Previously, Facebook had created 3 strict rules that allowed:

1. No call to action
2. No website information
3. No address information

Facebook has now made revisions to these restrictions. As of March 6th, these restrictions are wiped away and a new rule is in place. Facebook states that your cover photo may not include more than 20 percent text.

If you are unsure how to measure this percentage, Paavo has a great tool to ensure your Facebook cover photo meets this requirement. COVER COMPLIANCE TOOL

To learn more and view 9 businesses that leverage Facebook’s new cover photo rule, click here.

A recent study from Javelin Strategy and Research showed that more than 12 million people in the United States were victims of identity fraud.

Online security is an issue in today’s digital world. Despite privacy acts, you can never be too cautious. While you should always assume that everything you put on the internet is public, there are steps you can take to decrease the chances of being personally hacked.

Many online social sites like Facebook and LinkedIn ask for your birthday. It is ok to enter the month and date, but we suggest leaving out or hiding the year you were born. It is not because your “old,” but hackers have a far greater chance of successfully stealing your identity if they know your age.

Avoid clicking on suspicious links while you peruse social media sites, especially Twitter. Seventy percent of identity theft attacks stem from links that ask you to visit a scam website via a private message. Restrain and don’t click!  No one is spreading nasty rumors about you, at least not on Twitter!

As social media experts, we see many profiles that have left their information, posts and photos public. By doing this, you are helping thieves easily access your personal information. Statistics show that 30 percent of Facebook profiles are not set to private and 14 percent do not know their Facebook privacy settings. With that said, inform yourself of your social site’s online privacy settings. It’s not fool proof, but it’s a good start to protect yourself from being hacked.

Create strong passwords. This seems silly, but many people use their pets’ and/or a child’s name. If the password requires a number, many people use the number “1.” Don’t do this! Create a strong password with a mixture of letters, numbers and special characters. Two out of five people use similar passwords for various accounts. Protect your social and financial accounts by being password savvy.

No matter what we consider today for Twitter, there’s no doubt that they have accomplished quite a bit in the past 7 or so years. They’re now boasting over 200 million active users who are churning out 400+ millions tweets per day. In the video, you’ll see a quick glimpse of Twitter over the years.

A Facebook spokesperson said, “We want to ensure that the new design is as fast and reliable as possible before we roll it out to everyone. We’ll be gathering feedback in these initial weeks and hope to roll it out to everyone as soon as we can.”

One change that you may not notice immediately is that “Unliking” pages in your News Feed has been made a bit less user friendly. Previously we only needed to choose “Hide” in the upper right corner to be presented with the options to “Hide all stories from____” and “Unlike.” With the new News Feed, you’re only given two options, “Unhide” and “Hide all stories from_____.”  This change leaves users with two options for “Unliking” pages. Option 1) Navigate to the page, hover your cursor on the “Liked” button and choose “Unlike” Option 2) From News Feed, hover your cursor on the page name until an information box appears, hover over “Liked” and choose “Unlike.” All this hovering can prove to be very tedious when using a mobile browser in “Desktop mode.” It can even be pretty painful on a desktop, considering how well it’s hidden now.

Depending on how you look at it, this could be a bad thing for the Page’s analytical reporting. Even though users are less likely to go through the trouble of “Unliking” they’ll simply hide the page away to be forever forgotten about. While the number of followers won’t take as much of a hit, the page will lose its reach thanks to hidden posts. After all, what good are followers if you can’t reach them? This could also skew Graph Search results, as they’re based on the “Likes.” I don’t know how many times I’ve accidently “Liked” something and had to immediately “Unlike” it. What if I didn’t know where the two “Unlike” options were and I accidently “Liked” something like “Malibu Pudding Girls”? Who could possibly see this? Depending on my privacy settings, anyone could.

Other changes you can expect to see include a greater emphasis on larger images in photo uploads and links, while eliminating that jumbled mess of a navigation bar going down the left side. If you’re interested in having the new News Feed earlier than later, you can sign up by going to https://www.facebook.com/about/newsfeed and scrolling to the bottom.

We all know that Instagram has been on the wrong side of the camera lately, but let’s step away from that and focus (some pun intended) on what benefits Instagram can offer your business.

If you’re not one of the 100 million registered users of Instagram, I’ll briefly bring you up to speed. Instagram is a mobile based social site cleverly disguised as a photo editing app for users to share their photos with other users. For me, it’s somewhere to post funny pictures of my dog tagged with #boxer or #puppiesofinstagram for other enthusiasts to like and comment on. For others, it’s a place to post pictures of their children, dream cars, friends, funny sightings, and even food.

Plums in Bacon
#foodporn #NSFDiet

With Instagram’s geotagging feature, users have the ability to tag the location they’re at. This has been a hit with foodies looking to document their meal on Instagram and others who are looking to try a new restaurant. This is great for restaurateurs looking to showcase their latest signature dish or cocktail. While customers are waiting for the entrée, they can hop on Instagram and read comments about desserts that users have publicly posted.   (I don’t know where the picture above was taken, but it’s working!) 

Firehouse, a local favorite, has been using Instagram to run contests and have been doing quite well. Their most recent contest was one that gave customers the opportunity to win a $10 gift card simply by taking a picture of their favorite sub and tagging it with #firehousesublove. They really took the possibility of having hundreds of fan-photos floating around the internet with their food, tagged with their company name, and ran with it. (Remember to make sure that official terms and conditions are made publicly available or your promotion may backfire.)

 Sharing behind the scenes photos is also a great way to increase brand awareness. You can post pictures of the product being made, or a few willing employees having fun. Anything that shows the company is run by actual people that users can relate to is a plus. These days, customers have more options than ever and they’re well aware of it. This year, Black Friday started during Thanksgiving dinner and seemed to last all the way to Christmas Eve. This is because companies have realized that they no longer get to pick and choose a date to pigeon hole customers into.

Protips

• Consider using other apps to edit your photos before posting them on Instagram. Two of my favorites right now are Pixlr and PicSay.

•Don’t forget about #hashtags. Think of hashtags as a way for users to streamline search results by category. If they want to see funny pictures, they’ll simply search, “#Funny.” Let’s say your company installs vinyl decals, consider having a special for an upcoming event, like the Superbowl. Post a few high quality photos of your work with the words “50% Off #CarDecal Installation of Your #Superbowl Team!” Take it to the next level by requiring they post a picture of the finished product and tag your company to redeem the savings.

• Instagram recently added the ability to view from your desktop by simply going to Instagram.com/. If you want to go to a specific user’s feed, you can do so by typing their username in behind the URL. (e.g. Instgram.com/marketingchick)

Supplies:

Cake boards (varying sizes)
Rubberbands: 10 per centerpiece
Wired Ribbon
Bubble wrap
Burger King crown
High quality pictures
Metal wire (for pictures)
Styrofoam
Bedazzle gems
T-shirts: 10 per centerpiece
Baloon Ribbon
Hot glue gun and super glue
Gold spray paint
Scotch Tape or strong double-sided tape
Gold Duct Tape

The Bottom Tier

Start with cardboard scraps, repurpose old moving boxes if possible. Roll the scraps into cylinders and secure with a hot glue gun.  The height of these scraps will determine the height of each level (distance from lower cake board to middle, and so on).

Unless you’re a cardboard magician, your cylinders will not be perfectly circular. We remedied that by wrapping the cardboard cylinder with bubble wrap. You can use simple scotch or packing tape to secure the bubble wrap to the cardboard

At this point, you’ll want to practice rolling a few shirts. They’ll need to be the same height
as the bubble wrapped cardboard cylinder.

Keep in mind that you’ll need to adjust your rolling method based on the size of the t-shirt. Don’t forget to keep the logo facing outward, for all to see! Tie each shirt with a rubber band to hold in place.

It wouldn’t be a bad idea to break the process up among the team. Have a few people working on rolling the shirts and a few others rolling cardboard and wrapping in bubble wrap.

Now that you have a production line hard at work, it’s time to spray paint the cake boards.We chose a regal shade of gold. You can find your favorite color at any big-box or local hardware store. Be prepared to show ID. Pick an exterior location, in the grass if possible. Be aware that any overspray will permanently stain anything it lands on, including nearby cars, sidewalks, and passersby.

Assemble each T-shirt bundle around the bubble wrapped cardboard cylinder and hold in place with a ribbon. We discovered that a thick ribbon lined with wire may work best. Next, tie into a nice bow.

Once the spray paint has dried, assemble the T-shirt foundation onto the bottom cardboard cake. Though we did not glue the bottom layer down, you may do so with tape or hot glue. Stand up for a celebratory stretch, as you now have your first layer complete. Any popping you may hear is natural. It’s just your bones finder their way back to where they belong.

The Middle Tier

For the second layer, you can repeat the first layer’s steps, or you can change it up a bit. To ensure we only used 10 t-shirts per cake, we used a different folding method. We rolled the t-shirts diagonally and wrapped the shirts horizontally around the bubble wrapped cardboard cylinder. Then, we tied the ends of the shirts together with a rubber band. If the shirts are long enough, you may be able to tie the ends together with the T-shirt itself.  To hide the knots and add some flare, use the same gold ribbon as you used in the first layer. To save ribbon, tape each end of the ribbon to the top and bottom of the structure instead of running the ribbon through the center of the structure.

Add the mid-sized cardboard cake plate to the top of your first T-shirt structure and attach with hot glue or double sided tape. Take your second T-shirt structure and attach with hot glue or double sided tape to the mid-sized cardboard cake plate. Next, attach the smallest cardboard cake plate to the top of the second T-shirt tier with hot glue or double-sided tape.

You should now have both T-shirt tiers and all cardboard cake plates in place.

The Top Tier

Here is where you can get creative. For the sake of this blog, we will discuss how we built the top of the  T-shirt cakes. Because TMC wanted to highlight each child of the Wolfson Children’s Hospital Birthday Party, we printed out high-resolution photos of each child.

First, spray paint each BK crown. At this point, you’re probably just as excited as we were to put the crowns together, but resist the urge and bedazzle that bad boy first! Once the gems have dried, you can  use a pair of scissors to trim the crown down to a size that’s easier to work with. Now, fold the crown to your preferred size and secure it with hot glue. From here, you’ll simply place the crown to the top of the cake, again using hot glue to secure it in place.

Cut out pieces of styrofoam, 2 inches by 2 inches and wrap them in gold duct tape. Try to make each side as flat as possible. It should look like a golden nugget. Glue the gold nugget in the middle of the cardboard cake plate in the center of the crown. It may look a little silly, but we promise it serves a purpose.

Tape two photos back to back, with wire in the middle (like a flagpole). Stick the bottom of the wire into your golden nugget and voila!  

Decoration

Add bedazzle gems to each layer in a uniformed pattern. You can be fairly liberal with the gems; just don’t use so many that they distract the eyes from the logos on the T-shirts.  To add flare, use balloon ribbon and curl with a scissors. Tape one end of the curled ribbon to inside top of the cake (inside of the crown works just fine) and the other end of the curled ribbon to the bottom of the cake. This will prevent the curly cued ribbon from flying.

Ta-Da!  You’re now T-Shirt Cake ninja!  Feel free to put your own sense of style into it, while keeping the theme/goal in mind. Most of all, don’t get discouraged.

After launching a “comprehensive engineering audit” Facebook discovered that a few bugs were lurking within their Business Pages product that have affected reporting.  According to Facebook, the insights of Pages have been under-reporting how many people are being reached. However, actual delivery and reach remain unaffected.

Facebook stated that not all Pages have been impacted by these bugs and went on to suggest analyzing your Page’s data, including organic, paid, and viral reach in order to view if (and to what extent) your Page was affected by these bugs.

Facebook’s engineering team began work to roll out fixes on Friday, February 22 and throughout the following weekend. Unfortunately, Facebook will not be able to go back and restore the real data in past posts due to these bugs impacting their logging systems.

4 things that Facebook expects most Pages to see:

• Total reach to stay the same or increase for most Pages

• An increase in paid reach if you ran News Feed ads

• An increase or decrease in organic reach, depending on many factors such as the composition of your      fan base, when and how often you post and your spending patterns

•A change in metrics computed from reach and impressions, such as engagement rate and virality

Source: http://tinyurl.com/FBInsightsUpdate

Previously Google+ Brand Pages were working against a handicap. Businesses that gave them a shot quickly either abandoned their pages or closed them entirely. The problem was that companies had no way of reaching out to prospective customers. Unless you were the admin of a well-known brand such as Ford you were likely frustrated by the lack of engagement and quickly threw in the towel like many others. Since then Google has been working to improve their social network and it’s looking like they’re finally on the right track.

In December 2012, Google gave business pages the ability to engage with users even if  users did not already have that business in their circles. For example, TMC can now comment on posts by users who may not have heard of +Thomas Marketing Consulting. This is something that Facebook business pages cannot even do. But, they didn’t stop there…

Hangouts on Air

Companies that offer seminars can take advantage of Hangouts on Air, letting invited viewers join in from across the world. They can fully interact, ask questions, and just about anything else short of shooting spit-balls. Have a new product to show-off? Hangouts on Air is perfect for hosting a Q&A Session. After the hangout is over, a live player of the hangout will be posted to your Google+ page and your YouTube channel for other to see. Unless you want to make it private, of course.

Communities 
Communities are groups of like-minded people. If you’re a Photoshop fan, simply join the community and you’ll be greeted by a wealth of people sharing their own photos, personal experiences, and even a tip or two. Have something you really want to share? Invite your new found brethren to an event or hangout. Starting a Bacon parlor? Join a foodie community and spread the word of your delicious treats and bask in the constructive criticism of your peers. You could even start your own community. ‘Bacon Lovers of Jacksonville?’ Why not? I’d join!  When you see content that’s relevant to your favorite community somewhere on the web, hit the +1 button and share it directly to your community.

Google Local   
You may remember Google’s $125 million Zagat purchase and recent  $23 million acquisition of Frommers. That was a strategic move to integrate local business reviews into its own ecosystem. That’s quite a bit of money for most, but to put it into perspective, Google wanted to pay a reported $6 billion to acquire Groupon to address the same market.

So, if you’ve once been put off by the lack of engagement on Google+, it’s time to dive back in. el gooG has an abundance of business tools (most are free of charge) and they’re all starting to run in parallel to a common goal.

While there was much speculation leading up to Facebook’s big announcement last week,  the outcome was not what investors had expected. Rather than Facebook rolling out new ad formats, advancements in mobile ads or even an external ad network, we got yet another way to search. It’s been dubbed ‘Graph Search,’ not because you can search in near paragraph form but, instead because of the graph-search algorithm in use on the back -end.

How it works on the surface  Currently, at the top of your News Feed there is a blue bar with the Facebook logo and 3 notification icons at the top left, followed by an auto-populating search bar.  Once Graph Search is rolled out, your notification icons will be shoved to the right along with your avatar, name, settings, and whatever else Facebook decides to put up there from time-to-time. Taking the place of your notification icons will be where you search. It will simply say, “Search for people, places and things.” When you hover your cursor over this you will be greeted with a drop-down of simplified choices that serve little more purpose than to simply remind you how to ask Facebook a question. The drop-down includes “My friends,” “Photos of my friends,” “Restaurants nearby,” “Games my friends like,” “Music my friends like,” and “Photos I have liked.” Once you’ve made your choice you can narrow it down from there. You can ask things such as “Friends who like Of Mice and Men.” This could be useful if OMAM are coming in concert and you don’t want to go by yourself. It’s unclear whether this will also show friends who are fans of the John Steinbeck novel of the same name.

You can also search friends of friends. Let’s say you’ve been suffering a tooth ache and have no idea which dentist to go to. Trying searching ‘Friends of friends who are dentists.” This will bring up only dentists that your friends are connected to. Now you can ask those friends if they’d recommend that dentist or not.  If you’re looking for a new job, trying searching, “Friends of friends who work in IT.” Here’s where some folks may not be too keen on Graph Search. You can get creative and ask, “Friends of friends who are single” or to narrow it down, “Friends of friends who are single in Jacksonville, FL.” The resulting list will be populated with just that. All you need to do now is ask your mutual friend to introduce you while explaining that you’re not a creeper, you’re just shy and want someone to go dancing with on Friday night. As always, if you don’t want your information out there, the best thing to do is simply don’t put it out there. You can also let your privacy settings do the work for you. Keep the “degrees of Kevin Bacon” in mind. For instance, I don’t mind that friends of friends know that I‘m a huge fan of The Walking Dead (and can’t wait for its return in Feb), but I’d prefer to limit viewership of my phone number to just my friends.

It’s been said that Facebook is going after Yelp and other similar sites with Graph Search. While this may or may not be true, Yelp has little to fear just yet. Sure you can search, “Taco stands my friends like in Jacksonville,” the results are not yet very robust. While there is a rating system, it’s still very new and rather incomplete in comparison to Yelp. Of course, that will come with time as Facebook’s 1billion users start taking advantage of Graph Search, giving Yelp a head start on getting their next move in line to stay ahead of the competition.

Now that you know what to expect in the immediate future, you’ll be ahead of your friends when Facebook finally rolls out Graph Search to the masses. If you’d like to be a beta tester and help Facebook works its way through the bugs, click here: https://www.facebook.com/about/graphsearch#signup

Social Growth of 2012
2012 was a huge year for social networks. Facebook especially, it hit 1 billion users. To put that into perspective, 1981 was 1 billion seconds ago (Source: http://tinyurl.com/SecondsAgo). That’s pretty impressive growth for a company launched in 2004. Until you look at the huge growth building over at Pinterest. At a meager 12 million users, Pinterest is growing faster than any stand-alone site… ever! Twitter has jumped to over 555 million users. With 1 billion tweets every 2.5 days it’s no wonder why Twitter is the best tool for interacting in real-time. Google+ has pushed its way to 170 million users and is the best platform for driving visibility. Keep in mind that it is a product of the search-giant, Google and has become heavily integrated into Google’s search functionality. LinkedIn has 150 million users and is the #1 platform for networking. It takes a bit of dedication, but is well worth your times and devotion. Then there’s the newest of the social platforms, Socl from Microsoft. It’s still in its infancy. Don’t run from it, but don’t run to it either.

Looking Toward 2013
“Will Facebook continue its reign atop the social hierarchy? Will businesses get better
returns on their social media investment? Will your CEO finally learn to tweet?” -Fast Company

-Nowadays over 50% of U.S. consumers have smartphones, making them all easy targets for video content. Not only will there be an increase of video being posted to the web, but there will also be an increase in commercial video being published by small and medium sized businesses.
-It may be back to the drawing board for Twitter. The average user spends only 21 minutes per month on Twitter, probably because of all the noise and clutter. I don’t foresee Twitter collapsing altogether, I just feel they’re in line for a thorough overhaul.
- SoMo (social mobile). As deeply integrated as smartphones have become into our day-to-day lives, it was only a matter of time before companies started to harness the power of tracking your daily routines. Companies like Google are now modeling their ads around the habits of the users. Find yourself at the beach a lot? Chances are you’ll soon find ads for sunscreen lurking at the top of your mapping app of choice. Less than excited about the excessive wait to get your oil changed? Foursquare’s new point system bases the rating of companies on the things we have to say when we check-in as opposed to the old “Check 1-5” method.

Workshop Follow-Up
Someone asked if Jessie had a preferred app for scanning business cards into her database and if there was an app that could be used in conjunction with LinkedIn. You may be surprised to know that Jessie takes an old-school approach with business cards. She’d rather collect the cards and add her own personal notes of the meeting, giving a more personal touch that she can later look back on. As for the app in question, CardMunch allows you to scan someone’s business card, view their LinkedIn information and see which contacts you may have in common. It’s a pretty neat little app from the people of LinkedIn.

In closing, I’ll leave you with the Top 5 Critical Mistakes in Social Media:
1.) Lack of Plan and Strategy.
2.) No Priority with Content.
3.) Automated Posting by Linking Social Media Accounts.
4.) Lack of Desire to Learn.
5.) Unrealistic Expectations.

Planning your Social Media Strategy for 2013: The Blog