Ever wonder why you’re required to input your birthday in order to setup a Facebook account? Although I am new to Facebook, I find it an extremely useful tool. The concept of making it a free service that everyone wants to use, but yet behind the scenes, tracking and then harvesting user demographic information is brilliant!
Tracking demographic information is not a new idea. Marketers and retailers have been doing this since the beginning of time. You can bet that McDonald’s, Home Depot, Taco Bell, Sears, Talbots and other high-end clothing stores know exactly who their ideal customers are. That’s why they build stores in certain areas. Typically they know a lot about the people who shop at their stores: age, gender, annual income, number in family, zip code (aha!) where they live, and type of magazines read, etc. That way they can place ads or coupons in certain flyers, newspapers, or magazines, or simply do a blanket mailing to a specific zip code.
Facebook is doing the same thing electronically. They are building a huge database of all users – their “likes” (aha!), interests, and who they associate with online. Believe me, they know a lot about you. This information is extremely valuable for targeting ads (vis a vis Google and Amazon). Also, did you know that most mail-order catalogs and non-profit organizations make almost as much or sometimes more money from selling their customer/donor lists than they do through product sales? Think about that for a minute and then apply that concept to Facebook. But yet we still use it! Why? We like it!
In addition to the above, here are a couple of tips about Facebook that I thought I would share:
1) Do you have a “friend” who is “hogging” your News Feed? Does it seem like they are constantly on Facebook and every single post on your wall is from them? Guess what? You have the option of “hiding” their posts! To do this, left click on the “X” next to their post and then you are given an option to hide that particular post, or “hide all”, which will remove the post and also prevent all future posts from that person. The third option is to hide all applications. For more applications you may have downloaded, go to this great post by Meredith Singer:
http://www.allfacebook.com/are-you-still-oversharing-through-old-applications-2010-12
If at some future point you want to re-enable your “friend’s” posts, click on the drop-down arrow next to “Most Recent” at the top of your News Feed, and then go to Edit Options. You can then choose who you want to “Show More” of and whose posts you want to “Hide.”
2) Another common dilemma is: If you use Facebook for business, how do you keep your clients from seeing personal photos that you post? Most of us have a mixture of friends, family, and sometimes clients or colleagues in our “friend” list. I first started using Facebook as a way to share photos of my children with their grandparents and other family members. It is a much more efficient method of sharing special moments in their lives without having to email everyone. Very quickly, my friend list has grown to include my coaching and other clients. Some people don’t care that all of their Facebook friends see everything they post, but I prefer to keep my professional and personal life separate, even though some of my colleagues may in fact also be friends. So what do you do?
The solution is to set up “groups” on Facebook so that your clients don’t see your personal photos. Then you load the photos only to that specific group. You cannot do this retroactively to photos that have already been posted, because the group must already have been created first.
When you load photos or post content exclusively to a certain group, you make people feel special because you did not share your post with everyone. When people feel distinct, they will more likely respond to your post with comments, or read your article, blog, or whatever it is that you have shared.
Now it’s your turn – do you have any tips to share? How about some little thing that you might do on Facebook that is not widely known?
Michele Scism – I know you have one!
Great tips, never considered creating ‘groups’.
Instead I’ve created “lists” in my friends and in my privacy settings I’ve blocked certain things for certain “lists” to see this or that. Which includes photos I’ve posted and those that I’m tagged in.
Leona
Thank you so much! That’s exactly what I mean! I saw the ability to make “lists” from the “Most Recent” drop down menu but have not used them yet. Possibly the difference between creating “lists” and “groups” is that your friends know that you have created the groups and they can see who the members are. Are the friend “lists” private?