Its been a while since I took a look at the badges Facebook offers and voila! I find some new ones that could be very helpful. I’m going to explore more of them in future but for now I’m going to talk about Facebook Page Badges.

I found two types of Page Badges. The first is available only to owners and admins but the second is available to all, so you can get it for any page you want.

You can get the standard one Here.

Or you can get the Social Like Box Plugin

1. After you’ve chosen the kind of badge you want, you need to get the code for the page. For the Standard Page Badge select the “Other” option in blog type and copy the code. For the Social Plugin, select the options you want in your plugin (you will see the preview change) and then click on Get Code. Select the IFRAME option in the pop-up and copy the code.

2. Go to the Widgets section in your Wordpress blog. The Widgets option is in the Left Column under Appearance on your Wordpress Dashboard.

3. Based on your Blog Template you will see your Sidebars listed on the right of the page. I have three hence they are listed as Sidebar 1, Sidebar 2 and Sidebar 3.

4. Choose which sidebar you want the badge to show in.

5. Now drag the TEXT widget into the Sidebar and paste the code into the TEXT dropdown. (You can use a few HTML codes to create space between plugins and to add comments).

6. Click the Save option in the Dropdown and you’re done. Now check the widget on your blog to make sure it’s showing as you’d like it to, else change the options you selected and replace the code with the new code generated (only for social plugin).

And voila, you have a badge on your blog. I’ve added Chenthil’s Photography Page Badge to my blog. Like it? Please ‘Like’ the page too

A friend moved his Facebook profile to the new Timeline and I liked what I saw and thought why not? So, what’s so great about Timeline and why should you switch.

Timeline offers you a way to navigate though someone’s life. You can go back to when they were born, went to college, dated, married, had kids, etc. It’s a great way to skim though the highlights of friend’s life.

Imagine you found a friend from college 10 years after passing out. It’s a thrill to find old friends on Facebook and I’m always on the lookout but when I do find them it seems like there has been such a gap in who they are now and whom I knew. Timeline’s great for that. I can scroll back in time and see the highlights of what my friend has been up to in the last 10 years; I like that idea.

Like a lot of Facebook ideas, Timeline will take sometime to get used to but after a while you’d be wondering how you lived without it. Its one of those things I like and don’t like about Facebook. Mark seems to know what I need better than I do – that’s a bit rattling.

You should get Timeline if you’d like friends to be able to see the highlights of you life. It’s a nice way to tell the story of your life and share those high points.
So how do you get Timeline and what do you need to do to set it up?

Timeline is still a choice but soon it will be rolled out for everyone whether you want it or not. I recommend getting it early, that way you have more time to play with it and set it up.

When you choose to use Timeline, note that there is no going back. You cannot disable it, so think before you hit the Get Timeline button.

To get Timeline for your Facebook account click here.

Aside: If you want to remember what your Facebook profile looked like before Timeline, remember to take screenshots before clicking the button. Here’s how my Profile looked before Timeline.

Now that you’ve enabled Timeline, you need to know that it is visible only to you for the next 7 days. Facebook gives you 7 days to set up Timeline the way you want it to look before its published and visible to friends and everyone else (based on your Privacy Settings).

Here’s are things to do in the next 7 days.

1. Add a Cover Image to your profile. This is different from your profile picture and is a great way to say something about yourself. This image can be changed and edited over time as your life story progresses.

My husband and 3 dogs are a big part of my life and say so much about me.

2. Update your profile information. Add in work details, school details, etc. It makes finding you easier (assuming you want to be found )

3. Now the most important job to be done; also the one that takes the most amount of time. Go though your Timeline and remove the posts and status messages you don’t want shown in the Timeline. You don’t need to delete them, just hide them.

At the top-right-hand corner of each post you will find a little settings button when you mouse-over the post. Click the button and choose your option.

You can either scroll down the Timeline to go through posts or go to the Activity Log from your Profile page (the button shows just below your Cover image) to do your house keeping.

4. If you’ve cleared up your Timeline before the 7-day deadline, you can go ahead and publish it to make it public or just wait for it to be published after 7 days.

5. Last but not the least – remember that the house keeping you did isn’t a one-time activity. It’s an ongoing job. You should come back from time to time and clear up posts you don’t want seen.

Here’s what my Timeline looks like.

Have you got Timeline for your Facebook Profile? What do you think about it? Like it?

There are times when you want to comment on your Facebook page as yourself but usually as an admin the comment will show up with the page photo and name. This isn’t great when you want to start or create a conversation. (Of course this also depends on the settings you have selected for the page.) Here’s an example of two ways to comment on a page.

However you can swap between settings to make comments on a page both as a page and as yourself. Here’s a quick tutorial on how to comment with your personal profile on a Facebook page.

1. Click on the ‘Edit Page’ option (top right corner).
2. Click on the ‘Your Settings’ option (left column).
3. Remove the check mark from the ‘Posting Preferences’ option.
4. Click on the ‘Save Changes’ option.
5. Return to the page by clicking on ‘View Page’.

After you have made your comment as yourself, follow the above steps again, only this time add a check mark to the ‘Posting Preferences’ option and Save Changes.

You can now create a conversation on your page – something like this

Special Note: Thank you to Tarunjeet of Nucleus India for asking me about this at the HEN India Social Media Strategy session. Hope you find this helpful Tarunjeet

A couple of days back I received some Marketing Charts from HubSpot. Here are some stats I found very useful for small businesses and entrepreneurs to know. Keep in mind that most of these numbers are from U.S. web users but with the internet aren’t you selling/offering services to the world? (and India is headed here in the future so better start early!)

• Social media site users spend an average of 5.4 hours a month engaged in networking sites.
• 53.5 billion minutes per month spent on Facebook
• The average Facebook user spent seven hours, 46 minutes on the site monthly
• 734.2 million unique visitors to Facebook.com globally in June 2011, an increase of 33% from the previous year. Twitter.com comes second reaching 144.4 million visitors (up 56%). LinkedIn.com is fourth with more than 84 million visitors
• Facebook, has an average monthly audience of more than 140 million vs its nearest competitor Blogger with 50 million. That means Facebook reaches 70% of active internet users.
• From 9% of US market share of visits, Facebook has now reached about 65%. YouTube has gone from 9% to 20% and is steadily climbing. Twitter and LinkedIn seem to be staying constant at 2 to 3%.
• Globally Europe leads in the average hours spent on social networking sites by 38.1%. N. America has 21.4% and Asia-Pacific has 16.5%.
• According to the 2011 American Customer Satisfaction Index Facebook scores the lowest satisfaction score. Google on the other-hand was one of the highest scoring companies.
• In just one week, Google+ went from ranking as 54th most visited site to 8th place.
• Women make up majority of visitors to social networks, and people aged between 18-34 have the highest concentration of visitors among age groups.
• Mobile users accessing social networks on the phone in the older generation (+55) have doubled since last year.
• 41% of both video and search ad viewers have taken some type of action from an, while only 28% of social media ad viewers were inspired to act.
• 63% of Facebook users what something in return when ‘Like’ing a page.
• 80% of social network users prefer to connect to brands via Facebook.
• 6 in 10 online shoppers say user-generated customer product reviews have a good impact on their buying behavior
• An average of 29%, that’s 3 of 10 consumers seek buying advice.

That’s a lot of numbers but it’s clear that for now Facebook cannot be ignored. Customers are talking and connecting on Facebook and companies need to be there engaging with them or they will be missing out! YouTube and videos are a great way to engage with your audience and its steadily growing in usage. Not to be left out is Google+. I’d like to see how it fares a year from now; instinct says it’s just gonna keep climbing the usage charts – so get your Google+ Corporate Page Now!

You can download the entire report at Hubspot.

Facebook is a great way to keep in touch with both close and distant friends but, as your number of friends increase you will start to miss out on updates or see too many updates from someone you aren’t very interested in. This dilutes the value of Facebook both as a personal network builder and marketing tool. So, here is where lists come in…

Creating lists for your friends and categorising them helps makes sense of the chaos. (Friends can be added to multiple lists too.) These lists can then be used to view New Feeds and send out information and updates.

Categorising friends may seem like a lot of work initially but in the long run it will help organise Facebook for you. Among other things, it will allow you to send group mails and most importantly set-up you privacy well. Do it, you’ll be glad you did it : )

Create your lists based on how you would like to group your friends and how you know them or interact with them. For Example – As a gamer I have created atleast two lists for games – e.g. Frontierville and Friends on Frontierville. On one list I have friends who play the game too. On the other, people I do not know at all but who are friends I play games with on Facebook.

Why do you need these lists? Here’s why.

Viewing Updates from Friends by List

What if I told you that you can choose to view updates from just school friends, or college friends, or work friends, or even your marketing circle? You can do that, here’s how.

1. Click on ‘Most Recent’ above your News Feed on Facebook Home.

2. In the drop down menu, click on ‘Choose Another’ to see more Lists.
3. Choose the list you would like to view.
I love this method to see group updates or game updates.

Marking Status Updates viewable only to specific Lists

You can even mark each status update to be viewable only by specific people or not. This helps send out targeted messages not only for marketing but also when some information you are sharing is private or hidden from some.

1. Click on the little ‘Lock’ icon below the Status Message box, right next to Share.

2. Choose the ‘Custom’ option.
3. Select the audience that can and cannot view your post.

Now onto creating those all important ‘Lists’. Here’s how to create them -

1. Click on the ‘Account’ tab on the right-top-corner of the page.
2. Choose and click on ‘Edit Friends’

3. Click on the ‘Create a List’ button

4. In the pop-up type the name of the list

5. Select friends for the list. (You can do this later too.)
6. Create as many lists as you need following the same process from Step 3 onwards.

You can also add friends after the list has been created.

1. Choose the ‘All Friends’ option on the ‘Edit Friends’ page.
2. For each friend choose the ‘Edit Lists’ option and choose the lists.

Creating Lists is a tedious process the first time its done and the more friends you have the more time and effort it takes. So start early and maintain the lists as you go. You’ll be glad you did this as your Facebook group gets bigger.

How do you categorise/group friends? Do you have any special lists?