Social Media Roundup - September 2013

All Your Data Belongs to Us!
Facebook's latest revision of its terms of service, released in early September, essentially lays claim to the right to use or sell your identity, content, and data - without limitations. The company has gotten some pushback already, and has delayed implementation of the new policy. In August, The American Society of Media Photographers released "The Instagram Papers" to highlight Facebook-owned Instagram's Terms of Use, which lay similar claim to the right to do just about anything with your photos and videos, including the right to sell them - and they mean forever, without a right of revocation. Let the social media user beware. These services are useful to us, but they are not our friends.

Hospitality: If You're Not on Trip Advisor, You Don't Exist
Hospitality businesses need to use online review sites like Trip Advisor. Travelers searching for places to eat, sleep, and visit overwhelmingly turn to these services for advice, information, and above all, reviews. If you haven't claimed the listing for your hospitality business, do it now, and start asking your satisfied customers to review you. This article contains 10 useful tips on how to optimize your Trip Advisor listing. Remember: for mobile Internet users, businesses that don't have listings easily available to them on their tablets and smartphones when they want them might as well not exist.

Facebook Rolling Out New Shared Photo Albums
Up to 50 Facebook users will be able to post photos in one of the company's new shared photo albums. Each user can post up to 200 photos. It will be a great feature for events attended by a lot of people, like weddings, graduations, company meetings, or franchisee conventions. Shared photo albums will be particularly useful for Facebook Groups. However, the article does not say whether they will be available to Fan Pages as well.

Google Replaces Keyword Tool with Keyword Planner
Long an important tool for search marketing professionals, particularly for planning Google Adwords campaigns, the Keyword Tool has officially been retired and replaced with the Keyword Planner. Google says the new tool combines the functionality of the Keyword Tool and the Traffic Estimator, which gives a reading on how many people are searching for particular terms in particular geographical areas. The application continues to be free, but does require users to log in to an Adwords account.

Let Me Tell You About My Website...
Matt Cutts, head of Google's Webspam team, sent out a tweet in late August asking users to tell Google about good sites they think should be doing better in Google's search results. This should help Google refine their algorithm to take better account of newer or smaller sites offering valuable information that tend to be ignored by the current implementation.

New Look for LinkedIn Groups
Many B2B companies find LinkedIn Groups a valuable place to create a community around their products or services. More than 2 million Groups have been created to date. The update aims to allow Group members and managers new abilities to customize them, including banners and better editing tools for discussions. People who engage in Group discussions get four times as many profile views as others, making Groups an excellent way to get noticed on LinkedIn.

Maximizing Your Facebook Page
What does your Facebook Page do for your business? How can you tell if it's reaching its goals? Pay attention to these four Facebook Page metrics.
1) Reach: this shows the size of your potential reader base (not the number of people who have actually read your content).
2) Engagement: how many people have taken some sort of action. Actions include Liking, Commenting, Sharing, and Viewing photos and videos.
3) Action: this refers to a post's click-through-rate (the number of people who click to view content).
4) Negative feedback: Hiding posts, unliking your Facebook Page, or reporting it as spam are all things you want to avoid.
Maximize the first three and minimize the last one. You'll be ahead of the game.

Does Including People in Images Help or Hurt Facebook Engagement?
Visual content is key to a successful Facebook Page. So questions about what to put in pictures is a serious matter for Facebook marketers. Social media images firm Taggs studied the question in depth and the results are pretty interesting. First of all, images without people outperformed images with people by about 17 percent on average. Larger differences were found for retail brands like Old Navy (+41 percent). Images that show hands and feet using the product do better, but not as well as images without people. The exceptions are marketers that have people as a notable brand asset (e.g., Victoria's Secret models).

Every Tweet Ever Published!
Topsy.com offers a searchable database of the entire history of public tweets on Twitter, going all the way back to March 2006 (is Twitter really only 7 years old?!). Topsy is a "social insight" tool, allowing marketers to mine useful information from Twitter's vast mass of messages. The tool can be used to locate Twitter firsts, like Justin Bieber's (44.2 million followers) first tweets from 2009, and the first mention on Twitter of Barack Obama (36.2 million followers) in January 2007. Visit Topsy.com to try the service free. A free 14-day trial is available if you want to check out Topsy's more advanced tools.

The Hardest-Working People in Social Media
Consumers get hit with 1,500 messages every time they log in to Facebook. How hard is it for them to find out what they want to know about you? How do your messages stand out from the noise they're confronted with every time they go online? How do you make it worth their while to work so hard every day? What's in it for them? Smart marketers know who's boss, and always remember not to make the hardest job in social media any harder. Learn more here.

Daniel Lieberman is the founder of Daniel Lieberman Digital ("I speak Geek - You don't need to"). Based in Shelburne Falls, Mass., he helps companies, organizations, and individuals learn to use the Internet to communicate, market, and brand themselves using the most up-to-date tools and techniques. Contact him at 413-489-1818 or daniel@daniellieberman.org.