Yup. I agree. Unless you have a highly motivated and engaged audience Facebook now makes it really hard to make things happen. Unless, that is, you spend some dollars with them.
All the more reason to brush up your SEO and Analytics skills and make sure you are concentrating your efforts and money in the right places.
7 reasons why Facebook doesn’t care about your business page – DashBurst.com.
Here is a recommended link to some great tips on squeezing the best out of Google Calendar.
I’ll be adding the ‘Jump to Date’ and ‘Next Meeting’ Lab features.
pcworld.com – Power through schedules with 21 Google Calendar tricks
Today WordPress.com announced a new paid-for enterprise version of its free blog hosting service.
They are offering unlimited uploads, bandwidth, 70 WordPress plugins and lots of customization features to draw corporate users away from self hosted sites using the open source version of WordPress (WordPress.org). The price – $500.00 pcm.
Read more:
WordPress.com Enterprise is Live « WordPress.com VIP.
From BBC News:
“An alleged cybercrime ring said to be responsible for losses of $850m (£530m) looks to have been foiled by the FBI – by using Facebook.Facebook users were targeted over two years beginning in October 2010.”
Read the full post:
Police in Global Arrests over $850m botnet crime spree – BBC News
The BBC reports that the ‘Ghost Shell’ hacking group have released user account data after it was obtained primarily from government agencies in the US and Europe.
“The group gathered the data during a series of attacks on NASA, the FBI, the European Space Agency and many other government agencies and contractors.
Included in the dump were log-in names, passwords, email addresses and CVs, plus the contents of online databases.”
The full report can be read here: BBC- Hacktivists Ghost Shell dump 1.6m log-in details on web
“Bogus hotel reservation emails have been spammed out widely, which claim to come from Booking.com but in reality carry malware designed to infect Windows computers.
Even if recipients haven’t booked a hotel room they might be tempted to open the dangerous attachments, in fear that their credit card has been charged.”
Read more on Sophos Naked Security
Do you want to drive more traffic to your website? Would you like to create content that people want to read?
This interview with Michael Hyatt provides some of the secrets of attention-grabbing blog posts that generate traffic.
Social media Examiner – Blogging Success: How to Create Content People Love
Here’s a link to a simple way to stop your friends from embarrassing you on Facebook. I’ll bite my tongue and I won’t say ‘unfriend them’ or send them a link to my post on the privacy hoax post.
This won’t protect you from their silly comments etc. but it does keep unexpected pictures and comments out of your timeline.
Here’s A Simple Way To Stop Your Friends From Embarrassing You On Facebook
If the thought of dealing with business tax taxes you 😉 then there might just be something here to help.
5 Essential Online Tax Tools for Small Business Owners from IRS.gov
At last Pintrest is enabling business accounts. There’s a great article on Hubspot which takes you through the steps of changing over a personal account to a business account. Now get pinning!
Make your website count. A nice reminder to stop and check the obvious once in awhile.
There’s nothing worse than out of date or incorrect information on a website. Getting the basics wrong can cause frustration. At the very least it reduces their confidence in your message. At worst it’ll send your customers away.
Researching another post I came across this little gem from September 9. The article suggests that posts to Facebook via third party apps can reduce their reach by up to 88%. Originally data from the use of Hootsuite and Tweetdeck were used as examples, but the data was later withdrawn. There’s been no follow up to explain why.
If you use a third party App, you might like to run a little experiment or two of your own to check the efficacy of your campaigns.
Facebook Fail: Posting via Other Apps Can Cut Likes & Comments by 88% [STUDY]
Some good suggestions on using LinkedIn on your business website over on Mashable.
A couple of days ago I received an email entitled “What were we thinking?” from Smugmug; they had made a major faux pas in a blog posting. The mail from Chris MacAskill, Smugmug’s president and co-founder, apologized for their mistake.
To see how they handled the situation with transparency, honesty and a little humor follow the link to Smugmug’s blog where they published a copy of the email sent to all their customers.
I think there are a couple of obvious and valuable lessons here…