The Social Path

Five things your business isn't allowed to do on Facebook (but probably is doing anyway).

1. Host giveaways on your page’s Wall.

“What’s your favorite dessert at our restaurant? Let us know in the comments, and you could win a free gift card!” You probably see these simple giveaways all the time on Facebook, usually hosted by small businesses trying to build a little more engagement and loyalty.

These contests are a great way to build audience — but they’re also a violation of Facebook’s Promotions Guidelines, implemented in November 2009.

Throughout the rules, Facebook makes it clear that you can only run a contest through a third-party application or on your own Web site. But to make it doubly obvious, Facebook has this to say:

"In the rules of the promotion, or otherwise, you will not condition entry to the promotion upon taking any action on Facebook, for example, updating a status, posting on a profile or Page, or uploading a photo. You may, however, condition entry to the promotion upon becoming a fan of a Page."

Suggested workarounds: If you can’t afford to build your own contest application, check out WildFire, a flexible system for creating photo contests, giveaways, etc. It costs money, but you can get a pretty nice limited-time campaign set up for about $100.

Or you can just do it all on your wall anyway and hope you fly under the radar. The punishment for violators is not made clear in the rules, but I’m guessing it wouldn’t be pretty if Facebook actually decided to drop the hammer on your page.

2. Create user profiles under your business name.

Many, many businesses continue the old MySpace practice of creating user accounts under their business name. To clarify, this is the account you use to log into Facebook. It should be your personal name, not a business name.

Another popular system is to create a “work account” for yourself under your real name on Facebook so that you can use it to administer pages while keeping it separate from your personal account.

Both of those approaches seem fine, but they’re also prohibited by Facebook’s Terms of Use.

Facebook wants you to use your personal account as your sole access point for work and personal issues, and to be fair, there are plenty of ways to keep the two separate. The network also wants to reserve user accounts for real users and steer businesses to Pages.

As a compromise of sorts, Facebook has a little-known option of creating a “business account” to help you administer ads and pages. But that’s about all you can do — there’s no Wall or networking options.

Also, you’re not supposed to create a business account if you already have a personal account on Facebook, which means this option essentially applies to no one. From Facebook’s Help Center:

Maintaining multiple accounts, regardless of the purpose, is a violation of Facebook’s Terms of Use. If you already have a personal account, then we cannot allow you to create business accounts for any reason. You can manage all the Pages and Socials Ads that you create on your personal account.

Violating that rule gives Facebook “the right to terminate all of their accounts.” Good times.

Recommended workarounds: There really is no reason to have a business-named user account. It weakens your search presence on Facebook and confuses potential fans. So just stick with your personal account. If you feel this opens you up to unwanted friend requests from coworkers and clients who might share admin status with you on a page, just explain that your account is for personal activity only. There’s no shame in setting your social network boundaries and sticking to them.

3. Geotarget your content to a specific city or state.
(Facebook seems to be of two minds on this.)

I have to admit, this one baffles me. Last year, Facebook allowed brand pages to post status updates that were targeted to a specific city, state, region or language. This was a fantastic addition for companies and organizations that didn’t want to annoy fans with updates that were irrelevant to their area.

But check out this line in Facebook’s very clearly written Page Guidelines:

Pages can only post content and information under the "everyone" setting.

Which seems to be a pretty stark contradiction from this section of the Help Center:

Can I publish posts to specific fans, instead of to everyone?

Yes, you can publish posts, links, photos, and videos to fans based on... Yes, you can publish posts, links, photos, and videos to fans based on location and language. This is controlled via the ‘Customize’ option, located in the dropdown next to the ‘Share’ button in the publish box. A post that is published to Facebook users in a specific location or language will only be visible to those users. All other users will never see the post in the News Feed, on your Page, or anywhere else across Facebook.

Suggested workarounds: Keep doing it. I’m not sure what happened with the phrasing on the geotargeting rules, but I’ve contacted Facebook to see if we can get it clarified. If nothing else, it just goes to show that Facebook’s rules are always evolving and expanding to the point where they can sometimes become contradictory. It’s important for businesses to keep up with these changes — and to help Facebook clear up such discrepancies.

4. Use exclamation points in ad headlines.

I’ve seen some “self-serve” ads get away with this on Facebook, but it’s worth noting anyway (and, I assure you, it will be enforced if you do a large-scale ad buy):

• Exclamation points cannot be used in the title of any ad.

Other prohibitions from the Advertising Guidelines:

• Ads cannot contain repeated and unnecessary punctuation (such as "Buy now!!!").

• All complete sentences (including if the ad title is a complete sentence) must end with a single punctuation mark. Sentences cannot end with ellipses, dashes, etc.

• Symbols cannot be used for the following:

1. To substitute for letters (e.g. "$ave" instead of "save");
2. To substitute for entire words (e.g. "&" instead of "and" or "$" instead of "cash/dollars/money");
3. As unnecessary abbreviations to shorten character count (e.g. "w/" instead of "with" or "@" instead of "at").

Some might find Facebook’s many (and there are many) ad content rules to be restrictive, but in an age where texting and instant messengers have wreaked havoc on the English language, I actually love Facebook for this.

5. Violate Section 11.

The previously mentioned “Facebook Pages Terms” that seem to prohibit geotargeting also contain this mysterious warning:

8. If you display advertising on your Page, Section 11 of this Statement also applies to you.

What’s that you say? There is no Section 11? I’m afraid you’ve delved too deeply and discovered the Secret Rules of Facebook. An elite squad of assassins has already been dispatched to your location.

Suggested workarounds: Stick to crowded places, listen for footsteps, and seriously, seriously spend some time updating your privacy settings.

David Griner is a social media strategist for Luckie and Company and contributing editor for Adweek’s blog, AdFreak.com. You can reach him by e-mail or on Twitter.

Photo credit: Neubie on Flickr.

The Seven Deadly Sins of Social Media, revisited.

In case you missed it, below is a copy of the full-page ad we ran in today's Birmingham Business Journal. The goal was just to share some social media insight while also introducing ourselves to some neighbors who might not know about this blog and Luckie's social media successes in recent years.

The ad is posted below. Just click on it to read it at full size or download it as a PDF. By the way, BIG props to our new design director, Markus Beige, who did a phenomenal job hand-crafting that apple image from scratch:

If this is your first visit to The Social Path, welcome! If you're a regular, I wanted to take this time to thank you for your support in making this blog such a vibrant place for candid discussion over the past two years. 

Click here to read the original Seven Deadly Sins of Social Media as it appeared on the blog.

David Griner is a social media strategist for Luckie and Company and contributing editor for Adweek’s blog, AdFreak.com. You can reach him by e-mail or on Twitter.

Corporate bloggers should get to the point, unlike the execs at Twitter and Facebook.

As I write this, Facebook is announcing its new, streamlined approach to privacy settings. I'll have more on that topic soon, but first I wanted to get something off my chest.

Corporate bloggers need to get to the point. And that's exactly what the leadership teams at Facebook and Twitter are not doing. 

Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg's blog post today on the new privacy settings waxes introspective for 550 words before actually describing the new settings. You're a Facebook user, right? Do you really care about how the site has evolved from a college community to feature-rich, global powerhouse? More to the point, do you care enough to plow through such a history lesson before reading about the breaking news on privacy settings?

Earlier this week, Twitter took a similar (but even more meandering) approach to announcing its new restrictions on ad networks. Under headlines like "Enduring Value" and "Ecosystem Clarity," COO Dick Costolo devoted 611 words to praising Twitter's role as an information hub before even beginning to describe the new advertising rules.

People, the Gettysburg Address is only 246 words long.

I know that it's important for companies to give context when they're describing a change in policy, especially a major one, but can we please dial back the self-indulgence a bit and respect our customers enough to value their time?

I could keep going, but you get the point.

David Griner is a social media strategist for Luckie and Company and contributing editor for Adweek’s blog, AdFreak.com. You can reach him by e-mail or on Twitter.

Photo credit: Molas on Flickr.

Making sense of Twitter's new advertising crackdown.

In a long-winded and circuitous blog post today, Twitter’s COO announced that the social network is banning third-party services that insert ads into users’ streams.

The decision is a kick in the collective crotch for in-stream ad businesses like Ad.ly, 140 Proof (shown at right) and Sponsored Tweets, which pay users to post occasional commercial messages or partner with applications to drop ads into the tweet stream.

It’s also a sign that Twitter is getting serious — after a mere four years — about monetizing their own service instead of just watching while everyone else milks their cow. The relatively new, official ad service of Promoted Tweets will now have a lock on in-stream advertising.

What Twitter said:

I’ll spare you the 611-word introduction (kid you not) to Twitter COO Dick Costolo’s blog post and skip right to the key points:

“Aside from Promoted Tweets, we will not allow any third party to inject paid tweets into a timeline on any service that leverages the Twitter API. …

“Why are we prohibiting these kinds of ads? First, third party ad networks are not necessarily looking to preserve the unique user experience Twitter has created. They may optimize for either market share or short-term revenue at the expense of the long-term health of the Twitter platform. …

“Secondly, the basis for building a lasting advertising network that benefits users should be innovation, not near-term monetization. Twitter is uniquely dependent on and responsible for the long-term health and value of the platform. Accordingly, a necessary focus of Promoted Tweets is to explore ways to create value for our users.”

Personally, I find this to be a less compelling argument than if he had simply said, “It’s our service, we pay the bills, and we want to be the ones making money from it.” I think we'd all agree that's fair.

Who does this affect?

The biggest problem here isn’t Twitter’s decision; it’s the length of time it took for Twitter to make the decision. By taking a laissez-faire stance on advertising for so many years, Twitter’s execs tacitly gave companies and users the green light to create their own ad opportunities.

Had Twitter made this decision in 2008, it probably wouldn’t have hurt much of anybody. But this late in the game, it comes as a heavy hit to several businesses and takes away a modest revenue source from many users and app developers who’ve signed up to automatically distribute the ads.

All that said, it’s hard to get too upset about a decision that reduces the number of ads we have to see in a day. Also, the Twitter execs deserve credit for being otherwise accommodating to most businesses profiting off their service.

Even Sponsored Tweets, part of the Izea network of paid social media content, seems optimistic its advertisers and users can remain active on Twitter. As I was writing this post, Izea CEO Ted Murphy published his take on what kind of promotion is still kosher:

“You can still tweet about our sponsors. You can still promote your employer. You can still drive traffic to your blog. You can still share amazon affiliate links. You can still use your account to tweet out deals. You still have freedom to do what you like with your Twitter account, so long as you aren’t a spammer.”

Murphy hopes that turning off his service’s “direct publishing” feature will be enough to comply with Twitter’s new rules, though I’m not so sure. Ad service 140 Proof also has posted a quick response, which basically just says "no comment."

If you’re in the advertising field, now’s a good time to brush up on Twitter’s constantly evolving guidelines on commercial use.

It’s also a good time to start thinking about Twitter’s upcoming Annotations feature, which could help users interconnect more intricately than ever before. Costolo feels this addition alone will spark the creation of many new companies, ones which can hopefully live in peaceful co-existence with a Twitter that’s finally behaving more like a tech industry leader and less like a nonprofit.

David Griner is a social media strategist for Luckie and Company and contributing editor for Adweek’s blog, AdFreak.com. You can reach him by e-mail or on Twitter.

3 workarounds for Facebook's new landing tab restriction.

More tough news for socially savvy small businesses this week as Facebook announced that only brand pages with 10,000-plus fans or hefty advertising budgets will be able to use a "custom landing tab." That's the setting that lets you determine which tab of your Facebook Page new visitors will land on (instead of your standard wall or info tabs).

(UPDATE: The All Facebook blog reports that this change seems to have been reversed — for now at least.)

Most major companies have been using landing tabs for a long while now, and they've proven to be a fantastic way to build a fan base by highlighting the promotions and other benefits your page has to offer. Plus, these tabs can be custom designed to match the look and feel of your brand.

But yesterday, Facebook posted the following note on its Platform Developer Forum:

Hello all,

We apologize for not messaging this earlier. Facebook recently made a change requiring that Pages be authenticated before enabling the ability to set a landing tab beyond Wall or Info. To be eligible for authentication, a Page must have greater than 10k fans or the Page admin must work with their ads account manager. If you are already working with an account representative, please contact that representative to begin the authentication process. If you do not work with an account representative, you can use this contact form to inquire about working with an account representative.

Also, for advertisers who don’t have a representative or 10k fans, and want to run ads and land users on a specific tab, you can still do so with standard Facebook ads by making their Destination URL as the URL incl. your tab.  Unfortunately, this currently will not work with "Fan"  ads.

Thanks,
Matt Trainer
Facebook Developer Network Team

Facebook has increasingly been reserving some of its best perks and hands-on customer service for its largest advertisers, which is understandable to an extent. And while it's not addressed in the note, I have a feeling this shift (much like Facebook's intensive crackdown on promotions)  was motivated by deceptive spammers rather than greed.

So if you run a local, emerging or niche page on Facebook, what can you do about this? A few tips:

1. Do it yourself with links from your other sites.

If you want to send new or existing fans to a specific tab, link to it directly from your site, blog, e-mail blast, etc. It's easy. Just click on the tab and use the app link that appears in your browser bar (it sometimes requires some tweaking, but should look something like this:

http://www.facebook.com/ATT#!/ATT?v=app_23744633048

As you'll see there, I've linked to AT&T's Uverse tab instead of its actual landing tab, "Offers." (Disclosure: AT&T's a Luckie client, though we don't manage their Facebook presence. Just using them as an easy example.)

2. Point your Facebook ads to land on your preferred tab.

Even if your ad budget is under $25,000 (roughly the amount you'd need to get on a Facebook account manager's radar), you can still have your ads land on any tab you'd like.

Facebook's new change mostly just affects people finding your brand through search and direct visits, which are far smaller traffic drivers than advertising and links from your other sites. So if you follow points 1 and 2, you should be fine.

3. Focus on putting great content on your wall.

Custom landing tabs are great, but they're no replacement for killer content. When Facebook users "Like" a brand page, they are — first and foremost — subscribing to your updates.

Yes, it helps to have promotions that reward people for clicking "Like," such as Wheaties' current offer for a $1 off coupon. But what good are thousands of new fans if you can't keep them? Retention is vital, and that requires serious thought about the content you'll be pushing to your wall in the months to come.

So while I wouldn't quite call this landing page limitation a blessing in disguise, I will say that it's not quite as bad as it might seem at first blush. Got your own workarounds or grievances? Let us know in the comments.

Hat tip to All Facebook.

David Griner is a social media strategist for Luckie and Company and contributing editor for Adweek’s blog, AdFreak.com. You can reach him by e-mail or on Twitter.

50 travel apps you shouldn't leave home without.

Each year, my colleague David Stutts puts out The Luckie 50, an awesomely useful catalog of the newest digital travel tools (here's a link to last year's). This year, he dedicated the whole list to the exploding field of mobile apps.

Read all about the new Luckie 50 on our ReThink Tank blog, where David has embedded the full report for free. For a clickable version of the chart shown above, download the PDF here.

David Griner is a social media strategist for Luckie and Company and contributing editor for Adweek’s blog, AdFreak.com. You can reach him by e-mail or on Twitter.

How Facebook's Community Pages are diluting brands.

We recently told you all about the new Community Pages on Facebook, created to bring together lots of content on general topics of interest, such as running, poker or interpretive joust. And while it's still hard to tell if users themselves are taking advantage of this new feature, it's safe to say that they're not too popular with people running official business pages.

First off, community pages create instant confusion when they share the same name as a brand that's already established on Facebook.

But more dangerously, these community pages are pushing real brand pages down (or even off) the all-important home page search results. Very often, community pages for brands take search prominence over official pages, but there are also many cases where the "real" page doesn't show up at all.

The good news? Each Community Page asks you to help improve it by suggesting the "Official Facebook Page," which is a pretty easy process — one you should definitely do on every applicable page if you're representing a brand. But it's unclear if this will really help the search prominence of brands or simply add more of your official content into the Community Page.

For now, these new pages are posing three pretty serious search dilemmas. They can be a bit tough to explain with words alone, so I wanted to walk you through a few visual examples. (if you're reading this via RSS, this is when you might want to click through to the blog post.)

Problem 1: Without recommended search terms (ie, "Did you mean...") built into Facebook's home page search bar, worthless community pages come out on top.

Example: Try searching for "JC Penney" and this is what you'll see:

Each of those is a Community Page created automatically by Facebook, despite the fact the official page has 824,000 fans.

What's the problem? The brand actually spells its name "JCPenney," which is exactly what you're offered in Facebook search — but only if you click to "See more results..." Even then (unlike Google), Facebook continues to offer you the wrong pages until you click through to the alternate spelling.

Click on the "Did you mean" option, and you'll finally get to the real JC juggernaut:

Sure, this is a problem that was probably already a thorn in JC Penney JCPenney's side, but the advent of Community Pages has really made it worse by offering people lots of incorrect links. Imagine if Google served you up five or six unused Wikis as the top results when you searched for "JC Penney." 

How to fix it: Facebook needs to incorporate its recommended search alternatives into the home page search bar instead of just placing them "after the jump" in the (often unnoticed) full search results. This change would be a huge boon to brands whose names aren't easily spelled to begin with, like Schlotzsky's or Volkswagen.

Problem 2: Facebook search sometimes gives preferential treatment to Community Pages.

You'd think the most popular page would win top billing on most home page searches, but you'd be wrong. In the screenshot below, you can see that GameStop's official page (with its 21,000 fans) plays second fiddle to the GameStop Community Page (with just 1,800 users):

How to fix it: A simple weighting system should keep the most popular pages or groups on top of home page search results. Or, if Facebook must give preferential treatment, it seems the preference should go to the brands (unless Facebook expects Community Pages to start buying ads any time soon).

Problem 3: A lot of official pages simply aren't showing up in search.

This one's a real head-scratcher. While most brand-name searches in the home page come up just fine, some simply don't show up at all. Here are a few I found in just a few minutes of tests:

Tool company DeWalt doesn't get any love for its well-run brand page, which has 6,500 fans. Instead, a basic Facebook search returns only the Community Page:

Same is true for fish-frying favorite Captain D's, whose official page has 6,000 users but makes no appearance in the home page search results:

How to Fix It: Page admins might actually be able to help themselves out a bit on this one. A little old-school Search Engine Optimization might beef up the search results for both of the examples above.

Specifically, DeWalt hasn't claimed the custom URL Facebook.com/DeWalt yet, which could help improve results when searching for its name. Also, neither company explicitly says its name in the info box at the left side of each Facebook page. That's one of the few spots you have for permanent customized text, so be sure to use it, people.

So now that we've had a few weeks to see Community Pages take shape, what do you think? Have you seen any real benefit? Conversely, have they posed any problems (search-related or otherwise) for your business? We'd love to hear about it in the comments.

David Griner is a social media strategist for Luckie and Company and contributing editor for Adweek’s blog, AdFreak.com. You can reach him by e-mail or on Twitter.

Video: The newest mind-blowing stats on social media.

In case you haven't seen it yet, here's a newly updated version of the incredible "Social Media Revolution" video that got 1.9 million views over the past year. Obviously, the social media numbers have only gotten more jaw-dropping:

For more, be sure to check out the original and pick up the book behind the videos, Socialnomics.

David Griner is a social media strategist for Luckie and Company and contributing editor for Adweek’s blog, AdFreak.com. You can reach him by e-mail or on Twitter.

Will the next generation ever use a keyboard?

I'm writing this live from the audience of iCitizen, a digital conference that packs a lot of insight into a quick two days. And while most of the conference has been devoted to the "the Real-Time Web," with great discussion of how social media is changing our culture, I wanted to share one question that really struck a chord with me.

Will the next generation know how to type? 

Wired magazine's founding executive editor Kevin Kelly flat-out said in his presentation this morning that "we are raising a generation that doesn't know how to type." That's not an insult; it's simply a statement of fact about how we're changing our interface with digital technology.

If you have young children in your life, you've probably already noticed how dramatically this shift is changing their ability to experiment with technology.At 18 months old, my daughter was already able to navigate photos on my iPhone with ease. At 2, she has learned (on her own) how to use multi-touch to zoom in and out or even pull up applications. I'd predict that within 6 months, there will be little she WON'T be able to do on the iPhone despite not being able to read, much less write.

Of course, there will always be some form of "typing." Our written language is not going away, and writers like myself will always need a way to put these words together. But will the physical keyboard, with its QWERTY format and cryptically abbreviated buttons, still be around?

Just think about all the ways we "type" today:

• Touch-screen keyboards on the iPhone, iPad, etc.
• Cell phone keypads, navigated almost solely by thumbs 
• Video game controllers
• Predictive typing, guessing your input (Google, Garmin, etc.)
• Scroll wheels
• Finger-tracing text (see Swype for examples)

Those are just a few, and I'm sure I've missed dozens of others. As you go about your day over the next week, pay attention to how you input data into devices. How often do you really need a physical keyboard?

While I think many (probably most) of us will miss the tactile sensation of typing on a keyboard, it's hard to deny that touch screens have clear advantages.

Touch screen keyboards:

• Take up less space.
• Can be updated and improved with software upgrades.
• Can be translated into any language, even on the same machine.
• Can be stretched or shrunk to suit your preference or space needs.
• Can adapt predictively (I'm talking about they keyboard itself adapting, not simply predicting your words. The iPhone invisibly adjusts its keyboard to predict which letters you might type next. Type in a Q, and your phone will make it easier to hit U than other nearby letters like Y or H.) 
• Take some getting used to. But the technology is improving with each day. If you haven't tried using one in a while, you might be surprised.

So what do you think? Will the keyboard as a physical entity cease to exist in the coming years? Will today's toddlers grow up without learning to type? If so, will we lose something intangible in the process?