


Another example, and embedded YouTube video

You can also do this in embedded videos.  For instance, on my demo video, I bring in my Mom 23 seconds into the video at Start embedded YouTube video at different start time

Save your friends some time with this feature.

Cool, huh?

Here’s how your Facebook status updates can be seen by the public, and how to restrict them so the public cannot search for them.

Details:

You may know that your public status updates can be seen by anyone in the world, but do you know how people find them?  I’ll show you both sides here:

How to post Facebook statuses to the public

When you post a status update, just to the left of the “Post” button, there is a drop down menu that allows you to post to the whole world or just to a “custom” group, like your friends, or even a more restricted group, like your friends except for work friends.  In my shameless self promotion, here I am on Fox news talking about this at 1:23.  Note that at the time (Feb 2011), the “Post” button was the “Share” button.

How to see public Facebook status posts

Let’s say you wanted to see what people are saying about Comcast.  If you put Comcast in the search box at the top of your Facebook page, it will show you

• The Comcast business page
• A bunch of “Comcast sucks” and “I hate Comcast” pages

However, at the bottom, click where it says “see more results for comcast”.

Now, on the left, click “Public Posts” and you can see posts from anyone that set up their status updates so that they can be seen by the public.

Implications – why you care

Here’s how this information can be helpful to you:

• Careful what you say – your bosses, ex-girlfriends, enemies, and competition can see it
• My conclusion is shown at 2:59 in the video above – don’t post anything on the Internet that you wouldn’t want to be seen on the nightly news
• If you are getting cable, you’ll see why you don’t want to get Comcast.  The public is constantly talking about their bad experiences with them, and I’m one of them.  This works for any product you are considering.
• If you have a brand, you may want to monitor what people are saying about you.

Be careful out there.

***************************************************************************************
Patrick O’Malley, aka (617)-PATRICK, is a professional speaker on social media and Google ranking.

Summary:

Before you call a prospect, check their interests.  Or you can look for interests in a “reverse direction”.

Details:

If you are

• cold calling
• calling a new prospect
• meeting someone for the first time

you should have some way to start the conversation.  If you care cold calling, you need some way to get their attention in the first 5-10 seconds, since most prospects don’t have time for idle chatter.

LinkedIn tip

Look at the prospect’s LinkedIn profile and look at their “Interests”, which are at the bottom.  This is a clever technique that very few people use.

Real example of scrutinizing a LinkedIn profile:

When I went to do the keynote in the video above, I knew I would meet the CEO of AMS, Jim Bourdon.  I looked at his profile and noticed that he listed “golf” among his interests.  Therefore, the first thing I started talking to him about was golf, and the conversation went effortlessly.

Using interests in “reverse” fashion:

Let’s say that your target prospect is typically a CFO, and you are trying to get some new prospects to join you for a golf outing near Boston.  Try the following – do an advanced search in LinkedIn with the following search

• Title: “chief financial officer” OR cfo
• Keywords: golf OR golfing
• Location: near Boston

Now take a look at the results, and the CFOs that you contact will probably be much more interested in your golf offer.

There are even better, smarter, and more efficient ways to do this, and we teach them in our training sessions, which are full of awesomeness.  Call (617)-PATRICK for more.

Go forth and prospect.

Summary:

My interview on Fox TV News about how I used social media during the tsunami in Japan.

Details:

This is one of my two recent interviews last week on Fox TV News after the tsunami talking about

• how I helped a friend of mine who was in a hotel in Tokyo during the tsunami by communicating with her using Facebook (her only working option)
• how I used Twitter to try to warn people about the tsunami continuing to move to other areas, like Guam
• how Microsoft Bing made a huge mistake by trying to use the tsunami to market the search engine

In addition, I got to talk about one of my passions, which is that I think cell phone companies ought to warn you if an emergency is happening in your area.  They know where you are, so why can’t they warn you?

My sound bite:

“If the cell phone company can tell you that there is s Starbucks 5 minutes away,

why can’t they tell you that there is a tsunami 5 minutes away?”