Tag: Facebook

Facebook 240: 5 Steps to Customizing Your Facebook Page

In my post last Friday from the Facebook for Business seminar, I reported some recommendations from Alan De Keyrel, a friend from Rochester who was the keynote speaker.

Among Alan’s suggestions was that organizations with Facebook pages should create a custom landing tab for their visitors, so that you don’t “just dump them on your wall” but instead have some kind of welcome message that directs them in a way that is in keeping with the goals you have set for your Facebook page.

In Facebook 240, I will take you step-by-step through the process of customizing your organization’s page.

In keeping with my original goals for SMUG, to learn on my own before applying in my work, I will use the SMUG.Chancellor page as the demo example.

Maybe soon we will apply something like this on our Mayo Clinic page. In the meantime, I’ve learned the basics of how to do this, so if and when we decide to make that switch we can do it seamlessly.

Note: The following applies to organizational or business Pages, not personal Profiles. The SMUG.Chancellor page is what was formerly called a “fan” page, and even though it says “Lee Aase” at the top, it’s about me as an author/speaker. It’s different from my personal profile.

A personal Profile uses the “Add as Friend” terminology, and is for individuals to connect with each other. It is reciprocal; in other words, you don’t get to see my profile details until you add me as a friend and I confirm the relationship. Pages, on the other hand, use the “like” lingo. If you “like” Lee Aase, the SMUG Chancellor, you are connected to that page. No need to confirm the connection.

So I’m glad to be your friend on Facebook, but I hope you’ll like me too.

Step 1: Install the FBML application on your page

From your Page, click the Edit Page link under your profile picture:

Then click the Applications link in the left navigation to see the applications you have already installed. Your screen should look something like this (click to enlarge):

Click on the Add Application button for the Static FBML application. If for some reason the Static FBML application isn’t listed, you can search for it by clicking the Browse more applications link at the bottom of the list.

Continue reading “Facebook 240: 5 Steps to Customizing Your Facebook Page”

One of your next three page views will be on Facebook

If you’re reading this on the SMUG site (instead of in an RSS reader), it’s highly likely that one of the next three pages you load in your browser will be on Facebook. That’s according to this CBS News story:

According to Hitwise, Facebook has a 10 percent share of Internet visits in the U.S., and accounts for nearly 25 percent of page views. Trailing behind Facebook, Google has about a 7 percent share and YouTube (owned by Google) about 3 percent of Internet visits. On the page view front, YouTube and Google have a combined 11.7 percent share. It appears that Facebook is gobbling up a lot of what its CEO Mark Zuckerberg called the vast “uncharted” territory of the Internet.

So since this post counts as one, it’s likely that if you’re like most people (or at least “U.S. Americans“) one of your next three page views will be on Zuckerberg’s site.*

That got me to thinking about a post I did three years ago, when Facebook had “only” 35 million users, which I titled “Facebook: Covering the Planet in 5 years?” I made some projections based on Facebook’s “astonishing” growth rate of 3 percent per week, to see how long it would take Facebook to sign up everyone on the planet, a goal that had been attributed to one of its cofounders. Here was my take on it:

If that weekly growth trend continues, Facebook would have 6 billion users in January 2011, which would make that cofounder prediction of blanketing the planet in 5 years come true.

Of course lots of factors could intervene to diminish Facebook’s growth rate. As the old prospectus boilerplate says, “Past performance does not guarantee future results.” But even if Facebook’s “astonishing” growth rate were cut by a third, to 2 percent a week, it would have 400 million users by January 2010.

Clearly, Facebook’s growth rate slowed to something closer to that 2 percent a week mark. But even though it’s a few years behind schedule in covering the planet, the goal seems less fanciful than it did three years ago.

*Note to the humorless: I realize that the Hitwise figures are averages. More likely you’ll browse around on some other sites and then go on Facebook and log 50 page views there all at once. If you’re looking for some other historical (and hopefully interesting) posts about Facebook, mainly from 2007, check out the Facebook Business page. For a more structured approach to learning, see the Facebook curriculum section.

Safe Social Media for Family, Fun and Profit

Tonight I’m giving the first of three presentations I will be doing for a group of community banks in southern Minnesota over the next three Thursdays.

Here are the slides I will be using. Some will be familiar to those who have seen my previous presentations, but there is a new section on Facebook privacy protection that begins at about Slide #92.

Safe Social Media for Family, Fun and Profit

View more presentations from Lee Aase.

Many of my presentations are for medical audiences, so it’s nice for a change of pace to be talking with parents and business owners.

Facebook 211: Friend Lists

In Facebook 210, a course developed over two years ago, I described how to use friend lists to make Facebook your all-purpose networking platform.

Back then, Facebook had “only” 100 million active users. Now it’s over 500 million. And over the last couple of years there have been changes to the site and resulting controversies about privacy. I will deal further with privacy protections in Facebook 212 and 213, but for now I want to update the Friend lists concept and highlight the role it can play, enabling you to be friends on Facebook with a wide variety of people without giving all of them the same level of access to your information.

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On World Peace, Labor Day and Blocking Facebook

I’m as big an advocate of social media as you’re likely to meet. Still, I think Washington Post columnist Kathleen Parker went a bit overboard in yesterday’s offering, Facebook and social media offer the potential of peace:

Not to be a Pollyanna, but it is striking to realize that peace becomes plausible when barriers to communication are eliminated. More than 500 million people use Facebook alone. Of those, 70 percent are outside the United States. MySpace has 122 million monthly active users, and Twitter reports 145 million registered users.

I actually think Ms. Parker does have a bit of the Pollyanna principle running through her argument. And it’s kind of nice for me to have people like her occupying the “extreme optimism” end of the social media spectrum. It makes me seem more moderate. I agree that building more friendship connections is helpful, but I’m not anticipating a Nobel Peace Prize for Mark Zuckerberg.

While I don’t see social media ending the Middle East conflict, I do see these tools playing a huge role in connecting and strengthening relationships within organizations and among those with common interests.

That leads me to one of Parker’s paragraphs that I thought was particularly illuminating, as it relates to the practice of many companies in blocking access to social media sites from their corporate networks:

Obviously, some countries don’t like these media for the very reasons we do. People talk. Facebook is blocked in Syria and China and until recently was also blocked in Iran, Pakistan and Bangladesh. Where freedom flourishes, so do open channels of communication.

As we celebrate Labor Day in the United States, maybe opening access to social media sites at work wouldn’t rank among the all-time achievements for employee-friendly workplaces. It probably won’t usher in a Millennium of peace, either.

But at least it would make your company more open than China, Syria and Iran.

Does your company block access to Facebook, Twitter and YouTube at work?