Rooturaj's Blog

I spend a way too much time on facebook. Its virtually open all the time on a dedicated chrome / firefox tab. Lolz.

Here is the snapshot of an update from a friend that was duplicated. Posts like this take a lot of visible space on the feed space. While the more important ones get pushed down.

Duplicate Feed items resulting from LIKING and SHARING the same item.

If that is happening all the time I must say it would annoy a lot of people. It is very probable that someone sharing a feed item will like it too. In that case pushing both the action to our news feeds is not a smart thing to do.

I will be reporting this to Facebook – with a hope they fix it ASAP.

Cheers

I was tagged on a note / link shared by a friend. The content was in Spanish language and I am dead sure this particular friend has no Spanish girlfriend for whom he would learn Spanish overnight. The thumbnail accompanying the link was showed some semi nude women.

That was enough to trigger a spam alert in my already spam suspicious brain. (sorry can’t help). As I have always pointed out, being spam conscious is the best defense against getting hacked and then spamming your friends.

Sample Spam Attack on Facebook

Here is a snapshot (edited) of the viral spam attack infecting thousands on facebook. I am sharing this with a hope that it will help you be  ”spam suspicious” like me. So next time you come across something similar -

• DO NOT click the link.
• Untag yourself from the post (see the red box above – I did it) It will stop the post from appearing on your timeline.
• Alert your friend about the infection and ask them to double check every application they have allowed. Disallow all unnecessary apps.
• Run a through system scan if things do not improve.
• Ask your friends to change their Facebook Password ASAP.

If you arrived on this page then you must be looking for a way to get those sweet looking facebook page urls. I assume you already know how to get kool Vanity urls for your profile.

If you want a flat url or Vanity url for your profile. Simply go to Home > Account Setting > Edit Username. Thats all.

For those of you who need to have a kool looking URL for FB Pages

We all get pages made for our business, blog, dog’s page, girl fiend’s dog’s photo page or whatever stuff we do on the pages we have. But some people like to promote those pages for a profit or just to gain some public appreciation. One of my employees who is a link builder – he gets one Facebook Page like request (you like my page I like your page kind of crap) every 5 minutes when he is signed in.

Whatever way you follow to promote your facebook page, a simple url always helps. No I wont blabber any more – here follow this screen shots and you will have your Facebook Page Vanity URL ready. If you like this do give me a like of share this post. cheers and good luck with your shameless promotions.

Now here is how my Company page looks like

http://www.facebook.com/pages/Nth-Dimension/202688226455391

I want a better one. like http://www.facebook.com/Nth-Dimension

So I go to this link while I am signed in on Facebook. http://www.facebook.com/username/

Choose which page you want to get a Vanity URL for.

You can see I already have my Profile URL set. If you havn’t yet you can do it here too.

You can now provide what url you want. Choose something sweet and small.

Once you have picked your desired URL check its availability. You can see some rascal already took my desired URL. So I have to improvise and yet stick to my desired url. So I picked Nth.Dimension.India

Now my facebook page has the url http://www.facebook.com/Nth.Dimension.India makes sense? Well my domain is nthdimension.in so I added India.

Rules to follow

• You can use only alpha-numeric characters and ‘.’ period.
• You cannot change your facebook page username again.
• you cannot transfer it to another facebook account.
• if you do not own the right to the user name it will be confiscated by the rightful owner.
• if you sell the page to another company and it tracked by facebook it will be reclaimed.
• only admins of the pages can create the vanity URL. It need not be the owner. A facebook page can have multiple admins.

Before I tell you how to get unlimited free Facebook likes and Twitter followers please take a moment to read my previous post about buying facebook likes and fans. This post will tell you the SECRET to thousands of Fans for your business page or fan page on Facebook. You can use this same system to build Twitter followers and YouTube Channel views ans subscriptions. People charge somewhere between 5$ to 50$ for this simple tutorial. I am providing it FREE. Enjoy.

Follow the instructions strictly. You can do as you like once you are familiar with the system. Till them stick to the line.

Join Twiends . Sign up with your twitter account if you have one.

Once you join you get 15-25 free seeds. These seed are like credits to be used on this site.

Now go to settings and add your details. Verify your E-Mail address and earn extra seeds.

Add a Face book fan page in the Facebook Settings. See the screenshot below. You can add only those Facebook Pages that you have created or those you administer. So if you want to promote some other page as the creator to set you as the admin.

By default you loose 2 seeds everytime someone likes your page on twiends. If you have lots of seeds but not getting enough likes/fans then increase the seed value to 3. The higher the seeds the faster you get the fans and followers.

If you seek only country specific fans then tick your country option as show above. You can also set what kind of users are allowed to follow you. Set you seed offer and see your fans growing steadily over time.

Now the most important part is getting the seeds. Once you are out of seeds you get no birds. I mean you get no fan/followers.  You can get more seeds by liking other peoples pages, watching youTube videos, following twitter accounts and much more. Finally you can buy some seeds if you dont have spare time to kill doing all those activities I mentioned before.

You can replicate the same success with your twitter account and YouTube videos. But again remember my advice from previous post. (link provided at the beginning of this post). These are not the right kind of fans that will give you any long term benefit.

Thanks – I sincerely hope this helped you. If it did, like me or recommend this post to your friends please.

Well yes we all are crazy about Social Media marketing these days. Even though people just jump at the name and almost anyone who signed up for Twitter or knows how to make a Facebook page claims to be a Social Media Expert. The truth actually is far from it. They are actually jobless people who would do anything for a living. I mean no offense to anyone but wasting a business owners money and time is no good thing to do either. So stop pretending and start learning.

Now How many of you buy Facebook Likes and Fans for you Facebook pages?

Well I have done this on several occasions for our own use and our clients as well. I will today discuss the pros and cons of buying Facebook Fans and will suggest some precautions to ensure your money is well spent.

Are the Facebook Likes and Fans worth the investment and effort?

Yes they are. With the web going social major search engines (Bing Google and others) have started using social signals apart from an estimated 180 or so signals to determine the position of your site/page on a search page. The value of the Social Signals are no doubt very important. They are opinions of real people and that definitely matters when it comes to calculating relevancy and trust factor of pages / domains.
While it was initially said to be making an influence of 6% in SERP rankings (ref : SEOMOZ study) its believed to be much more now. Its so important that even Google is going to introduce the +1 options to take in Human votes.

Further it gives your websites visitors a sense of security and euphoria when they see thousands of facebookers trusting your website. Better yet if they are logged in to facebook while visiting your website then they might see their friends faces in the Facebook widget (if you have them) and that is bound to improve your sales ratio and skyrocket your trust factor.

How can I get more Facebook likes?

When you have your facebook pages linked from you website searchengines know how to associate them. So getting more likes / fans on your pages directly influences your websites trust.

How to get them totally depends on the quality of services / products / advice / information you provide to the public. If someone is happy with what you are offering then they don’t have a problem clicking that little like button and increasing your fan/follower count.
But not everyone plays fair or has the resources to promote services on Facebook so they resort to cheaper methods like buying Facebook likes.

What should you know and check before you pay someone to get you facebook followers.

I am listing below the characteristics of the cheap Facebook Likes that is rampant in the Market.

• You can get 500 likes for 5-10 USD.
• You will actually get more than 600 for the price so you will be over the moon and sing praises of the service provider.
• Your number of Fans will start dwindling from day 1.
• When you ask the service provider they will tell you its a natural process and since the Fans are real people they might not want to continue.
• The decreasing number of Fans will continue and in two months time you will be left with only about 300 fans out of the original 500+ you had got.
• If you take a closer look at the profiles who have liked your pages you will notice that they are mostly fake accounts which have been created for the sole purpose of Liking pages.
• You will see no real interaction there.

What do you Gain and Loose from such practices?

Well these likes are very much like links. The search engine algorithms can easily find it out. They will check how much interaction is happening between your page and your followers/fans. If it does not look natural then all your effort is counted as spam. Which in simple terms means negative trust for your site.

There is something you can gain from these cheap facebook likes though. Initially while it takes time to accumulate the real fans you it can help to have a handsome count of cheap (may be fake) followers. This way it becomes easy for the real user to decide whether or not to follow the page/site.

But if someone provides you real followers. I hope by now you would have known how would real followers be. If your services are restricted to a geographic location look for followers from that area. Monitor the activity of your fans regularly and interact with them. Share interesting and informative stuff with your followers so that they come back to your facebook page and share it with their friends. This is the natural way of getting followers and there is no alternatives to it.

Monalisa in Honor of Breast Cancer Month - Oct 2010 (image credits : freakingnews.com)

What do you make out of such status updates by women on facebook these days?

• On My Bed – Soft and Familiar
• On the Big Table
• i like it in da closet….:)
• dining table with candles lit.

I know what you are thinking. But thats not it. There is nothing related to sex here.  Read On.

Man you put a mystery in front of me and …poof I loose my sleep. The mystery is – whats going on????. Looks like every one else knows except me. People are liking and commenting on the statuses while we dont have a clue whats going on.

So I google the damn thing and crack the code.

This is all about the World Breast Cancer month – Oct. This is to create an awareness among women. Facebookers find an innovative way of spreading this awareness – by curiosity. You get mystified you search and you find the answer.  So you do not forget. Hmnn I like that.

Last year it was even more wicked. They talked about what color bra they are wearing. I had no idea whats going on. One of my friends (girl) posted “White and Lacey” one of my male friends commented “Blue Black Pin Strip” and I said “denim with copper”. And you should have seen the reaction from other female friends. They were laughing their heads off. We two poor souls had to delete our comments and stayed away from facebook for two days.

I am posting this so that you dont make and ass of yourself while dealing with your female friends on facebook.

(img src : coastalvectors.com)

Notice the two developments on Facebook in recent past.

Some days ago Facebook killed “Become a Fan” option and forced on us the “Like” alternative.(Ref1)

Before that about a year ago we used to get updates about which friend became a fan of which site or application.  This is history now.

They seriously do not want you to use their platform for free marketing. So all those popular branding and viral advertisement option are being killed.  It remains to be seen how long it goes before they kill the remaining free promotion options out there.

facebook kills profile boxes

As a most recent development some more of free promotion options are being targeted. See the graphic to the right. Its a snap shot from my own profile.

Facebook is Killing profile boxes. We can no longer showcase what cause we are supporting or what books we are reading. It was kinda free promotion for good causes. But probably Mr Zuckerberg does not care if we want to save the girl child in India or I want to tell my friends what books I am reading or I have recently read.

All they need is to make the advertiser pay. The days of free promotion on social media power house -Facebook, is almost over. The Applications that used to enjoy a viral presence are dying now. Yeah if you can carve out a revenue sharing deal with Facebook then that is probably no problem, like Zynga – the makers of Farmville and MafiaWars.

Of course revenue is important but I don’t think this is a very wonderful way of making money. We have loved facebook as a sharing platform. Now they are killing that spirit. Kind of sad to see this approach.

Hey guys… Saturday is about to end and I am on Facebook. Lol the right time to be on FB you would agree with me.

Now the funny thing happened….. one of my friends shared some thing like this on my wall. I deleted it ofcourse and sent a message to the guy. But as I look at my updates my updates I see a lot of people being infected.

I recognized it because this has happened to one of my friends before. I ask you to remove the updates and remove the user (if not your regular contact) because I suspect they infect you when you click the link. You  got to remove the updates because anyone who visits your wall might click the link as well. Again.. I am trusting FBs technology that the infection does not spread just by visiting the infected profile.

It is just a shared video.It somehow infects your PC or hacks into your account.Iam not sure which one is the case…in either case it would probably post this vid on friend’s wall.

Ok thats fine but how the hell do I get rid of this?

O yeah.. I have the solution now. Go to your facebook setting->application settings find this app named Winamp and remove it. Change you password as an additional precaution.Then make sure you remove all those posts form your wall and friends walls too.

Dear Readers,

This post is for all Facebookers who are concerned about their social security and privacy on world’s most popular Social Network. We know Facebook is not very interested in safeguarding our privacy. You might like my last post about Facebook Privacy fiasco to see the dangers facing you on FB. Some of my friends on Facebook are so concerned that they are planning to leave Facebook for ever. So I planned a series of posts to help my friends and YOU to use facebook safely. This is the first in the series.

Think twice before you allow that stupid facebook app.

Some of us just use facebook for the apps or so it seems. You open their public profiles and see automatic updates from a host of crappy apps. I hate such kind of users. They don’t do much on Facebook so they allow all kind of apps to access information. But they don’t realize that the apps are pulling information about their friends as well. If you are not concerned about yourself ..at least take a moment to think about your friends.

I logged on to facebook today and there were some updates. One of them was this.

Freinds Exposed App - Sick thing

Now see what questions is it discussing? Definitely personal right? This person who choose to use the app is a close friend so I have no issues with it. But imagine I do the same and it pulls up this kind of crap with my clients or relatives. You do not know whom it is targeting..because you authorized it to access friend’s information. When? yeah you might ask that… Note that link at the end of the update…see what they said…its a link bait…they induce you to click the link..then some thing like this comes up.

If I want to use this app ( I would actually never do it) its fine but I have no right exposing my friends to such  kinda stuff. God knows what they are doing with the information they pull out from our profiles. Given that they are discussing things like Virgin – hot- hooking up they could be well be one of those sick companies selling viagra or dating service sites. Or they could simply sell out your information to those who do it.

My request to you all is
to take a moment and think twice before you allow any app.
Do not expose your friends privacy.
Stay away form those people who are on facebook just for those apps and games.
Take a moment to set you privacy settings.

We are all familiar with twitter’s RT (retweet) features. Now Facebook has started a similar feature on the lines of Retweet. This is a short post on how this feature works and the advantages it will bring to Facebookers.

Retweet feature that first started on twitter as a practice of preceding any post that you want to re-post to your followers with a RT and @originalusername. Now we have dedicated retweet buttons as it became massively popular. @mentions on Facebook also caught up soon. Now its time for RTs. The main idea behind RTs on twitter of Via on Facebook it so credit the original poster for his contributions. Lets see how they work.

This feature is now available to the public and only works on links for the time being. That is you cannot “via” your friends status updates or shared videos. All You need to do is use the good old share option on a link posted by your friend. Then notice the change marked red.

You can choose to remove the via feature if you like to. (note the remove link) I would strongly suggest you keep it. This would let people know who the original poster is and you won’t be involved with the nasty incidents that follow when you share something that does not match everyone’s taste.

On twitter we have some thing like this.

Enjoy the new feature. I hope this is implemented on status updates as well.