Sharing on Facebook is getting out of hand. People joke about not using Twitter because they don’t care what their 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?

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.

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.

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?

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.

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.

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.

Last night I was checking my Facebook Page and a huge message pane was covering the top of my Page Wall. Apparently, the October deadline Facebook set for all apps and tab pages to be secure (https) has been extended until November 7  and Facebook was even nice enough to provide a list of apps on my Page that aren’t secure with links to report them to the developers. Only one problem… 3 of the 5 were their own apps.

The screen shot below has been cropped to fit the width of the column. Click to view the full image.

Needless to say, this announcement caused a fair bit of panic and I spent a couple hours answering questions and even had to talk a couple of hysterical folks down off a ledge.

I’m assuming that the script that Facebook is using to determine which of our apps aren’t secure isn’t working properly. The message disappeared within a few minutes and people stopped reporting seeing it so Facebook must have discovered the mistake and pulled it, but I’m wondering if we’ll get any official explanation from them.

To add insult to injury, have you ever seen a typo in an official Facebook warning before? I haven’t, but I’m pretty sure there’s no such thing as “secure browswing”.

Have you noticed how when you post a status update on Facebook, either on your profile or Page, at first there will be a flury of comments but after an hour or so the conversation dies out? That’s one of the limitations of most social networks, like Facebook, Twitter and Google+. Unlike blogs, where I’ve had comment threads stay active for months, on social networks, comment conversations have a very short lifespan.

When we post a status update on Facebook it shows up in our friends’ and fans’ news feeds and hopefully they see it and comment. The problem is that after they comment they’ll only see additional comments and perhaps comment again to keep the conversation going as long as they continue to monitor that particular update. The only person who gets a notification each time a comment is posted is the person who posted the status update and, in most cases, within a short period of time, most conversations are over.

Let’s suppose that you haven’t checked your news feed in several hours and you see that one of your friends had posted something of interest earlier in the day and you feel like commenting. The last comment is from 6 hours ago but you comment anyway. Here’s the thing. The person who posted the status update will get a notification and will probably see your comment and may post a reply but no one else who had commented will see it. No problem, crank that sucker back up. Scan through the list of comments and reply to things others said and mention them by name and in most cases (depending on their privacy settings) as you’re typing their name it will become highlighted, which means it’s been tagged. You don’t even need to put the @ symbol in front of the name. You can even delete their last name if you want. Now, when you post your comment, anyone you tagged will get a notification.

Thanks to Deanna Walz Kastrinos for the heads up on this, but she discovered it’s also possible to tag people as your Page as long as you’re tagging them in a status update on your own Page and you can only tag people who have commented to that specific update. Normally, the only way they would know you’d replied to them would be if they checked the update periodically, but if you tag them, they’ll get a notification. Check out the screen shot below. I tagged three people in my comment and you’ll notice that they’re names are blue. If you moused over their names in the actual comment their photo would pop up and the name would be linked to their Facebook profile, and of course, each one of them received a notification that I’d replied to them when I posted that update.

This is an awesome option for Page owners and Facebook has clearly thought this one through completely and come up with a brilliant solution. My concern all along has been that if they allowed Pages to tag people it would be a spammers dream, but by only allowing us to tag people on our own Pages and then, only the people who have commented to that specific update, they’ve eliminated the spam potential but given Page owners a very valuable tool.

Click here to see a status update I posted on my Page with me tagging the people who are commenting to see this in action. Feel free to comment if you’d like now that anyone can comment on a Page without having to Like it first.

This morning I posted a couple of comments in reply to others’ comments on some of my own status updates on my Social Identities Facebook Page. Shortly thereafter, I received a Notification that I had commented to myself. Okay, so now Facebook has me talking to myself. Wait… what?… Stop talking to me I’m trying to type here… Oh, that was me talking to me?… Hang on a second and let me finish… Hey, if you’re going to keep talking to me you can just type this post yourself… Oh, you think you can do a better job?… Okay, I’m leaving, you go ahead and do my work today… I don’t care who finishes this post, why don’t you do it?… Wait, what?… You already did?