http://www.socialmediaexaminer.com/26-promising-social-media-stats-for-small-businesses/

For those that like quick, dirty numbers and don’t want to read whole articles, these tidbits might just tempt you to take the time to read this one:

1. There are now more than 800 million active Facebook users. 200 million were added in 2011.
2. 80% of all Americans are on social networks.
3. If you’re going to pick just one social networking outlet to focus on, Facebook is your ticket. Americans spend more time there than on ANY OTHER U.S. WEBSITE!
4. A post every day hits all your customers: more than half of Facebook users log in EVERY DAY.
5. Is your business international? 80% of Americans may be on Facebook, but 75% of Facebook users are outside of North America.
6. According to a Comscore study, businesses that post at least once a day will reach 22% of their fans in any given week.
7. Experian’s 2011 Social Media Consumer Report reports, among other stats, that 98% of 18 – 24 year olds access social accounts monthly. If they are doing so only once or twice a month, then the importance of posting DAILY becomes even clearer.
8. Fans are filtering through social media and spending with small business. 50% of business owners have confirmed this. The majority of Facebook and Twitter fans are more likely to buy from brands they are fans of.

Consider what is here as an incentive to work that Facebook page you set up a year ago and haven’t done anything with.

Networking is not just about making connections and getting referrals. If you think that is all it is, you better go find yourself a book on human interaction and relearn how to talk to and treat people. If this sounds harsh, it might be because you need the book. I won’t apologize for the bluntness in this post and if it is found offensive, methinks it is because it struck a sore spot. Those that are ever evolving and refining their people skills will stop and take a look at what is said here and ask themselves, “Do I do that to people?” “Is that why I’m not getting as much business as I could have?”

There are few better ways to discover the value of your networking than in how people interact with you – especially when there is a crisis. People are mirrors held up to ourselves, and they can be brutally honest, whether we want them to or not. So, instead of taking offense at the networker who treated you like less of a person and more like a source of income, learn from the experience. We as a specie are so quick to take offense and so slow to learn. Don’t be stuck at the dead-end of the evolutionary chain with no sales and worse – no friends.

Remember, when you’re old and retire, or move on to another line of work where you no longer network, the friends will stay with you.

The networkers will leave.

It opens up to Top Stories. When tapped, the “All Stories” button at the top opens up a scroll-up at the bottom with options to view Status Updates, Photos, Links, Pages, Events or Videos – an improvement over the old version of the app. The Photo and Status buttons at the top are convenient since they are the most often function used by people checking in on Facebook (the photo button also gives the option to upload videos). Status Updates is not to be confused with the “Status” button. The Status Updates are everyone else’s statuses while the Status button in the middle of the bar below is the one used to update your own status.

For those that liked the convenience of the 9-icon opening panel, you can still access that dashboard by clicking on, weirdly enough, “Newsfeed” at the top left of the screen. (Guys, you could have just called it something plain yet familiar like…oh well, say, “Dashboard”? That way you wouldn’t have confused the heck out of us.)

I confess I have not yet tried the chat function, so if anyone has experience with it, please feel free to drop a comment on the end of this blog to let us know how it performs.

Note: version 1.7.2 is now available. I will be updating this review as soon as I install it and get some practical use out of it. Give it a day =D

“Where’s My ‘droid” is an Android app designed to help you find your lost phone. Simple explanation, simple function, powerful app! Six million users and over 30,000 Likes on Facebook can’t be wrong, right?

This neat little gem is worth the space on your phone and the time and trouble to set it up right, though I found setting it up was no trouble at all for yours truly. If I can set it up, so can you!

What sold me on this particular app was the solution to the past, obvious hurdle of clever users calling their phone to find it, only to remember they had turned the ringer off! This app WILL TURN THE RINGER BACK ON. How smart and cool is that?!?

The opening paragraph on the ‘site declares, “When you lose your phone while the ringer is turned off it can be impossible to find it. Where’s My Droid fixes that problem. After texting your phone a custom attention word the app turns the ringer volume up and makes your phone ring. It’s also possible to get the GPS location of your phone in latitude and longitude and a link to Google maps.”

Among the features listed are:

• Find phone by making it ring/vibrate
• Find phone using GPS location
• Text or email your attention word
• Passcode protection to prevent unauthorized app changes
• Notification of changed SIM card or phone number (BETA)

The Pro version also has a “remote wipe” function that will send the Hari Kari command of death upon your instruction, permanently wiping out all information in case your phone falls into the hands of evil doers.

The website is full of support features – instructions, video tutorials, troubleshooting, an FAQ page and an explanation of why the app needs permission to do certain things on your system.

If you have a ‘droid and no way to find it, do yourself a favor and install this wonderful application before you lose your phone and regret you didn’t have it.

Websites:
http://alienmanfc6.com/
http://www.wheresmydroid.mobi/

Requirements:

• Android 1.6 or better
• 2.65mg of free space

App Homepage

One of my favorite ‘droid apps, CurveFish’s “Battery Life” is everything you could want in a phone app. – colorful, functional, useful and most importantly, it’s ACCURATE and it WORKS. Set it to show how much of a charge your battery has left, or get real nerdy and also set it to show the battery’s temperature (in Fahrenheit or Celsius), voltage AND technology. Mine is on my home screen and is so much easier to see and read than that tiny little icon up in the corner of the screen. It can also be color customized. AWESOME!

Ah, Facebook is at it – again. When will these people learn that their network (all of us who use Facebook) HATE CHANGE and especially BEING TRACKED, like some weird scenario out of the book “1984″? They are really caught between a rock and a hard place. Their users and fans demand they stay on the cutting edge of technology, yet anything implemented immediately elicits the response of putting up a, “I Hate the Latest Change Facebook Has Made to My
Page” fan page. Who needs t.v.? It’s as entertaining to watch the users react as it is to watch Facebook react to the reaction.

This week’s trauma & drama comes courtesy of the Facebook Gods decreeing there will be an easier way to tag your photos via facial recognition. Should you be afraid of it? Should you react like a cobra who reacts to being stepped on – with hissing and spitting and biting back the hand that enables our world’s largest social network? Uh, no. And here’s why:

If you are afraid of this newest tool, you could be an escaped convict on the run and shouldn’t be playing around on Facebook in the first place, so do us all a favor and go quietly turn yourselves in to the police already.

Or you could be an overly paranoid person, in which case you might want to go take some courses on self-esteem. They can only do you and your friends a world of good.

If you are neither of these, you are probably a pretty well-balanced person who just doesn’t want your ex-husband or boyfriend to find you. In that case, turn off the Facial Recognition option and go back to your business. You see, that’s the problem with this implementation because, like everything else Facebook had done, they have turned this damn option “on” for everyone instead of “off” and letting people decide for themselves whether they want to utilize it or not. Maybe it’s a limitation of the software platform they use, but if it is, they should find a way to remedy that before they get into trouble with someone big enough to do something about it like, say, the Gods of the Internet or the U.S. Government.

And if you think the government isn’t watching them, check out this little factoid in an online article amusingly called, “The Paranoid’s Guide to Facebook”: “Congress recently sent Facebook an open letter asking the company to explain the disclosure of user identities to third parties (as originally reported by the Wall Street Journal), and how the
company plans to address this issue.” Yeah, that’s the ticket, now we’re really getting Orwellian on their hinies!

If I were you (or me) I would be MUCH MORE WORRIED about the utilization of Facebook “places” for as this same article continues, “Using Facebook Places has its benefits, but whether you’re using a mobile device or a desktop, telling the world where you are has major disadvantages. When you broadcast your location, you’re exposing vulnerabilities for an ill-intentioned person to swoop up. And your iPhone or Android-based Smartphone can broadcast your exact geographic coordinates down to a few feet.”

Yes, there is a lot to be paranoid about in the world, people, but we can only keep track of so much of it. Pick your battles and win them so in the end you really can win the war.

Article also cited:
http://www.pcworld.com/article/210859/the_paranoids_guide_to_facebook.html%23tk.mod_rel

Facebook attacks scam spam with new security tools

Facebook has the never-ending job of protecting its users from their own curiosity and it isn’t easy. Big events such as Osama Bin Laden’s death are always potential tools for people to prey on the unsuspecting Facebook user. In this case, it was the promise of satisfying a morbid curiosity to see photos of Bin Laden’s bullet-riddled corpse.

Last week scammers tried tricking Facebook users into spamming their friends accounts with a link supposedly from the BBC showing Osama’s body after U.S. troops got through with it, but all the link did was let a virus into their address book that spread the obnoxious message to everyone connected with the user.

“Clickjacking”, as it is known, tricks a person into accessing links and/or “Like” buttons by hiding the code underneath content that piques your interest — such as a video of that thing Justin Bieber did to that girl that “YOU WON’T BELIEVE”. Facebook claims it has fixed the hole in their system that let this particular virus run rampant through their community, but that never means we should drop our guard and think it’s safe (or wise) to click on the next implausible link that comes our way.

It is always in human nature either to ignore the advice to be careful or to say, “I’ll never forward anything or like anything else on Facebook again.” Let’s take the smart and cautious middle road, people, and just use a little common sense instead of either being cavalier or paranoid.

KNOW YOUR AUDIENCE. “Like” and “Share” items of interest to your audience. If you are doing business and networking, stay away from the taboo subjects of sex, politics and religion (unless you are either a politician or a nun, of course, and that IS your business). Some family subjects are always safe to share such as a new child or grandchild in the house, but don’t go overboard. Let your audience gush over the news and give you a reason to gush more and upload more of those baby pictures.

CHECK SNOPES.COM FIRST! I can’t emphasize this enough! People either don’t know about snopes or forget to check before their itchy trigger finger hits that “send” button. Snopes.com gives you the lowdown on all the urban legends, folklore, myths, rumors, and misinformation out there that is or was circulating. Typing a few keywords into their search engine will bring up articles that either prove or disprove that incredible story you can’t wait to share. Remember the tired old, but reliable phrase, “If it is seems too good to be true, IT PROBABLY IS.”

MSNCB’s Technolog tells us, “Facebook’s new ‘Self-XSS Protection’ is meant to prevent spam spread by users tricked into cutting and pasting malicious code into their address bars. According to the Facebook blog, ‘Now, when our systems detect that someone has pasted malicious code into the address bar, we will show a challenge to confirm that the person meant to do this as well as provide information on why it’s a bad idea.’”

They will also be providing free tools for “safe surfing” by Web of Trust, so be on the lookout for them and they won’t take you by surprise.

My favorite tool so far has been the new “Login Approval” system implemented last month. I had hired an East Coast social networking promotion company to take care of promoting my jewelry and design business in the hours of the day either too early for me or while I am busy offline creating new designs. A great idea, but a surprise when I received an email of an attempt to log into my Facebook account from somewhere located in Maine. I knew who it was, called them to confirm they had attempted to login in to begin my campaign, and then verified the attempt as a valid one. It was a minor delay to my time and I appreciated it because it showed that Facebook was on the ball and now had a way of further safeguarding our internet accounts. You will not hear me complain ever about this new tool and the next person whose account is compromised by a hacker won’t complain either.

~ synopsis provided by Kristine Cherry, an internet guru/social networking junkie who will gladly help you if you ever have a question about a suspicious email or Facebook notification you get.

I’m behind in my app reviews, to the tune of five pages worth of them on my phone. So it’s time to review and get rid of the stinkers, definitely.

Do live wallpapers count as apps? Well, no, but some are worth a warning when you learn a lesson from having one on your phone. For instance, get rid of that “2011 countdown” New Years Eve exhibition of noisy fireworks that goes off every 5 minutes whether you like it or not, whether you want it to or not and especially before you’re the new kid in the office being shown around by your Supervisor. The Supervisor laughs and says it’s “cute”, but they are secretly filing the information away to put on your eventual pink slip, trust me.

Do I speak from experience on that one? No, of course not.

Who the hell put all these default apps on your and my phones anyway?!? Do I really have time for “The Sims 3″? Uh, NO. Let them riot and starve and die in their make-believe city because I neglected them…better yet, I’m just going to reject them outright and throw them in my virtual trash can, which, by the way, is not an app, but boy, does it come in handy!

Maybe they’ll find some virtual psychotherapist in there to help them get over the trauma of me rejecting them.

Nope, hate to break it to you, reader, but all this crud clogs up our phones because these developers stormed Samsung’s and Apple’s offices and bribed, begged and/or threatened these phone manufacturers to put their junk into your pocket. It’s certainly not there because we want it all or because they want to see our smiling faces as we play these mindless, senseless games as the nice traffic officer writes you a ticket on the side of the road. Oh and that reminds me, April is crack down on all those idiot driver, Lords of the Sims wannabes.

So if you’re in the San Fernando Valley, take my advice and bury that damn phone so deep in your pocket you can’t hear it while you’re driving. Again, do I speak from experience? YOU’RE DAMN RIGHT I DO!!! Don’t answer it – it’s only another twitter alert for the release of the 50th trailer for the new season of Doctor Who. It’s only another 16 days, 5 hours, 17 minutes and 2 seconds…CAN’T YOU WAIT THAT LONG, PEOPLE!?!

Today I logged in and it said I had to change the landing page ID…which I did. About six times. Still didn’t work, so I’ve switched back to the good ‘ol static FBML app I was using before. Any suggestions on something better would be welcome, but for now, it works.