Social Media Sharing Can Increase Content Markleting Reach and ROI

What a lovely discovery this afternoon in our +Rick Noel stream. A new learning opportunity that some of you may have already happened upon. Whiteboard+, a new SEO (Search Engine Optimization) informational video, the 5th  video in Whiteboard+ series produced by SEOMoz.org, a world leader in SEO tools and thought leaders on SEO strategy.

The Whiteboard+ topic today is on developing and executing on a social sharing strategy. A link to the SEOMoz Whiteboard+ Social Sharing Video is provided for your SEO/Internet marketing learning enjoyment.

The social sharing strategy video runs 15 mins and 13 seconds, which, for those of us that suffer from Internet attention deficit disorder, is a lifetime. That said, Trust me when I tell you that this free video and its content is well worth every second invested in watching, will provide specific tools, techniques and tips and is more relevant than ever given some recent changes in Google’s Search algorithm, dubbed Google Search, Plus Your World.

This content is primarily targeted (and best suited) for Internet marketers, SEO agencies and Social Media marketing agencies, but can also be beneficial for any small business using or considering investing in Internet marketing tactics such as content marketing, search marketing including SEO and social media engagement.

In this Video, +Rand Fishkin of SEOMoz.org explains social sharing strategies providing specific, helpful examples with social media sharing tools, tips and techniques used to maximize the reach of your content marketing efforts while providing key performance indicators such as CTRs (Click Through Rates) by content by channel.

Social Sharing Strategy - Video Summary

Rand talks about building a social sharing strategy for Google+, Twitter, Facebook, YouTube and other sites based on your audience and where they are most engaging for the particular type of content that you are sharing. You can track these if you have the discipline along with using a specific shortened link for each piece of content by channel. Two of the social sharing tools mentioned include two URL (web address) shorteners called out by name: bit.ly, goo.gl. In addition, Rand mentioned two tools that can be used to track and measure some social metrics including OpenSiteExploer.org, an SEOMoz.org developed tool which can measure social engagement and link attributes and ShareCount.com which can measure integrated social engagement activities across social platforms for a particular web page URL.

In the Social Sharing Strategy Video, Rand elaborates and then answers the following questions:

1. What is content is worthy of sharing?
2. How should I distribute accounts across social platforms (agency vs. business vs. individual)
3. Which items (content) should I share on which social platforms (test and see which works best)
4. How do I prioritize promotion of social media accounts (on website, blog and other promotional platforms)

For eBiz ROI, we use a strategy where content we create and curate (e.g. the Social Sharing Strategy Video above) lives on our blog and then is shared, typically simultaneously across Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn and Google+.  As Rand points out in the video, this is often acceptable as the cross over between channels is minimal, especially with the nature of Twitter feeds where a few hours can be the life of when you share might get viewed.  In addition, you will note at the top of this post there are buttons for Facebook like, Google+1, Twitter and LinkedIn to make sharing content easy. eBiz ROI also uses the AddThis widget which allows for additional sharing options including a myriad of social bookmarking sites such as Digg, Reddit and many others, enabling viral sharing to increase content reach,

Rand also discusses some tools that can be used to evaluate audience and what social networks they are logged into while consuming content on your site. This requires the placement of some code on your site to be able to measure and track, but can provide useful insights when trying to prioritize your social media sharing and promotion strategies. There is a good post on Social Media Examiner that shows how to track Tweets, Facebook Likes and more with Google Analytics.

If you found value in this post, please like eBiz ROI on Facebook at http://www.facebook.com/ebizroi(or click like button directly below) and Follow eBiz ROI on Twitter @eBizROI (or click the Twitter follow button directly below) to stay connected to the Terrific Time for Traffic series and other quality content for growing your business online while maximizing marketing ROI (Return on Investment).

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Social Sharing Strategy to Increase Content Marketing ROI is a post from: Internet Marketing Blog | Online Marketing Blog |

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1. Enabling Viral Sharing to Increase Content Reach
2. Driving to Social Media Success, Are We There Yet?
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facebook addiction or merely an obsession?

Are you addicted to facebook? Have you shared and liked yourself into obsession? A recent study by comScore, shows that social networking is one of the top online activities worldwide, with facebook dominating minutes of use.

The recent comScore report finds social networking accounts for 1 in 5 minutes spent online. Facebook dominates consuming 3 out of 4 social networking minutes. A complimentary copy of the report, is available from comScore at: http://www.comscore.com/it_is_a_social_world

According to the comScore study:

• One in every five minutes online minutes is spent on the social web
• Three out of every four minutes on the social web is spent on facebook
• Twitter grew by 59% over the past year in terms of number of users
• Twitter usage trends along with events of national significance or of pop culture interest
• People spent 35% more time on social networking sites this year (2011) than last year

“The emergence and widespread global adoption of social networks has vastly influenced human interaction on an individual, community and larger societal level, and underscores the convergence of the online and offline worlds,” said Linda Boland Abraham, comScore CMO and EVP of global development.”

“Regardless of geography, social networks are weaving themselves ever more intricately into the fabric of the digital experience, opening a world of new opportunity for business and technology.”

The most popular social networking site by a good margin was facebook, which was incredibly visited by over 50% of all web users in the world based on analysis of October data. Twitter now reaches about 10% of off web users worldwide.

Broad smartphone adoption is driving social activity online with the study citing nearly 40% of users access the social web via smartphone.

See video featuring Adam Faulk of Mashable reviewing some of the comScore study highlights:

UPDATE: 2 Jan 2012 – Relavent YouTube Video from 2009 with interviews from facebook addicts

Are you Addicted to Facebook?

If you found value in this post, please like eBiz ROI on Facebook at http://www.facebook.com/ebizroi(or click like button directly below) and Follow eBiz ROI on Twitter @eBizROI (or click the Twitter follow button directly below) to stay connected to the Terrific Time for Traffic series and other quality content for growing your business online while maximizing marketing ROI (Return on Investment).

Follow @eBizROI

facebook addiction or merely an obsession? is a post from: Internet Marketing Blog | Online Marketing Blog |

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3. Facebook Marketing Solutions Announces $10M Business Boost for US Small Businesses

facebook business boost program

Facebook is promoting it’s Business Boost program in partnership with the National Federation of Independent Business and the U.S. Chamber of Commerce. The Business Boost program is expected  to be rolled out in efforts to promote facebook marketing solutions to small US business. According to facebook, the Business Boost program will  to invest, educate, and connect with small businesses. Like LinkedIn hosting a town hall style meeting with President Obama, it appears that facebook too wants to take an active, visible role in stimulating the US economy and, let’s not be naive, drive advertising revenue.

Facebook references $10M in their Facebook Marketing Solutions - Business Boost  program page . If you think about how many Google AdSense users opened their Google Adsense accounts in the last 90 days using any one of a gazillion available coupons offered by Google ranging from $25 to over $100 of free advertising to get started, $10M doesn’t seem like that much (like 200k $50 coupons that Google probably does honors each month).

What makes the facebook Business Boost program unique is their partnering with National Federation of Independent Business and the U.S. Chamber of Commerce to roll out the program as well as tying it to some of the national economic stimulus sentiment. I think the PR around this campaign if brilliant in targeting it to “American Small Business Owners”  who facebook references as the “backbone of the largest economy in the world, and at Facebook, we’re excited about helping you grow.”

The Benefits

facebook business boost program benefits

Another aspect of the facebook business boost program that is interesting is that facebook appears to be taking a more hands on approach, claiming to engage with small businesses directly by ”hitting the road to meet small businesses like yours, so please join us when we’re in town. We’d like to share with you the benefits of using Facebook for marketing your business.”  The Business Boost page indicates that schedules with and locations will be ”coming soon.”

The facebook approach of using roadshows to promote its Business Boost program could be unique if they extend beyond the obvious urban centers (NY, LA, Miami, Chicago, etc.). Hopefully facebook roadshows cover tier 2 markets such as Albany, NY area but not sure if population centers of ~1M or less are going to get any real focus from facebook in efforts to engage small businesses. We’ll see.

As a small business, why not take the $50 (minimum, hopefully some of us get more) test drive using the facebook Business Boost program? You have nothing to lose and conversions to gain! With an audience of 800M users, you can’t beat the reach and targeting opportunities that the facebook self-serve advertising program brings, with the exception of Google that is. just bear in mind that one is an audience in social context while the other is an audience in search context. By what the hay, free is free!

Facebook Marketing Solutions Announces $10M Business Boost for US Small Businesses is a post from: Internet Marketing Blog | Online Marketing Blog |

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For those readers here that always forego the book to wait for the movie, this new facebook share feature tour video is dedicated to you:

The tour covers three aspects the new facebook share feature:

The first feature of the new facebook share is the ability to tag other facebook users. In fact, users can click this button to add tags of your friends or anyone else on facebook. Adding a tag instantly creates a link to the person’s profile and may share your post with their friends. This is similar in concept and application to how you could tag friends in status updates and comments in the previous facebook share. You might have experienced where facebook would type ahead matching names in your facebook network when typing status or comments.

The second feature of the new facebook share allows users to add location information to their facebook status. In essence, enabling facebook users to geo-code their status updates. Using this new location-based share feature, users can easily share what city or neighborhood they’re in with each post, or share a particular place, like an attraction, business, park or pub.

The third feature of the new facebook share enables users to manage privacy settings of their status at an individual status-level right where they post without having to navigate to another page to set or reset privacy settings. Users can choose who sees their status updates, photos and profile information using the inline audience selector when you share. If mistakes need to be corrected after sharing, users can change the privacy settings using this new feature.

Facebook positions its new share feature as a user benefit by proving privacy controls closer to the front line, where users share information and content, claiming to simplify the user experience and management of privacy settings.

Facebook users will also notice that the new facebook share feature does not include the share link capability that existed in the prior facebook share functionality. If you’re a frequent link poster on facebook like many of us are, this is probably the first thing that you noticed even, before the facebook tour was offered.

Now, if a user wants to post a link using the new facebook share, they must post the link in the body of the status update and then facebook will interpret that as a link as facebook deems appropriate when displaying in the news feeds of other facebook users and in your profile.

The optimist in me says that there could be interesting applications of associating location and people tagging right in the context of a facebook status update while also setting privacy at a post-level right from the share interface. The pessimist in me however, says that facebook is pushing this functionality on users to drive tighter control over link
sharing in an effort to combat link spam which no doubt plagues many facebook users impacting their personal facebook experience.

Regardless of the driver for the new share feature, users were not asked by facebook whether or not they wanted to adopt this new feature so therefore the only logical choice is to not use facebook if you don’t like the new share feature, or at least not share anything else on facebook (don’t bet on it!).

eBiz ROI is interested in your feedback of whether or not the new facebook share feature has been rolled out to your facebook profile and if so what you think of it so far. It will be interesting to see how users adopt and use the new share features. It will also be interesting to see whether or not facebook sharing, in aggregate, is positively or negatively impacted by this new “sharing enhancement”.

As always, if you have any questions about facebook and how to use it to effectively promote your business online, you can contact an eBiz ROI, Inc. representative at sales@eBizROI.com, +1 (518) 557-3052 or online at www.eBizROI.com. We look forward to hearing from you.

New Facebook Share Tour is a post from: Internet Marketing Blog | Online Marketing Blog |

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2. Adding a Facebook Like Button to Your Website in 4 Mins or Less
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The reason that all businesses should have a Facebook like button on their website is quite simple really.
With over 750 million active users on facebook today (source: http://www.facebook.com/press/info.php?statistics ) and widespread adoption of facebook by many US-based Internet users, facebook like buttons make the ideal mechanism to enable your website visitors to share content with their friends, all with very little effort.

According to facebook (see above reference), at the time of this writing, on average, each facebook user has 130 facebook friends. A facebook like button enables any facebook user who visits your website to simply click the like button and without any further action, share a link to your website, with a rich text snippet generated by facebook, with all their facebook friends, which, as previously mentioned, is on average 130 other people. The friends of the facebook like button clicker will see a link to your content in their facebook newsfeed. Given that the average facebook user logs in once every other day on average, there is a good chance that by adding a facebook like button collocated with your content will result in broad distribution and visibility, all with little effort or cost. Pretty cool! Now that Facebook has surpassed Google as the most visited site from US Internet users, businesses should take note.

Integrating a Facebook like button into your website could not be easier. Simply go to the following webpage: http://developers.facebook.com/docs/reference/plugins/like/ and enter a few fields in the create a button form , then click create code to generate the html code to place on your website.

The following video demonstrates how just how quick and easy it is to integrate a facebook like button into your website, all in under 4 minutes. This educational video does assume a basic working knowledge of html, but if you prefer, this kind of effort can be outsourced for ~$100. (pst… eBiz ROI can do this for you

If you’d be interested in learning more about how adding a Facebook like button to your website can add significant benefits and ROI to your Internet marketing investments, we encourage you to contact eBiz ROI to find out how easy and affordable it is to install a Facebook like button on your business website.

Adding a Facebook Like Button to Your Website in 4 Mins or Less is a post from: Internet Marketing Blog | Online Marketing Blog |

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Instead of creating a video from scratch, embed below for your knowledge enrichment, is a popular YouTube video from Keith Dougherty of www.keithdougherty.com.

Now that you have created your Facebook Page and associated Facebook user account, you are now able to create your Free Facebook Company Page using the Facebook account just created.

Stay tuned for a follow-up post on how to build a Facebook Company page. If you would like assistance with setting up a company page for your business, contact eBiz ROI, Inc. today at + 1 (518) 557-3502 or email us at sales@ebizroi.com

Video HowTo – Setting up a Facebook Page is a post from: Internet Marketing Blog | Online Marketing Blog |

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While LinkedIn does not have even 20% of the audience size as Facebook, LinkedIn recently reach a significant milestone of 100 million LinkedIn Users registered users email notice of this fact to the first 1 million members. And while 100M is far less than the 600+ million registered users that Facebook boasts, as is often the case in marketing and advertising, less is more. In other words, many of the people on Facebook are teenagers, retirees and others not in market for your business services. Many Facebook users will not likely fit the target demographic for your business, message or offer, thus providing merit to promoting your business on LinkedIn as opposed to Facebook.

Mindset of the user is also important. When people are on Facebook, they are less likely to be thinking about business services to procure and more likely to be engaged with friends and family on a personal level. All of my interactions on LinkedIn are of a professional nature and most on Facebook, of a personal nature.

My first experience with LinkedIn began back in 2004 when a former project lead had sent me an invitation to join LinkedIn in what was positioned at that the time is an exclusive professional network. At the time, LinkedIn had less than 1 million users. Since then, LinkedIn has evolved beyond a classic business networking tool or online resume/address book, to include features that enable companies to represent not only their own personal business experience, but also features and functions enabling them to promote their business on LinkedIn.

Here are a few tools and tips on how to get started promoting your business on LinkedIn:

Build a Business Profile on LinkedIn

Setting up a business profile is the first step in promoting your business on LinkedIn. In order to set up a business profile on LinkedIn, you must be a member of LinkedIn. This is a free and painless process much like signing up for a Facebook account. Once your professional profile is set up, then it’s possible to create a company page associated with that profile.

Though company pages were originally position by LinkedIn as a tool initialed designed to support HR hiring functions within a company promoting businesses to potential candidates, new features have grown the use of company pages well beyond that. These new features include providing key statistics about a company such as experience level, educational achievements and client recommendations and other key attributes that inform potential prospects buying process. Both prospects and candidates have the ability to follow a company during the recruitment or procurement process much like they would follow a company or user on Twitter.

Having a company page on LinkedIn can also have benefits from an SEO (search engine optimization) perspective. This is a result of the LinkedIn.com domain having very strong authority with the search engines. Having a company page company page on LinkedIn enables you to provide a link or links back to your website or websites, thus providing the potential increased ranking of your website in relevant search results.

Stay Connect with new and past Key Contacts on LinkedIn

As the old business adage goes, it’s not what you know but who you know, and it seems that the further I journey into my career, the more those words ring true. With the advent of social networks, it has never been easier to stay connected with our professional contacts. Prior to the social networks, there were some contact management company such as Plaxo, Spoke and others that would enable you to manage your contacts online. The beauty of LinkedIn, by its very nature, incentivizes users to keep their LinkedIn profile, including contact information, up-to-date.

Why is this important? Because when you leave a company, it’s entirely possible that you would have all the up-to-date contacts of the people in that company the day you left. Over time, your Key contacts from that company will also move on to other opportunities requiring anybody who stays connected the individual to update their contact information. However, in LinkedIn, when that person moves on and they update their LinkedIn profile, you have now have the latest information without having to do anything.

Beyond direct connections, the value of LinkedIn as a networking tool is based on its users’ ability to leverage the contacts of your Key contacts based on how you’re connected in LinkedIn. So for instance, if you happen to be connected to a person from a previous job that understands your skills and work ethic, and their connected to the CEO of a company that you’re trying to establish contact with, not only can you see that within LinkedIn, you can use LinkedIn as a networking tool to begin establishing communication. In addition, by having that direct network connections, LinkedIn will give you visibility in terms of additional details of that individual and their company based on how you’re connected through your professional network. The more connected you are in an industry, the more visibility and access LinkedIn will grant you.

Join LinkedIn Groups that mirror your target market

One of the powerful features of LinkedIn is the ability to define and join LinkedIn Groups. Participation in a LinkedIn Groups is generally requires approval by the Group Owner or Group Administrator in the case that it’s not an open group. Whether or not a LinkedIn Group is open is based on the discretion of the Group Administrator. Groups tend to be comprised of individuals who are related based on some theme be it membership in an alumni organization, having worked the same company, based in same geography or just a special industry or business focus that’s common to all group members.

The key for successful business development through LinkedIn is to look for groups comprise of members that are like your target market. Unless you’re looking for partnership or recruitment opportunities, from a purse prospecting and business development standpoint, a common mistake is for new LinkedIn users to network to heavily within your own industry. Oftentimes people will join groups that are related to their industry based on a comfort level and an ability to demonstrate strong knowledge to their peers. However, unless you’re looking for potential partners or subcontractors or you are subcontractor yourself, then prospect opportunities may be limited.

A good way to find out which groups would be optimal to join our to look at your top five or ten prospects and see which groups members of that organization belong to. In this way, you can be sure that you’re in the right LinkedIn Groups (i.e. marketing venues) to come into direct contact with your target market.

Become part of the conversation in LinkedIn Groups you have joined

While joining groups on LinkedIn is a great way to promote your business, the act of being a member of a particular group alone is necessary yet not sufficient. It is also necessary to get involved in the conversations that take place within that group. This includes starting discussions or asking thought-provoking questions that can be used to engage your prospective clients.

Even more powerful than starting conversations or asking questions is actually answering questions. This gives you the opportunity to answer questions in a way that highlights your expertise and unique value. Since you joined groups populated by your target market, answering questions that are relevant to your target market in a short, concise and expert manner will position you and your business in a positive light to the very people that matter most to your business while delivering value ahead of a sale, which is key in today’s economic climate.

Participating in group conversations is a great way to meet and establish new contacts and network with potential clients. These discussions are e-mailed to the group distribution lists and can provide a great way for you to gain reach in demonstrating your expertise.

Solicit Recommendations from clients who use LinkedIn

LinkedIn got its start in 2004 based on a recommendation system. In fact, the original system was an exclusive invitation-only based system. To give context, take a look at my e-mail invitation from a former boss who was a real mover and shaker which created my original interest in LinkedIn (last name of my boss changed for privacy). As you can see from the invitation, at the time of during its formative years, access to LinkedIn was invitation only and based on professional recommendations.

While LinkedIn has a evolved greatly since 2004 and recommendations may have been superseded by Facebook-like status updates in LinkedIn with real-time Twitter integration (sounds sexy in a geeky kind of way), never under estimate the power of a professional recommendation, especially when given by somebody whose connected to high-value prospect. When looking to seal a deal, anyone in sales knows that a solid recommendation from someone your prospect knows is worth its weight in gold. If you have experienced this yet professionally, maybe after your first internship!

Since its sill very much a buyers in market, business in search of business service providers will often look to people they trust for recommendations based on their past successes. Assuming that you are able to garner positive recommendations based on clients who are also LinkedIn users, why not request that they provide you a recommendation on LinkedIn. By requesting recommendations from clients, it makes it easy for others in their network who are looking for similar business services to find out which vendors their contacts have had success with. Recommendations can also be used to get your business listed in the LinkedIn Service Provider directory relevant to your geography and discipline.

5 Steps to Promoting Your Business on LinkedIn is a post from: Internet Marketing Blog | Online Marketing Blog |

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The Good

For companies today, being on Facebook is like being on the Internet was a decade ago. In other words, if you are a company without a website 10 years ago, you would be hardly thought of as progressive. With over half a billion users today, having a branded company page today on Facebook is Internet marketing table stakes.

In fact, having a company page on Facebook provides numerous benefits such as providing a platform for creating brand awareness, driving customer engagement and messaging distribution, and perhaps most important, access to the world’s largest online community (that I know of at least). Best of all, a company page on Facebook can be obtained free of charge costing only the time required to create a Facebook profile and associated company page. Taking it one step further, obtaining a Facebook vanity URL with your company’s brand can provide additional benefits.

Facebook vanity URLs reinforces brands by including the brand name as the sole distinguisher of a company’s Facebook presence. For eBiz ROI, our Facebook company page is http://www.Facebook.com/eBizROI. Every time a user is directed to our company page on Facebook, our brand is automatically reinforced. These Facebook vanity URLs have the additional benefit of making it easier for Facebook users and potential fans to find your page just by remembering your brand. Best of all, Facebook vanity URLs can also be obtained free of charge (at least for today).

The Bad

Sounds great, so what’s the catch? Well to begin with, sometimes your brand name may not be available. Facebook does warn you when selecting an alias or vanity URL, that attempting to use a trademark name will result in loss of that alias. However, for small to medium-size businesses who may not have their brand name trademarked or service marked, there is always the chance that some cyber squatter has taken your brand as their Facebook username, and therefore, your branded Facebook vanity URL.

Another drawback is that company page ownership/association with a Facebook profile cannot be changed or transferred between user profiles, so think twice about who within your organization creates your company page, probably bypassing the person currently on probation whose position with the company is currently on life support.

Initially, Facebook required company pages to have 1000 fans before providing those companies with access to create a vanity URL. More recently, Facebook has relaxed this requirement to now allow company pages with 25 fans or more to create a vanity URL.

Even if you’re brand name is available when you go to create Facebook vanity URLs, make sure to proceed with a good deal of caution because you can only create this custom URL once. You cannot change it once created. Well, uh hum, sort of. There is a work around described below based on a real-life scenario that happened within eBiz ROI while in the process of claiming our vanity URL for the company’s existing Facebook page.

The Ugly (true story with a happy ending)

A funny now (scary when it happened) true story played out when attempting to claim our company brand as an alias for our existing company Facebook page. When creating the alias for the company page, the user accidentally associated ebizroi, our company brand, the one used for company pages on all social media sites, with a personal Facebook user profile.

The only way to disassociate ebizroi from the newly created personal Facebook profile alias was to change the username of the personal profile to RichardCNoel (those following closely now know who goofed!), which automatically replaced the www.Facebook.com/ebizroi alias for the personal Facebook profile page with www.Facebook.com/RichardCNoel.

The nerve racking part having to wait roughly 2 weeks for the ebizroi to show as available in the Facebook create username dialog box used to create page aliases (i.e. Facebook vanity URLs). Right after changing username, the www.Facebook.com/ebizroi URL returned a Facebook message of ”alias not available.” The big unknown was how long Facebook would hold on to ebizroi as part  aparently undocumented username “aging policy.” For ebizroi, the anwers was 14 days.

 As special thanks to Jonathan Arthur Reneau for describing the above work around on the Custom Username (Vanity URL) for Business Pages | Facebook

Your mission should you choose to accept

Step one: go forth and create a branded company page for your business on Facebook.

Step two: get 25 people to like your company page. Rely on calling in favors from friends and family as needed.

Step three: carefully mind you, create a vanity URL for your company’s branded Facebook page.

Step four: celebrate your company’s place in contemporary Internet marketing.

For more information on this topic directly from the horses mouth (Facebook), check out Why should I register a username for my Facebook Page?

Facebook Vanity URLs, The Good, The Bad, The Ugly is a post from: Internet Marketing Blog | Online Marketing Blog |

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Facebook instant personalization, was launched back in April of 2010, and is now gradually being rolled out, so as one might expect, the media has ratcheted up the Facebook privacy hype. You may have noticed a lot of Facebook status updates in my newsfeed indicating the need to disable Facebook instant personalization. The status post goes like this “As of today, the New FB Privacy setting called “Instant Personalization” goes into effect. The new setting shares your data with non-Facebook websites & it is automatically set to “Enabled”. Go to Account > Privacy Settings > Apps & Websites > Instant Personalization >edit settings & uncheck “Enable”. BTW If your friends don’t do this, they will be sharing info about you as well. Please copy and repost.” The question many users are faced with, is Facebook instant personalization something to be worried about, especially since the default option is enabled?

Facebook Instant Personalization is like the Facebook Connect service with respect to providing third-party websites use of your Facebook profile information. However, Facebook instant personalization is different than Facebook connect in that you don’t have to sign in to the service as Facebook does it automatically for you. In practice, how this works is, If you are logged into Facebook from within an browser session and then visit one of the Facebook Instant Personalization partner sites, you’ll receive a notification the first time that “personalization” is going on. You will be prompted with the option to disable it, and if you don’t, Facebook instant personalization will run and personalize that partner website to you based on information from your Facebook profile.

Who is Facebook Instant Personalization Sharing is my Information with?

A question often asked is whether or not Facebook instant personalization shares your profile information to each and every website on the Internet. The short answer is no. In fact, Facebook instant personalization currently is configured to work with the following Facebook partner sites: www.bing.com, www.tripadvisor.com, www.clicker.com, www.rottentomatoes.com, www.pandora.com, www.yelp.com, www.docs.com, and www.scribd.com.

What information is shared with Facebook instant personalization supported sites?

Another question that’s often asked is whether or not Facebook shares all of the information that it collects on you from your profile and usage in shares that information using Facebook instant personalization. Again, the short answer is no. In fact, Facebook instant personalization only shares Public information including your name, profile picture, gender, networks, and other information shared with everyone. This may put some minds at ease.

How is my Facebook profile information used by instant personalization supported sites?

Another popular question about Facebook Instant Personalization is how my personal information will be used. According to Facebook, “Your information can only be used to present you with a more personalized experience and cannot be transferred to advertisers or used for any other purposes.” Now all repeat after me, “targeted advertising.” Since Facebook is a free service to its users, some would agree that it’s reasonable for Facebook to offer targeted advertising to enrich their ad-supported business model and available advertising inventory. Targeting not only adds value to the user and their experience in terms of viewing relevant ads, but also adds value to Facebook and advertisers by providing highly targeted ads with presumably higher conversion rates.

Facebook positions the Facebook instant personalization services value proposition as follows: “See your friends’ reviews first when you search for a movie to watch. Hear your favorite songs automatically when you visit a music site. Experience a Web tailored to you and your friends.” Sounds pretty innocuous to me. See Facebook instant personalization positioning video using Rotten Tomatoes and Facebook [HQ] .)

On Facebook’s instant personalization information page, the following text is located next to a lock icon providing those concerned about privacy to get more information about how to disable instant personalization altogether. The disclaimer reads as follows: “You control what information is available to these partners by managing the information set in your privacy settings. Or you can turn off instant personalization altogether, at which time your information will no longer be instantly available to any partner sites. Find out more about instant personalization in the Help Center.”

What Now?

In summary, Facebook instant personalization probably poses less of a threat than sharing your real birth date including month day and year or posting a status updates indicating that your family is away from vacation (i.e. house empty, no surveillance, dogs in kennel, crooks welcome). What it boils down to is understanding what information is shared, who it is shared with, and for what purpose. Facebook users who are uncomfortable with their instant personalization service, or if the value proposition does not justify sharing the information, simply disable it. Otherwise, accept the default setting of enabled, and give Facebook instant personalization a test spin before caving to the media sensationalism of Facebook privacy concerns.

Facebook Instant Personalization – Reason for Worry? is a post from: Internet Marketing Blog | Online Marketing Blog |

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You can click the image above to go to a live example LinkedIn InMaps service created landing page. The InMaps service builds an image map of your LinkedIn Network, segmenting your network connections into different color-coded clusters that can be labeled by the InMaps user.

For my LinkedIn Network, which was initially started back in 1994 shortly after LinkedIn launched, there were some obvious visual patterns in InMaps created clusters based on my career path since 1994. Lots of nodes in the blue cluster for the 10 years and 100s of contacts from Telcordia Technologies, lots nodes in the green cluster from my tenure at Burst Media. 

The InMaps resulting image map appears to represent a contact’s node and label size proportional to number of connections by that contact. Once a user runs the InMaps network visualization of their LinkedIn network, a landing page is created that can then be shared with contacts using the provided share buttons for Twitter, Facebook, and of course, LinkedIn.

For more information from LinkedIn on their InMaps network visualization service, check out the video by DJ Patel, the chief scientist at LinkedIn.

Thanks to the Mashable for the blog post LinkedIn Launches Tool to Visualize Your Business Network and providing the heads up to this cool tool and the inspiration for this post.

LinkedIn InMaps Network Visualization Service is a post from: Internet Marketing Blog | Online Marketing Blog |

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