20 Facebook Tips/Tricks You Might Not Know

If you surf Facebook on daily basis or occasionally, chances are you’re already familiar with regular stuffs like add/delete friends, update statuses, walls and profile, add and explore pages & applications, etc, but there’s more..

This week we want to cover some interesting things you can do on (or with) Facebook; inclusive of tricks that are not documented or unknown to many, as well as tips to stay connected better with your friends. Without further ado, here’s 20 Facebook Tips/Tricks You Might Not Know. If you have interesting tips/tricks related to Facebook, please feel free toshare in the comment box below.

1. How To Place Facebook Chat On Firefox Sidebar

   If you are using Firefox, you can place the Facebook Chat at the sidebar.
   

2. How To Download Facebook Photo Albums

   FacePAD: Facebook Photo Album Downloader allows you to download your friends’ facebook albums, Events albums, and Group Albums, en masse, with the click of a button.
   

3. How To Share Flickr Photos To Facebook

   Flickr2Facebook is an unofficial Flickr to Facebook uploader(bookmarklet) which allows you upload photos to Facebook from Flickr.
   

4. How To Update Facebook Without Using Facebook

   hellotxt and Ping.fm both introduced features that let Facebook administrators update Facebook Pages.
   

5. How To Schedule Facebook Messages

   Sendible lets you schedule Facebook messages ahead of time so you can send messages to your friends, customers or colleagues in the future.
   

6. How To "Friend" Someone On Facebook & Hide It From Your Status Updates

   A short tutorial on Makeuseof to guide you how to hide Facebook status updates and keep that fact confined to your closer friends.
   

7. How To Create A Photo Collage Using Pictures Of Your Facebook Friends

   Click on Friends tab. Proceed to More tab. From "Choose an option" dropdown, choose any of the dashes "—" . Your Facebook friends collage is right on your computer screen.
   

8. How To Know When Facebook Friends Secretly Delete Or Block You

   This service has been discontinued. X-Friends is a unique tool for tracking friends that disappear from Facebook.
   

9. How To Display Selected Pictures Only On Your Facebook Profile Page

   A little-known feature in Facebook that lets you decide who shows up in that Friends box. Click that "edit" pencil in your Friends box and type the names of your best friends in the box that says "Always show these friends"
   

10. How To Remove Facebook Advertisements

    This Greasemonkey script – Facebook: Cleaner removes many of the annoying ads and updates that unavoidably appear on your Facebook pages.
    

11. How To Syncs Photos Of Facebook Friends With Contacts In Microsoft Outlook

    OutSync is a free Windows application that syncs photos of your Facebook friends with matching contacts in Microsoft Outlook. It allows you to select which contacts are updated. So you can update all contacts at once or just a few at a time.
    

12. How To Display Facebook Statuses On WordPress Blog

    The following method make use of Facebook status feed and WordPress RSS widget to display Facebook Statuses on WordPress blog.. It will also work for self-host WordPress blogs.
    

13. How To Post Your Blog Posts To Your Facebook Wall Automatically

    Wordbook allows you to cross-post your blog posts to your Facebook Wall. Your Facebook “Boxes” tab will show your most recent blog posts.
    

14. How To Access Facebook Chat On Desktop

    Gabtastik and digsby let you keep Facebook chat sessions open on your Windows desktopoutside of your regular web browser, using minimal screen real estate and system memory.
    

15. How To Create Quiz On Facebook Easily

    LOLapps provides quiz creator that can be employed to conjure up these popular personality quizzes that are so widespread in Facebook.
    

16. How To Hide Your Online Status On Facebook Chat From Select Contacts

    Facebook has integrated friends list with Chat and you can also choose which of these list members get to see you online.
    

17. How To Get Facebook Updates On Email

    NutshellMail consolidates your Facebook accounts through the inbox you use the most.
    

18. How To Update Facebook Status From Firefox

    FireStatus is a status update utility for multiple social networks, including FaceBook.
    

19. How To Get Facebook On Your Desktop

    Seesmic Desktop, Facebooker, Xobni, Facebook Sidebar Gadget, Scrapboy and Facebook AIR application are desktop applications that allows you interact with your stream just as you would on Facebook, but without the browser.
    

20. How To Delete, Cancel And Terminate Facebook Account And Profile

    A simple guide to terminate, delete or cancel Facebook account, together with the Facebook profile easily.
    
    http://www.hongkiat.com/blog/20-facebook-tipstricks-you-might-not-know/

Success Will Never Come to Entrepreneurs Who Do These 10 Things

Whether we are talking about a football game, an election or an entrepreneurial journey, one thing is certain -- there are going to be winners and there are going to be losers.

Want to stack the odds of being a successful entrepreneur in your favor? You can start by taking note of the following 10 things that you should never do.

1. Be jealous or envious

Seeing other people around you succeed should motivate you, even if they are your competitors. You should understand that every single person has the ability to become successful, and wasting time focusing on other people’s success or achievements will just sidetrack your own progress.

2. Look back

You are going to face hard times, difficult decisions and possibly even failure at some point. Don’t let small bumps in the road stop your forward progress. Find ways to maneuver around obstacles and continue to push forward, never looking back.

3. Make excuses

If you make a bad decision and screw up, own it. If something doesn’t work out as planned, don’t look for excuses. Search for the cause of the problem and chalk it up to a valuable business lesson. If you identify and own the problem you will not make the same mistake again. If you are constantly making excuses for your mistakes, you will continue to make them because you haven’t properly identified the root of the problem.

4. Stop learning

Your age, years of experience or level of success should never prevent you from learning. There isn’t a single person on this planet who knows everything. We can all continue to learn and be inspired from other entrepreneurs, whether they are billionaire household names or those just starting his or her entrepreneurial journey. 

5. Associate with negative individuals

People who constantly make excuses, complain and have a negative outlook should be avoided like the plague. We all know people like this. No matter what you say or what the situation is, they always chime in with negativity. People like this are a cancer and their negative aura can rub off on you. Surround yourself with like-minded individuals that are as focused and determined as you are.

6. Wake up without a plan

Time management is a crucial part of being an entrepreneur. There are only so many hours in a day, so to be efficient you need to know what your goals are and what tasks you need to get done prior to starting your day. If you are scrambling to create a plan of attack every day you are going to be in trouble. End each day by mapping out the following day’s to-do list.

7. Be scared to make changes and adapt

You need to be willing and able to adjust your plan and overall strategy, because there is a very good chance that you will need to adapt to maintain success in the future. Imagine if Apple never adapted and just stuck to making computers? After releasing the iPod it started manufacturing smartphones, tablets and now are releasing its first wearable technology, the Apple Watch. Once just a computer company, it is now a consumer-electronics powerhouse. 

8. Let your bark be bigger than your bite

Successful entrepreneurs don’t sit back and talk about what they are going to do. They plan, follow through and conquer. Nothing is going to get accomplished just by talking about it, and nobody is going to be impressed with words alone. 

9. Focus solely on dollar signs and decimal points

Instead of chasing the money, focus on creating products and services that make a difference and provide value. If you do this, the money will come. I would be lying if I said the goal of my company wasn’t to make money, but focusing on providing a great service paves the path for the money to follow.

10. Let failure stop you

Most statistics state that eight out of every 10 new businesses fail. Successful entrepreneurs go into everything knowing that there is a chance of failure. If in fact they fail it is viewed as part of their growth and they keep plugging along.

James Dyson is a perfect example, as his first 5,126 prototypes were failures, but the 5,127th one worked and went on to become the top-selling vacuum in the U.S. He is now worth $4.5 billion because he never once let failure stop him.

What are some others things that successful entrepreneurs should never do? Share your own in the comments section below.http://www.entrepreneur.com/article/240063

4 Winning Strategies for Social Media Optimization

Social media optimization (SMO) is the process by which you make your content easily shareable across the social web. Because so many options exist for where people can view your content, the content model for the web has shifted from, "We have to drive as much traffic to our website as possible," to the more pragmatic, "We have to ensure as many people see our content as possible."

You'll still want most people to see your content on your site — and if you're doing it right they will — but helping people view content through widgets, apps and other social media entry points will accrue positive benefits for your brand. The more transportable you can make your content, the better.

If you're ready to get started with a social media optimization plan for your organization, read on for an overview.

Why Social Media Optimization Matters

Before we get to the practical, let's start with the "Why," as in "Why you should care about SMO?" As you can see from the chart below, social networks are driving an increasing amount of traffic to an increasing number of websites. Sites like Comedy Central, Forever 21 and Etsy are seeing more traffic from social networks than they see from Google. How social referral traffic is performing for you most likely depends on two factors:

1. How interesting your content is; and

2. How easily shareable you have made that content across a variety of networks.

Image credit: Gigya

In other words, SMO can lead to increased traffic to your site, as friends encourage their friends to digest specific content. If you can appeal to a given person, their friends are statistically more likely to be interested in the same thing, so you're likely reaching a well-targeted audience.  Further, it also leads to improved search engine optimization, as major search engines count links as if they were votes for your site.

SMO isn't just about building a bigger social media presence for your brand. Whether or not your organization has a strong social network presence, the social networks of others can be leveraged to great effect.

1. Widgets and Badges

Before the sudden ubiquity of Facebook's Social Graph, widgets were the go-to tool that allowed others to "grab" your content and share it on their blogs, Facebook profiles,MySpace accounts, and dozens of other smaller social sites or programs like iGoogle.

The NBA is a good example of an organization that has used widgets to great effect, allowing passionate fans to spread branded content across their social networks without ever landing on NBA.com to get it. At my company, we had one client who produces a lot of video tell us their video views doubled when they stopped forcing people to come to their site to see them.

Below is an example of what a simple widget might look like before and after a user activates it to share content.

"Badges," on the other hand, don't necessarily have the "Get & Share" functionality.  Rather, they consist of an embed code that allows the user to add an image to their blog that links visitors back to your content. This is obviously harder to implement than a simple share button, but there are several advantages. For example, each badge can have its own unique identifier connected to it, so a contest entrant can drive visitors back to their specific entry page, rather than to a general site. And each placement of the badge counts as a backlink to your site, as long as the person keeps the badge up.

2. Content Sharing

While most experienced social media marketers now understand the value of social sharing, there are some key points to be made here.

First, offer options. According to social sharing plugin AddThis, Facebook is far and away the number one place where people share content through their widget, taking 38.52% of the pie. But that means that over 61% of shares are being made elsewhere. Having said that, I'm not a huge fan of those "Share This" and "Add This" buttons, unless they are supplemented in a way that features only a few major services.

In fact, AddThis' own data shows that its toolbox (which displays only a few major networks, instead of an expandable box of hundreds) performs 40% better than its regular widget. AddThis has even added functionality to that toolbox that shows different buttons for each user based on what sites they personally share to the most — even more targeting.

Gigya, meanwhile, has a handy tool that allows people to share to multiple networks at once without even leaving your site. This is an excellent way to socially optimize your content.

3. Social Sign In

The goal of most websites is to attract visitors. Beyond that, you want the visitor to register. Why? Connected visitors tend to engage more than non-connected visitors — they've already engaged once by registering, after all. So if you can get the visitor to connect, you'll likely see more time on site, more pageviews, lower bounce rate and, if you're operating an e-commerce site, increased sales.

The traditional long and cluttered registration form is a bit of a pain in the neck for users, and you may be asking the visitor to marry you when they're not yet sure they even want to date you. Social sign-in can help solve this.

For sites that already have a large database of registered users, however, social sign in can make things confusing, as you end up with duplicate records. To eliminate duplication, advanced sites are "sniffing" when a registrant may already have a conventional account, and asking those users to sync the accounts. This is something you should be thinking about now, before you end up with tens of thousands of split records.

Similar to sharing, remember that Facebook is important, but you shouldn't put all your proverbial eggs in one basket. Gigya reports that 46% of users sign in with Facebook, beating out Google as the preferred social profile for making connections to other sites.Echo, a multi-platform sign-in module you can use, reports that Yahoo is number one (34%) for sign in, ahead of Facebook (25%) on the top 10 sites they serve. Whatever data you believe, it's clear that providing choices will increase your chances of success.

4. Social Commenting

Leaving a comment on a site is nice. Sharing that comment with your social network is a traffic driver. Today, through programs like Echo, Gigya and Disqus, you can easily encourage people to share their comments more broadly.

Facebook upped the ante dramatically when they added the "wordless" social comment, the Facebook "Like" button. And people who click the Like button typically have 2.4 times more friends than people who don't, and they click on 5.3 times more links within Facebook than others.

Levi's implemented Facebook Likes across its site to great success. Jeans, of all things, went through the roof in terms of social commenting, and Levi's quickly found that Facebook became its number one site for referring traffic. (Note: The "Recommend" button is simply the Like button with a different word, allowing people to share content without "liking" news articles about crime, for example.)

Since Likes show up as one line of text, and Shares show up as a link with a comment, progressive sites are encouraging Shares immediately after someone presses the Like button.

Unless you're a news site or a blog, part of the art of this is figuring out where to implement social commenting and where to implement Facebook social plugins such as the Like button on your site. When you get it right, it can drive traffic, but it can also provide social proof that your content (be it a blog post or a pair of jeans) is "Like worthy."

Overall Strategy

Given the importance of the referral traffic and the fact that many search engines, including Google, Bing and Scour are currently incorporating social actions into their search results, having a strategy for socializing your website and your content is increasingly important.

What do you think? Have I overlooked any aspects of social media optimization that you think are important? Be sure to leave your strategies in the comments. http://mashable.com/2010/10/22/social-media-optimization/

10 Laws of Social Media Marketing

For business owners just getting started, a guide to build brand buzz and boost your bottom line.

Leveraging the power of content and social media marketing can help elevate your audience and customer base in a dramatic way. But getting started without any previous experience or insight could be challenging.

It's vital that you understand social media marketing fundamentals. From maximizing quality to increasing your online entry points, abiding by these 10 laws will help build a foundation that will serve your customers, your brand and -- perhaps most importantly -- your bottom line.

1. The Law of Listening
Success with social media and content marketing requires more listening and less talking. Read your target audience’s online content and join discussions to learn what’s important to them. Only then can you create content and spark conversations that add value rather than clutter to their lives.

2. The Law of Focus
It’s better to specialize than to be a jack-of-all-trades. A highly-focused social media and content marketing strategy intended to build a strong brand has a better chance for success than a broad strategy that attempts to be all things to all people.

3. The Law of Quality
Quality trumps quantity. It’s better to have 1,000 online connections who read, share and talk about your content with their own audiences than 10,000 connections who disappear after connecting with you the first time.

4. The Law of Patience
Social media and content marketing success doesn’t happen overnight. While it’s possible to catch lightning in a bottle, it’s far more likely that you’ll need to commit to the long haul to achieve results.

5. The Law of Compounding
If you publish amazing, quality content and work to build your online audience of quality followers, they’ll share it with their own audiences on Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, their own blogs and more.

This sharing and discussing of your content opens new entry points for search engines like Google to find it in keyword searches. Those entry points could grow to hundreds or thousands of more potential ways for people to find you online.

6. The Law of Influence
Spend time finding the online influencers in your market who have quality audiences and are likely to be interested in your products, services and business. Connect with those people and work to build relationships with them.

If you get on their radar as an authoritative, interesting source of useful information, they might share your content with their own followers, which could put you and your business in front of a huge new audience.

7. The Law of Value
If you spend all your time on the social Web directly promoting your products and services, people will stop listening. You must add value to the conversation. Focus less on conversions and more on creating amazing content and developing relationships with online influencers. In time, those people will become a powerful catalyst for word-of-mouthmarketing for your business.

8. The Law of Acknowledgment
You wouldn’t ignore someone who reaches out to you in person so don’t ignore them online. Building relationships is one of the most important parts of social media marketing success, so always acknowledge every person who reaches out to you.

9. The Law of Accessibility
Don’t publish your content and then disappear. Be available to your audience. That means you need to consistently publish content and participate in conversations. Followers online can be fickle and they won’t hesitate to replace you if you disappear for weeks or months.

10. The Law of Reciprocity
You can’t expect others to share your content and talk about you if you don’t do the same for them. So, a portion of the time you spend on social media should be focused on sharing and talking about content published by others.  http://www.entrepreneur.com/article/218160