Help With Twitter

Twitter: Best Practices and Tips

Related articles by Zemanta

• 10 Innovative Ways To Use Twitter For Business (makeuseof.com)
• HOW TO: Use Social Media to Connect with Other Entrepreneurs (mashable.com)
• Socialising the enterprise (slideshare.net)
• Twitter Updates for 2010-01-09 (charity-lynn.com)

An Open Letter from Facebook Founder Mark Zuckerberg

Image by deneyterrio via Flickr

by Mark Zuckerberg

It has been a great year for making the world more open and connected. Thanks to your help, more than 350 million people around the world are using Facebook to share their lives online.

To make this possible, we have focused on giving you the tools you need to share and control your information. Starting with the very first version of Facebook five years ago, we've built tools that help you control what you share with which individuals and groups of people. Our work to improve privacy continues today.

Facebook's current privacy model revolves around "networks" — communities for your school, your company or your region. This worked well when Facebook was mostly used by students, since it made sense that a student might want to share content with their fellow students.

Over time people also asked us to add networks for companies and regions as well. Today we even have networks for some entire countries, like India and China.

However, as Facebook has grown, some of these regional networks now have millions of members and we've concluded that this is no longer the best way for you to control your privacy. Almost 50 percent of all Facebook users are members of regional networks, so this is an important issue for us. If we can build a better system, then more than 100 million people will have even more control of their information.

The plan we've come up with is to remove regional networks completely and create a simpler model for privacy control where you can set content to be available to only your friends, friends of your friends, or everyone.

We're adding something that many of you have asked for — the ability to control who sees each individual piece of content you create or upload. In addition, we'll also be fulfilling a request made by many of you to make the privacy settings page simpler by combining some settings. If you want to read more about this, we began discussing this plan back in July.

Since this update will remove regional networks and create some new settings, in the next couple of weeks we'll ask you to review and update your privacy settings. You'll see a message that will explain the changes and take you to a page where you can update your settings. When you're finished, we'll show you a confirmation page so you can make sure you chose the right settings for you. As always, once you're done you'll still be able to change your settings whenever you want.

We've worked hard to build controls that we think will be better for you, but we also understand that everyone's needs are different. We'll suggest settings for you based on your current level of privacy, but the best way for you to find the right settings is to read through all your options and customize them for yourself. I encourage you to do this and consider who you're sharing with online.

Thanks for being a part of making Facebook what it is today, and for helping to make the world more open and connected.


Mark Zuckerberg

How Twitter Can Help--or Hurt--Your Business

Razorfish recently released a study of people who follow specific brands on Twitter. A whopping 97 percent of the study's survey takers said that their online experience with a brand "influenced whether or not they would purchase an item or service" from the company. 65 percent indicated that their online interaction with a brand changed their opinion of that brand. What do these results mean for your business? Even if you're a small company, the way you relate to customers online has an impact, so you'd be wise to have a strategy in place. Read more on the study here--and see us below for more advice on helping your business succeed. Visit http://FootPrintStrategies.com



Book A FREE 1/2 Hr. Phone Consultation

Changes On Facebook

NEW YORK — Worried about missing a birth announcement, or details on what your portly uncle had for lunch?

Facebook is tweaking its home page yet again in hopes of making it easier to find information. Among the latest changes is a list of items you might have missed during those rare moments spent away from the online hangout.

The changes are being rolled out Friday.

When you log in to Facebook you will see what the site deems the most interesting things that happened in the past day in the "News Feed." These could be photos, status updates or other items. As has been the case previously, what Facebook deems interesting to you will be based on what updates are popular with your friends or how close you are to the person giving the update.

"If the content has comments or 'likes' by 10 of your mutual friends, it's something that is important to you," said Peter Deng, a Facebook product manager.

After you've caught up, you can click back to the "Live Feed" you've had before and read updates from everyone on your friends list in a constant stream.

In another change, Facebook is integrating its "Highlights" feature from the right hand side of the page to the "News Feed" in the middle. The space it frees up will be used to feature birthdays and events more prominently – something Facebook says users had asked for.

And the site is restoring some features it had gotten rid of, such as posts on when your friend adds a new friend or becomes a fan of a brand or a celebrity.

"Nothing is going away," Deng said. "We are just moving things around."

That's important, because if past redesigns are any indication, change doesn't always go over well at Facebook.

Facebook has more than 300 million active users worldwide and about half of them log in every day. For many people, the site is becoming an important social hub for keeping up with friends and family.


Read more at: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2009/10/23/facebooks-news-feed-revam_n_332160.html