How to Avoid and Prevent Facebook Spam

Since Facebook has grown in to the largest social network, it is the best source for spam mails & applications. It is has been a pressing concern for Facebook to eradicate this issue. Thus, Facebook has applied features to tidy up this mess & it's cleaned at least 95% of it. But still they can only control its number but not completely eradicate spam.

Facebook spam

Facebook spam is already a given when they log in. They get junk mails, advertisements, fraudulent offers & opportunities which would lure people to click & view.

Some tips are gathered to help control this issue. To start with, you must know how to identify Facebook spams like links that turn out to be scams. You must avoid getting hooked to these because allowing these links to have the ability to post walls on mate pages make you an tool for spams to increase their range of susceptible victims.

You will know that these are spams since they offer things which are nice to be true and sometimes they use names of individuals who are unlikely to do their advertisements.

It is advised to follow Jolie’s instructions in the Southwest post in order to keep away from spams. You try to visit your Facebook privacy settings and go to “Apps and Websites” then you will see a list of the most recently accessed applications from your account. What you do is select the offending application & remove it from your account. You delete messages from that account and simultaneously warn your friends about it.

Another thing you ought to do is keep track of other people’s advices & recommendations regarding new ways & strategies by which spams could trick you and if you are already aware of this, then you won’t anymore be tempted to make use of their applications. It is important to screen whatever messages or links you have in your account because you might be trapped in a hole of spam.

Trackbacks and Pingbacks in WordPress

I am dam sure that most of the new Bloggers doesn’t know what are Trackbacks and Pingbacks. They see these words often in blogging but never think of it. These are very important to know as a fresh Blogger. Even these will help in Promoting your blogs. So let me take this opportunity to explain you a little bit on those. I don’t want to explain in my own words, so just presenting the modified content from WordPress itself.

Trackbacks: In a nutshell, TrackBack was designed to provide a method of notification between websites: it is a method of person A saying to person B, “This is something you may be interested in.” To Do that, person A sends a TrackBack ping to person B.

A better explanation is this:

1. Person A writes something on their blog.

2. Person B wants to Comment on Person A’s blog, but wants her own readers to see what she had to say, and be able to comment on her own blog.

3. Person B posts on her own blog and sends a trackback to Person A’s blog.

4. Person A’s blog receives the trackback, and displays it as a comment to the original post. This comment contains a link to Person B’s post.

The idea here is that more people are introduced to the conversation (both Person A’s and Person B’s readers can follow links to the other’s post).

Pingbacks: Pingbacks were designed to solve some of the problems that people saw with Trackbacks.

For example, Yvonne writes an interesting article on her Web log. Kathleen reads Yvonne’s article and comments about it, linking back to Yvonne’s original post. Using pingback, Kathleen’s software can automatically notify Yvonne that her post has been linked to, and Yvonne’s software can then include this information on her site.

The best way to think about pingbacks is as remote comments:

1. Person A posts something on his blog.

2. Person B posts on her own blog, linking to Person A’s post. This automatically sends a pingback to Person A when both have pingback enabled blogs.

3. Person A’s blog receives the pingback, then automatically goes to Person B’s post to confirm that the pingback did, in fact, originate there.

The pingback is generally displayed on Person A’s blog as simply a link to Person B’s post.

Trackbacks Vs Pingbacks:

There are three significant differences between pingbacks and trackbacks, though.

1. Pingbacks and trackbacks use drastically different communication technologies (XML-RPC and HTTP POST, respectively).

2. Pingbacks support auto-discovery where the software automatically finds out the links in a post, and automatically tries to pingback those URLs, while trackbacks must be done manually by entering the trackback URL that the trackback should be sent to.

3. Pingbacks do not send any content.

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Google Analytics for Facebook Fan Pages

With all Facebook pages only Facebook Insights program is available to page administrators. Facebook Insights shows demographic details and interactions on your pages BUT limited to show information of fans only. It is far less sophisticated and comprehensive when compared to the free Google Analytics. One of the limitations of Facebook Fan pages is that you can only run limited Javascript on it and Google Analytics needs Javascript code included to correctly track visitors. We have successfully managed to get ALL functions of Google Analytics working on our Facebook fan page (including visitor statistics, traffic sources, visitor country, keyword searches with all other powerful reporting & maps overlays etc).

How to setup Google Analytics on your Facebook fan pages

The workaround we use in our code is to include Google Analytics as an image instead of setting the standard Javascript. This method tracks every visitor to the custom facebook pages on Google Analytics. It required a combination of server side cookie management and an additional tag to the bottom of the facebook fan page. Here are the steps to get Google Analytics working on your facebook fan page.

1) Setup Google Analytics account. If you already have one, create a new website profile. You can name it facebook.com or facebook.com/your_page_name. You will finally get your tracking code which looks like this UA-3123123-2

2) Create your custom img tag for each of your pages you like to track. EG: contact form, services, products etc.  

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Social Media Profiles for Online Reputation Management

Your reputation, online or offline is vital extremely important. Recently, a friend of mine owned a travel business. After hiring an employee with a light criminal background and having thousands of dollars embezzled from him, he started to pursue legal action against this individual. This person decided to get revenge by badmouthing the owner and business through Rip Off Report and other online platforms. Now, anytime you Google his name or business some very offensive things are displayed as a #1 result. Consequently, his business has suffered tremendously.

This situation is the perfect example of the need for reputation management. One of the most powerful (and easiest) methods to begin to control your reputation in the search engine result pages (SERPs) is to create social profiles on major social media websites. Since domains like Twitter or MySpace have such high authority it takes a lot less effort to rank, than creating your own site, by creating a profile that will outrank and push down undesired search results. Also, these search results gives you the added benefit of having control over your brand and being accessible and available on multiple platforms strengthens your overall branding efforts.

Which social profiles should I have?

Once you understand that you should be monitoring and repairing your reputation, you will need to figure out how to do it. As a rule of thumb the Big 4 social media sites are a great place to start. Generally your goal would be to obtain user profiles that are an exact match as the keyword you are trying to manage. In most cases this is a branded term such as your company name. Additioanly branded usernames are generally available on social media websites. Many sites, particularly niche sites, can be useful to your company and your specific ORM situation. But the 4 you must have are:

• Twitter
• LinkedIn
• Facebook
• MySpace

If you want to check across 120 different social sites to see which keywords or names are taken you can do so very easily with one of the best social media monitoring tools out there called KnowEm.com. Just type the desired username and click “Check Username”. Additionally, they offer a service that will register you on all those different social media sites as well for .50 cents per social media site.

Steps to Take

Once you have your accounts setup, you will need to do a few things before your campaign can be effective.

1. Create a complete profile
Simply obtaining the name twitter.com/companyname, isn’t enough. You need a complete and full profile to have a legitimate working account, this includes bios, avatars etc. As much information that you can fill in and feed to search engine spiders, the better.

2. Engage and Interact
Participating in the community strengthens your profile and gives your account credibility. An account that has your name but nothing else looks like a spam account.

Also, you gain the added benefit of internal links from these social sites. If you just create a profile and let it sit then it doesn’t gain internal link equity it needs, for high SERP rankings, from other profile pages, group pages, etc.
Interacting (e.g. returning messages, commenting, voting) is vital to the strength of your profile. For an example, check out the hat tip to Steve Espinosa for showing how to get DoFollowed links on YouTube here.

3. Monitor
When a company engages in social media they are opening themselves up for a lot of commentary regarding their brand. Be prepared to monitor the sentiment to measure if it’s positive or negative. Have a contingency plan for when you come across negative sentiment. I’ll spare the lesson on monitoring and handling sentiment and direct you to The Online Reputation Management Guide by Outspoken Media.

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503 Status Code (Service Unavailable)

Are you familiar with 503 status code?

If not, this post can help you to know about 503 status code. Search engines like 503 status code if your site is down for maintenance.

In a thread at Google Groups, Googler JohnMu told that Google prefer to use 503 status code if your site is down for maintenance. With the help of 503 status code search engine determines that the site is temporary down for maintenance.

If you are not using 503 status code and your site is in maintenance mode that means you are offering 200 status code, which means everything is OK and still no content. It can harm your presence and ranking on search engine. So the best way is use 503 (services unavailable) status code to prevent the search engine from indexing the error pages.

5 Tips for Creating a Successful Social Media Contest

One of the best ways to drive engagement and build word of mouth traffic about your brand is to run a contest via social media channels. Not only does it engage consumers with your brand in a fun and exciting way, it results in a treasure-trove of customer information, preferences, and feedback you can then mine to improve your business. And, best of all, launching an online contest can be very inexpensive.

However, there is a subtle art to social contests. Your brand needs to appear neither too “cheesy” nor too “salesy,” and you must deliver a prize that people really want. This can be a standard product or gift card, or a “notoriety” prize, such as publishing a winner’s video. What’s more, the contest itself has to be fun and easy to participate in. Few prizes are worth doing something extremely boring, monotonous, or complicated.

Here are five specific strategies you can follow to launch and manage a social contest, and leverage it to deliver real business value:

1.Define the marketing goal:

 Every contest you launch should meet a specific marketing goal. Do you want to drive awareness of a new product or service? Collect a list of customers interested in a specific product segment? Encourage new participants to use your company’s social networking channels? There are many valid reasons to launch a contest, but it’s important to know ahead of time what you’re trying to accomplish.

2.Get Creative:

Here’s the fun part: Creating your contest. The sky’s the limit when it comes to the type of contests you can launch. Here are a few ideas:

- A video contest inviting users to create a new commercial for one of your products

- A user-generated content contest that awards the best ‘personal experience stories’

- A photo contest related to your product or service

- A product invention contest with a large cash prize.

3.Leverage  Social Channels: 

The best part about online contests is how easy it is to take them viral, encourage participation, and link them into your social marketing activities. Promote your contest via Facebook, Twitter, your company blog, and all other social channels, as well as via traditional marketing channels such as print, e-mail, and in-store signage.

Just search the word contest on Twitter to see hundreds of contests going on right now. The best contests are intensely social by nature, because people like to play games and contests together, and most people love to share the chance to win a cool prize with friends and family. Ensure your contest is easily sharable by embedding “share this” links on the contest site, on Twitter, Facebook, YouTube (YouTube), and everywhere else people will come across it.

4.Finish the Contest: 

Everyone loves a winner, so make sure you don’t let your contest drag on too long. A typical social contest runs about four weeks –- longer.hen the winner is chosen, do a PR push to publicize their win. Of course, use Facebook and Twitter to promote the winner like mad. Go back to your social media tracking software and find out which people and social sites are talking most about the winner, then post comments on those networks to drive even more interest in the winner.

5.Measure the Contest: 

Of course launching a contest wasn’t just for fun, it was to achieve a specific marketing goal. So after the contest is done, you need to measure the impact it had on brand engagement, clickthrough to your site, conversion, and bottom-line sales. Again, you can use your social media tracking tool to measure all of these success metrics. Find out whether your contest drove as much traffic to your site as you had hoped, and whether this traffic resulted in conversion.

Sorce: Mashable

How to Add Facebook’s Like Button & Social Plugins to Your Web Pages & WordPress Posts

Facebook’s new Open Graph protocol is now official, having been announced and launched this past Wednesday at the Facebook f8 Conference. It is the successor to Facebook Connect which will be slowly phased out, and it is a big improvement, making it much easier to “socialize” your Web pages into Facebook’s hyper-expanding social network.

I must admit it was hard to sit still at the f8 conference after Mark Zuckerberg made the announcement in his keynote address and I attended a couple sessions that delved deeper into the Social Plugins and the Open Graph protocol. As soon as possible, which happens to be today, I decided to start experimenting by adding some social plugins to my WordPress blog.

I decided I could save others a lot of time if I wrote up a tutorial. So here it is….

Adding the Facebook Social Plugins to your Web Page or Blog — XFBML or iFrame?

Facebook offers two methods to add their social plugins to your Web page or blog posts:

   1. A simple iframe which can be easily dropped into the Web page code;
   2. The XFBML tag, which requires that your page/post make a call to the JavaScript SDK and that your page be set up as a Facebook application (quite easy).

I decided to go the XFBML route which, although a bit more complicated, is more feature rich than the iframe method. For example, after clicking on your Like/Recommend button, the user can add a comment to the profile post on the user's personal profile.
If you’d be happy with the simpler iframe method, there are several WordPress plugins to add the Like button.

Create an Application – Tell Facebook Your Website, Web Page or Post is an Application

The Web page or blog post to which you will add Facebook’s social plugins or other features that interact with Facebook’s Graph API will be viewed by Facebook as an “application,” which allows the page or post to use the JavaScript SDK.

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