The number one thing I have missed since I switched from my Blackberry to my Droid HTC Thunderbolt, is by far Blackberry Messenger. It was a way for me to have a conversation with a group of people all at the same time, it was easier than texting and more importantly it was free. Now, Facebook has come out with a mobile app called “Facebook Messenger” that essentially does the same thing plus more… See the video from Facebook Live talking about it’s release.

1.  It’s Connected To Facebook: I can easily pop in a contact name of one of my friends and talk to them while they are at their computer.

2.  It’s not just for Facebook Users: Don’t think of Facebook Messenger as just another extension of Facebook, you should think of it as its own stand alone mobile app that allows you to message not only your Facebook friends, but those friends and people you know that aren’t on Facebook at all. If you message someone that isn’t on Facebook (or is currently offline) it sends the message as a text to their mobile device.

3.  Seamless Communication: Have you ever been chatting via a text message and the conversation isn’t over, but now you are sitting in front of your computer with a big keyboard in front of you and you are thinking how much easier it would be to just finish the conversation online? Well, now you can and it’s seamless, all your old messages will show up on the app on your phone and ones started on your phone will be right there in your Facebook messages.

4.  Geolocations and Photo Sharing: You can attach photos and include geographic locations to your messages. An example given is now when you tell someone you’ll be there in 10 minutes they can look at the map and get a pinpoint of your location to check. (So don’t lie!)

5.  Group Chat: You can have a conversation with multiple people without texting it to many and then having to individually answer and repeat things.  This came in handy when my grandmother was in the intensive care unit and the whole family needed to keep in touch (when I had Blackberry Messenger), now I can use Facebook messenger for group chat.

6.  Available on both Droid and iPhone: Available for iPhone and Android, you can download Facebook Messenger free via the Market or iTunes. Currently it’s only available in the U.S. and Canada but they are working on building out the app for all smartphones and countries.

7.  It’s FREE!: Both the app itself and then the messaging are free. Why sit there and rack up text message charges when you can use this free service? Brilliant.

Joan Woodbrey Crocker
Facebook Messenger Fan

In a recent article by the WSJ, they stated that Facebook is thinking of integrating ads into your news feed.

As of right now, it’s very difficult for advertisers to get in your news feed as that’s decided by the EdgeRank algorithm.  Sticking with the traditions of social media, if you can call them traditions in such a short period of time, would be preferred.  New media is supposed to be about the customer coming to you, not you sticking your ads in their face constantly without their permission.

Not only would these ads show up in your news feed, but you wouldn’t be able to hide them.  You know, like you do now when you get posts in your news feed from people that either post too much, you don’t really know or you just don’t want to hear what they’re saying/doing.

While obviously opening the feeds up so that advertisers would be more happy about their reach and the bang for their buck, it would come at a price.

I don’t know if Facebook wants to go there now that we have other options, ie. Google+.

Learn more over at the Atlantic Wire.

Joan Crocker Woodbrey
Just sayin’ “Don’t Mess With My News Feed”

Do you use your Facebook lists? Do you even know what they are? Not to worry, let’s review.

Background and Setup

Facebook Lists are a great way to organize your friends – you could create a client, coworker, and friend List. You can have up to 100 Lists at one time.

How do you get to Lists?

While making some things easier to get to with the redesign, I feel Facebook has made other things more difficult to navigate to. Regardless, to get to your Lists, navigate from your homepage to “Friends”.

From here, you have the ability to view, add, or edit all of your Lists.

How to add a Facebook List

Recently, Facebook’s changed its design, which also changes the way you add lists. First, go here. Then click “Create a List”, give your list a name (“Clients”, for example), then choose all of your friends you want to be apart of the list. That’s all there is to it!

Automatically add friends to a list

The initial setup – as with many things – is pretty time consuming for Lists at first. However, once you have all your Lists in order, you can add friends automatically when you friend them:

At first, Lists may not seem all that exciting, but there are actually quite a few ways you can effectively use them.

1. Privacy Settings

Want to block certain lists from seeing some things on your profile? No problem. Use your lists to more quickly manage your privacy settings.

2. See only your List’s statuses

Want to have the ability to only see certain statuses? Now you can. Personally, I use my Lists a lot like I would use TweetDeck columns – so I can specifically see certain people’s statuses, like the flyte crew:

3. Chat quicker

If you use Facebook chat, your Lists are a great way to distinguish which folks you’re trying to talk with.

4. Target easily

Have a page you want to suggest friends “like”? You don’t have to check them off, one-by-one anymore…just use your Lists! Simply click “Suggest to Friends”, click Filter Friends and the List you’d like to target, and finally “Select All”.

How to delete a List

Should you need to delete a list, Facebook has again hidden the option. Unfortunately what Facebook tells you has also changed:

How do I delete a Friend List?
To delete a Friend List, first select the list from the Friends page. After making your selection, the “Delete List” option will appear at the top of the page.

With the redesign, now you’ll need to click into the List you want to delete, scroll to the bottom and click “Delete List”:

Nicki Hicks
Facebook Lister

The following is a recap from a session at Search Marketing Expo (SMX) East. Follow the conference and session on Twitter.

Facebook Organic SEO & Naughty Ranking Tips

It’s hard to get in the SERPs for Facebook

aimClear tested 5 account (4 mature accounts, 1 totally new)

Personalization effects

These elements affect personalization and the way results appear when you’re logged in:

• You like it
• Your friend likes it
• You’ve got 2^nd degree friends
• You’ve been invited
• You’ve visited it before
• You’ve listed it as an interest on profile

Inside the autocomplete box

• 2-8 results
• “I’m feeling lucky”
• Masking crappy SERPs
• Most important to rank

How to rank in autocomplete box

• Your name
• Evens you are invited to
• Friend with keyword in name
• 2^nd degree friend with keyword in name
• Questions with keyword in it and number of answers
• App you’ve used
• Internal/external page and interest you have on profile
• Page friend likes (in tandem w/ number of friends and total likes)
• Group you have joined

Facebook SERP Anatomy

About All results

• Previous de facto search hub
• Requires additional click to see results
• All FB content types battle it out!

How to rank in All Results

• People – Friends or 2^nd degree friends with keyword in name
• Page – with enough like can beat friends…sometimes
• Keyword in posts by friends
• Web results (fueled by Bing)

About People results

• Purely human search
• Pay attention to filters!

How to rank for People results

• Keyword in friend or 2^nd degree friends (Name)
• Keyword in friend or 2^nd degree friends (workplace, school aka network)
• Keyword in anyone’s name/city/workplace/school/network

About Pages results

• Confusing
• Lumped together – admistered pages, community pages, non FB pages
• Heavily affected by personalization

How to rank for Pages results

• Too messed up to rank logically
• General guidelines – keywords play a large role, keyword density
• Put keywords – name, description

About Group results

• Being a member
• Friends are a member
• Keywords in title
• Number of members

About Event results

• Not based on geo
• Not based on friends attending
• Not based on invited
• Not really keyword relevant
• (basically, it sucks)

How to rank for Event results

• Get people to RSVP as attending (not maybe)
• Get people to visit page at least once
• Put your high value keyword  first
• Don’t make event names too long

About Apps results

• You are already a fan/user
• Your friend is a fan/user

How to rank for Apps results

• Keyword in title, body
• Buy fans/users

Facebook questions

• Often outrank more valuable/verteran content

How to rank for Questions

• Keyword in title, answer, in URL
• Multi-user engagement
• Generate something of value to community

Naughty to the Naughtiest ranking trick (Don’t do this at home)

• Facebook PPC and personalization
• Create ads to FB properties (those can’t help but click ads)
• Internal page destination has keyword rich title
• Shows up in search box
• Keyword rich profiles
• Gain friends somehow
• Wait a bit to get FB indexed
• Promote on your wall
• Create an even with keyword in title and body
• Invite non-friends (with just email address)
• Invitee types keyword  – they don’t even have to RSVP!
• Dominate search box for any keyword

Marty Weintraub, President, aimClear

Facebook SEO

Facebook search is punctuation sensitive

Methods for ranking pages

• Use a relevant page name
• Build the number of fans (and number of fan friends)
• Engage in relevant current all searches
• Search results

Facebook Questions – Shows heavily in suggest box – not necessarily all search results

Facebook Events – Be aware of spam (because of messaging from events)

The Future? Page browser – see pages you’re a fan of and suggested pages

How to prepare for Facebook Page Browser? Ads – make sure you include likes and interests to drive traffic to page

Free Tricks to Boost Your Fans

• Charity – donate money to a charity to acquire fans
• Must be a fan to comment (or even see) wall; for every comment, we’ll give money
• Create exclusive content – “visible to connection” tag (If you want to see (coupons, % off, deal), then become a fan) Use it for: coupons, sales, etc.
• Typical method – “Find us on Facebook” = NOT GOOD; fix = use QR code instead, use for FB places too

Greg Finn, Cypress North

Facebook SEO

Optimizing your status updates in Facebook

• Status update doesn’t appear on public page, unless you plan ahead and do some research to have them show up
• Appears to be private/controlled page, search for the “open” page
• Include popular keywords
• Tag referenced pages to increase presence

Optimizing page code for Facebook

Use open graph code: opengraphprotocol.org (Yelp does a good job of this.)

Chris Silver Smith, KeyRelevance

Can you answer “Yes” to any one of these questions?

• Do you have a presence on Facebook already, but want more “likes” on your page?
• Do you have a presence on Facebook already, but want to drive more traffic to your website?
• Do you have a new fan page that needs to build up fans (or “likes”)?

Then Facebook ads are right for you. Facebook ads are inexpensive, intuitive, and, when done the right way, have the ability to drive a ton of traffic.

In the past week, I’ve gone step-by-step through creating Facebook ads. They’re all linked here…so get ‘em while they’re hot.

1. Create ad: Create and Target
2. Create ad: Bidding and Review
3. Measuring and Reporting
4. Measuring Conversions
5. Making sense of the data

Nicki Hicks
Like flyte on Facebook