Facebook | Social Media University, Global (SMUG)

Facebook 103: Facebook Friend Etiquette

In the 1960s, when I was too young to be in on all the rebellion, the anti-war protesters had a slogan expressing wariness of all those who had begun their fourth decade: “Never trust anyone over 30.”

For those of us who are now among the thirtysomethings and above, here’s a general rule of Facebook etiquette I follow with few exceptions:

“Never friend anyone under 30.”

I still accept friend requests from youngsters, but I let them initiate the connection. Especially since I’m a grandpa I don’t want to unsettle the younger Facebook crowd. I don’t want teenagers wondering “Who’s this old guy who wants to be my friend?”

If you’re old enough to know better, I’d recommend the same rule for you.

Some other helpful hints:

Do invite people in your e-mail address book to be your Facebook friends. If you use Web-based services like Gmail or Hotmail, it’s an easy process. We’ll cover how to do it in a future course. The benefit of adding people as Facebook friends is you can retain contact with them even as they change jobs (and consequently their e-mail addresses.) Their Facebook profiles will stay the same, though, and they will likely update them with their new e-mail to stay in touch.
Do use Facebook Friend Lists to group your friends, as described in Facebook 210. You can assign varying levels of privacy for personal, family or professional friends. Besides the enhanced privacy settings, it also makes it easier for you to send a quick message to a group with a common interest. A person can be on more than one of your lists.
Don’t just network for networking’s sake. Even worse, don’t network for marketing’s sake. If you’re just adding friends so you can later spam them with get-rich-quick schemes, you’re missing the point. Social media aren’t about aggregating eyeballs; they’re about making real connections. That’s why I have these rules for accepting Facebook friend requests.
“Unfriending” is OK, but you have other options. If I accept a friend request from someone who turns out to be a spammer, I “unfriend” without a second thought. They have tons of “friends” and won’t be personally offended. In the hypothetical example of a real acquaintance or former classmate who gets uncomfortably friendly after all these years, you can start by putting him or her into a group with restricted access to your profile, including taking away the ability to see your wall or photos. Again, see Facebook 210 for instructions. If that still doesn’t create enough distance, you can unfriend and block the person. But the preliminary steps may be enough, without invoking the nuclear option.

How about you? What additional “Miss Manners” advice would you offer for people new to Facebook?

RAQ – Photos from a Flip Camera?

I’ve gotten something of a reputation as a Flip video camera booster (you might even say it’s the official video blogging camera of SMUG), and today a friend copied me on an e-mail about an offer for a free Flip that included a question for me and led to some others. In keeping with our Recently Asked Questions feature, I’m sharing both the link to the free Flip offer and the subsequent dialogue.

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Chancellor RAQ: Creating Facebook Pages

This is the start of a new occasional feature at SMUG, in which we’ll answer publicly some of the questions that are sent via e-mail. I thought about calling these FAQs, but a question doesn’t need to be asked frequently to be worth sharing the answer publicly. It could be that others just haven’t thought to inquire. So we’re creating a category for them called Recently Asked Questions (Chancellor RAQs).

This first question actually does fit the the frequency criterion, too, since I’ve had it a couple of times in the last week:

Q. How do I create a “fan page” for my organization in Facebook? Do I first need to create a group? I can’t find anywhere on the Facebook site where it gives any instructions and apparently I’m not quite cool or hip enough (yet!) to figure it out intuitively!!

A. You’re right: not about your lack of coolness or hipness, but about the relative obscurity of the method for creating a new Fan page for your brand. If you look at the bottom of any Facebook page, you’ll see an “Advertisers” link. When you click that, you will learn not only about Facebook’s advertising options, but also will see, on the right side, a description of Facebook Pages (along with a button you can click to create a new page.) Or if you want to take a shortcut, just click here.

This assumes you already have set up your own personal profile in Facebook. Someone has to be the administrator for the Fan page, so you can’t create a page until you have an individual profile.

This leads to a follow-up:

Q. I want to set up a page for my volunteer organization. Shouldn’t I just set up a separate profile for the organization (instead of a Page), so that when I rotate off the board someone else can take over? I don’t want to be forever connected to this Page through my Facebook account.

A. No. Individual profiles are for real people. Pages are for brands and organizations. Once you have created your organization’s Fan page, you can add others as administrators; for example, we have two administrators for the Mayo Clinic page. Be careful when adding administrators, though, because anyone who has admin rights can do everything with a page that you can, up to and including deleting the page. But when you leave the organization, you can just have yourself removed as an administrator for the page.

In a future post, I will go through the steps of creating a Facebook page as part of the Facebook curriculum. For now, hopefully the answers to these RAQs can help SMUGgles get started.

Facebook 302: Facebook for Medical Support Groups

Sites like CarePages and CaringBridge have been developed to meet important needs for hospitalized patients and their families and friends.

But Facebook, as a powerful general-purpose social networking site, may prove to be an even more useful alternative to these dedicated patient communication sites.

I will start by describing the very real needs CarePages and similar sites meet, and then discuss how Facebook can meet those needs.

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Facebook: Biggest AND Fastest-Growing Social Network

As Erik Schonfeld wrote today on TechCrunch, Facebook is blowing away the other social networks both in monthly unique visitors and in growth rate.

Even though Facebook is now the largest social network in the world,—with 132 million unique visitors in June—it is also still the fastest growing.

(At least among the major social networks). According to figures compiled by comScore, Facebook’s visitor growth is up 153 percent on an annual basis. This compares to anemic 3 percent growth for MySpace. Other social networks showing strong global growth include Hi5 (100 percent) and Friendster (50 percent), despite each of those being less than half the size of Facebook. Orkut and Bebo fall in at 41 percent and 32 percent growth, respectively.

Read the whole story here: Facebook Is Not Only The World’s Largest Social Network, It Is Also The Fastest Growing.

When I first started writing extensively about Facebook a little over a year ago, it was growing by 3 percent a week. At that time, MySpace was the bigger player and was growing more slowly, but that was rationalized by many as a byproduct of its size: when the denominator is huge, you can’t expect the percentage growth rate to keep up with smaller competitors.

Erik analyzes what’s driving the growth for Facebook, and clearly the user-contributed translation to other languages has been the major factor. But even in North America, Facebook’s growth was 38 percent. That compares favorably with any of the other sites, and is more than 10 times the growth rate for MySpace.

One question: Where does LinkedIn fit in? Why is it nowhere to be found on these comScore charts?

I guess that’s two questions. But if anyone has the answers, I’d love to hear them and I sure so would our SMUG student body.

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