The Hello Bar is a simple web toolbar that engages users and communicates a call to action.
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I bet I post a new phishing scam warning at least once a week on Facebook, — along with lots of other people — and yet, thousands of suckers (sorry for being blunt) continue to fall for them every time. Sometimes the offer is so ridiculous it baffles me why anyone would fall for it, but they do, over and over and over.

This morning I got an email from “Facebook Surveys” and the subject was, “Vote now for your opinion of Facebook features”. I have included a screen shot of the email below and as you can see, they used Facebook’s logo and style to create a very convincing email. Of course, as always, there are all kinds of clues that this is bogus, ranging from subtle to incredibly obvious.

I’m going to list all of the clues, some of which you should have been able to pick up by just looking at the screen shot but others that you can’t ascertain from a graphic.

1. Let’s start with the email subject: “Vote now for your opinion of Facebook features”. That doesn’t even make sense gramatically. Why would I vote FOR my opinion? Wouldn’t I vote WITH my opinion?

2. Facebook wants to give me a free gift for taking part in a survey and my opinion is “greatly valued”? C’mon, Facebook doesn’t ask for our opinions before they do anything, that’s why there’s so much hue and cry every time they change something.

3. From the fine print: “The advertisers in this email are not affiliated with any of the above brands.” Hmmm… the “above brands” being Facebook, I guess but if they aren’t affiliated with Facebook, why does the survey invite look like it’s from Facebook? Oh yeah, to fool the suckers.

4. More fine print: “This is a third party advertisement sent to you by the list owner.” I guess they think that disclaimer covers them legally for using Facebook’s logo and inferring that the offer was from Facebook. I’m pretty sure they didn’t get that advice from an attorney, unless he got his degree from the ACME Law School he applied to from a bubble gum wrapper.

5. Now, for the big clue and the one that the vast majority of suckers never pay attention to. The mouse over. That’s right folks, if you mouse over any link, whether it’s on a web page or in an email, you will see the actual URL that it links to. In this case, assuming you hadn’t read the fine print and already knew it wasn’t going to be a link to a Facebook URL, this would be the time to wonder, when it wasn’t.

All three of the blue links in this email link to the following URL and I didn’t hyperlink it or include the full URL on purpose.

http://bewitch.onlinesportbettingsystemsreviews.com/……

Hello? Why would anyone, sucker or not, click a link for a Facebook survey that went to a sports betting website? Would you? Please say no so I don’t have to come over and slap you upside the head.

So, what have we learned here today? Phishing scammers are crafty, but kind of dumb, and unfortunately, the dumb part doesn’t matter, because as P.T. Barnum once said, “There’s a sucker born every minute.” Now, would you like to see a photo of a real mermaid that has the body of a monkey and the tail of a fish?


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Sharing on Facebook is getting out of hand. People joke about not using Twitter because they don’t care what they’re friends had for breakfast or when they cleaned the cat’s litter box and yet Facebook is adding updates in our newsfeed from apps that let us know what our friends are listening to, watching, and doing as they’re doing it.

I really, really don’t care what you’re listening to or watching right now. Seriously, I don’t. But this morning I noticed Disqus comments in my newsfeed. Really? Why would I want my friends’ blog comments in my stream? I clicked the “Hide all by Disqus” button and took care of that, along with Spotify, Hulu and all the other places Facebook thinks I want to know what you’re doing. Next thing you know they’ll come up with a device to attach to our toilet like this. Is there anything Zuckerberg thinks is TMI?


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I’ve never really thought of my bathroom as a particularly social place and prefer to do most things in there alone, but hey, if you’re a huge Facebook fan and don’t mind showering with friends, this Facebook Social Shower Curtain is just what you need.

You can preorder your Social Shower Curtain, here, at the Spinning Hat.


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I’m sure by now you’ve heard that Twitter has launched a new new design. I love it and I think you will too, but I’m not going to review it here, I’m just going to tell you how you can get the new design early, if you don’t already have it.

According to Twitter, the new new design will be rolling out to everyone over the next few weeks but there is a way to get it early. If you have an iPhone or an Android, simply download the new Twitter app to your phone, launch the app and soon thereafter you should see the new design the next time you log in on your computer. It took a couple hours to happen for me but it did work.

Tip: If you already have the Twitter app on your phone just upgrading to the new version should work, if not, remove the app and download again from scratch.

Update: As you’ll see in the comments, many people are saying this trick is not working for them. Twitter says it will but if it doesn’t, the only choice is to wait till they finally roll the new layout out to everyone. I’m not sure what’s taking so long, but Facebook took a couple months to get the new Timeline rolled out.


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If you can’t figure out how to view a list of your Facebook Page’s fans all of a sudden, you’re not alone. I’ve answered this question several times the past few days and the reason is that whereas up until a few days ago, clicking on the “like this” link in the left sidebar on a Facebook Page opened a list of all of your Page’s fans, it now links to the Insight page for that metric.

Don’t worry, Facebook still lets you see who your fans are and there are two ways. The quickest way is to be sure you’re using your Page as your Page and not as yourself and then click the little people icon in the blue bar next to the Facebook logo. This will open a drop down showing the last five people or Pages that have Liked your Page. Click on “See All” at the bottom of the drop down to see all of your fans.

The other way to see your fans is to click on the “like this” link below the number of fans in the left sidebar as you have before and then click on “See Likes” in the top right corner of the Insight page.

Note: There appears to be a limit on the number of fans Facebook will let us see so if you have thousands of fans I don’t know of a way to get a list of all of them. I believe the limit is 500.


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I logged into my Google Bookmarks a few minutes ago and there was a message from Google letting me know that I haven’t created any Lists yet and encouraging me to do so.

Hey, that’s cool, I appreciate them letting me know and I might just go ahead and do as they suggest and jump in and create a list or two. But wait… what’s this? Right below that message was this one:

Good thing I didn’t waste my time setting up a list but here’s an idea, Google. How about pulling that first message from the page at the same time you announce it’s to be discontinued?

 


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You call yourself a “network marketing coach” and you’ve got a hot tip. Hey, why not post it on Facebook? Good info too; don’t post spam on someone else’s Wall because it’s not professional and would be a bad way to promote your business. Only one problem. You posted this on another network marketing coach’s Facebook Page Wall as your Page so didn’t you just ignore your own tip?


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Something occured to me yesterday as I was checking some of my Facebook Insights and wondering why some Pages can seemingly have a reasonable number of comments, shares, and post Likes and yet have a very low “Talking About This” number when compared to the total number of fans. The average seems to be about 5% or less, with 10% being on the high side, although some Pages do achieve a higher percentage. Many Pages, especially those with hundreds of thousands or millions of fans, like Justin Beiber or Lady Gaga, have extremely low percentages, many are below 1%.

I’ve spent a good bit of time analyzing many Facebook Pages, ranging in fans from a few hundred to millions, trying to understand just exactly what affected the engagement numbers. The obvious way to get high interactions per individual post is to provide information that others find interesting enough to comment on, Like, and share with their friends, but I found plenty of Pages who were doing that quite well with very high engagement numbers yet still with low Talking About This numbers when seen as a percentage of the total number of fans. Then, it came to me and the answer is actually quite simple.

The Talking About This metric is based on the number of unique people who interacted with your content in some way during the past 7 days. If you’ve noticed that even though you seem to have lots of people commenting, Liking, and sharing your individual posts but still seem to have a low percentage compared to your overall Likes (fans), you probably just aren’t posting often enough.

Let’s do some simple 5th grade math. Mary has 5,000 fans and they like her Page very much and many of them interact with her updates daily, with an average of 50 interactions per post. She posts 1 update a day. What is her Talking About This percentage?

Don’t worry, I’m not going to make you do math. The answer is that she would have 350 Talking About This — 50 interactions a day times 7 days. Her percentage wouldn’t be too bad either at 7% but Mary wishes it was higher, like her friend Jimmy’s.

Jimmy also has 5,000 fans but his Talking About This number is 1,750 which results in a 35% ratio. Mary is very jealous. The thing she can’t figure out is that Jimmy also has an average of 50 interactions per status update so how can he have a much higher Talking About percentage?

The answer? Jimmy doesn’t post only 1 status update per day like Mary does, he posts 5 times a day, spaced out evenly about once every 5 hours so he doesn’t upset his fans with too many daily updates. 5 updates per day with 50 interactions per update is 250 interactions per day or 1750 interactions per week or a whopping 35%.

So, if you want to increase your Talking About This number you just need to post more often. Of course you also need to make sure that by posting more often you don’t reduce the number of interactions per post because your fans just don’t feel like commenting or Liking too many updates a day. Studies show that posting 3 status updates per day seems to be a good number.

Please note that these exampes are highly simplified to make a point. The actual Talking About number is based on the “unique” number of people who interacted with one of your updates in some way. Obviously, if the same 50 people engage with each of Jimmy’s 5 updates a day his number would be the same as Mary’s so it’s not likely that doubling or tripling your daily posts will double or triple your Talking About number, but if you vary the topics so that each post is of interest to a different group of fans, the number will definitely increase.


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Several weeks ago Facebook rolled out a bunch of new changes to our newsfeed including adding a Ticker and changing the option to view updates in either chronological order or in the order Facebook chooses for us based on an algorithm that supposedly shows us stories we’ll consider the most interesting. Instead of being able to choose the order, we always see “Top Stories” first and need to either scroll down or click a link that drops us down the page to view “Recent Stories”.

Yesterday, in a blog update, Facebook announced that they were changing back to the old system by giving us a drop down that lets us choose whether we want to view “Top Stories”, which are now referred to as “Highlighted Stories”, or “Recent Stories” first. This will come as very good news to Facebook business (fan) Page owners. The way the system works now, it’s not likely that a Page’s updates will be considered as important by Facebook’s algorithm as updates from friends and family members, therefor, it’s less likely their updates will be seen if someone doesn’t check their newsfeed often and only scans the “Top Stories”.

Facebook has indicated that this update will take a few days to roll out for everyone, but this morning I was greeted with a pleasant surprise and now have the new (old) option to choose whether I prefer to see all stories in chronological order or in the order Facebook decides I consider the most interesting. Thanks, Facebook, but I much prefer to read all stories in the order they come in.

 

Page owners will be very pleased to notice that in the screen shot below there are two updates from Pages showing right near the top. I believe this change back will rectify the drop most of us have experienced in our impressions.


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Check out the screen shot below and you’ll notice that the “Weekly Total Reach” Insights metric for my Social Identities Facebook fan page seems to have had a very strange drop off, then a dead period, and then a steep rise back. What happened? Did that particular stat stop recording for a week? It must have because my “Impressions” had remained consistent during that period.

Imagine my elation when I had checked this stat in early October and saw that my Weekly Reach had climbed quite quickly from 5,377 “People Reached” to over 49,000 and then stayed that way for about a week. Then try to comprehend the horror I felt as I watched that number plummet and then level off at about 2,500. And then, bang, it started shooting right back up again and notice the latest reading of 42,636 shows an increase of 1,638.83%? Wow! Okay, enough already, my emotions just can’t take this. I like roller coasters a lot but this one sucks.

My first assumption after seeing that big valley in the graph was that for some reason there had been a glitch in the system and my stats had stopped recording for about a week. Cool, that made me feel better. But guess what? That’s not what happened at all. What had actually happened was that I run a Facebook ad and periodically turn it off for a week or so to let it cool off. I never remember seeing this part in the explanation before but Facebook has added, in parentheses, the following little tidbit to their explanation of what the “Weekly Total Reach” is: (including any Ads or Sponsored Stories pointing to your Page). What? How is that information of any use to me now? I can view stats for my Ads on the advertising page and can see how many impressions my Ads are getting so why would I want that data included in a stat that could have some real value to me; telling me how many people my content was reaching?

To be fair, this isn’t the only way you can view this particular metric, but it is the one big graphic that greets you when you first visit your Insights. So, if you run paid advertising on Facebook, don’t do what I did and assume this stat represents your actual reach. To find that information click “Reach” in the sidebar and then deselect “Paid” and “Total” in the “Reach” graph, as shown below.


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