Working for an HR Software provider I attend my fair share of HR events. A topic that has been trending in the conferences and seminars for a few years is the opportunity and challenge that social media presents the industry.

Essentially the debate goes like this… Social media enables people to communicate quickly and easily with one another and has the potential to aid collaboration among our employees. Yay, we like that, surely social media is a force for good. But wait, didn’t I just say that social media enables people to communicate quickly and easily with one another? This means slurs against your organisation have the potential to go viral, potentially reaching millions of people around the world in minutes. Boo, hiss, social media is dangerous. Cue calls for companies to simultaneously embrace social media while maintaining a level of control that would make Orwellian Thought Police blush with pride.

My own belief is that the control argument is futile. Human beings have thrived because of our ability and innate desire to communicate with one another. Urban legends and scare stories (think “Kentucky Fried Rat” or “Cling Film Causes Cancer”) used to go viral long before the internet; it just took longer and was harder to implicate someone for taking part.

Social media, by its very nature, is an open form of communication. Even if I send what I think is a private message, doesn’t mean that the recipient will keep it private. It’s the combination of the openness of social media with the ability to prove somebody has posted something online that poses a risk for employees. Employees need to be aware of how they conduct themselves online, as people can and have been sacked for what they’ve posted.

Featured image by Wirawat Lian-udom / Flickr (CC)

There are numerous examples of people who’ve found themselves looking for a new job following a misjudged Facebook post or Twitter rant. Typically they fall into 10 categories, some examples are below:

1. Breaching Privacy Laws: In California, five nurses are facing the sack after it was found they were discussing patient cases on Facebook.

2. Insulting Your Boss: A famous Facebook fail in 2009 involved a woman, known only as Lindsay, who posted a less than flattering post about her boss, forgetting that she’d accepted him as a friend on the social network. When her boss stumbled across the post, her six-month trial period ended pretty swiftly.

3. Insulting Your Colleagues: A call centre worker was fired after posting a comment on Facebook calling one of her colleagues a “brown nosing cow”. She was dismissed for breaching the company’s Internet policy that “staff should not post comments that could be regarded as bullying, harassment or discrimination.”

4. Insulting Your Customers: A waitress was fired from her job at a pizza restaurant for branding two of their customers “Cheap” on Facebook. While she didn’t give the names of the restaurant goers, she did mention the company name. She was fired for “violating the company’s social media policy.”

5. Disparaging Remarks About Your Company: 13 Virgin Airline crew members were dismissed after publicly discussing aspects of their job on Facebook, including the number of times an airplane’s engines had been replaced and that their cabin was currently infested with bugs. Oh. They also called their passengers “Chavs” for good measure. (See point 4. Insulting Your Customers.)

6. Causing Offence: Liberal Democrat MP Colin Eldridge got rid of his online campaign organiser after posting a comment asking “all religious people to just *&@^ off.” In case there were any atheists in the constituency he’d managed to not offend, he also posted a link to an article saying certain people should be “banned from breeding,” including “vile women with too many kids.”

7. Sharing Corporate IP: Nicole Crowther had been a recurring extra in the hit TV show Glee when she decided to tweet future storylines to her followers. Her message “K is PQ and Ka is PK” was easily deciphered by her fans as a spoiler for who would be prom King and Queen. When the show’s creator, Brad Falchuck, got wind of this he simply replied to her tweet with “@nicolecrowther, Hope you’re qualified to do something other than work in entertainment.” Needless to say Nicole was a recurring extra no more.

8. Busted Pulling a Sickie: An employee from insurance firm National Suisse who called into work claiming to be suffering from a migraine needed to lie in a darkened room rather than look at her computer screen. When her employer found her posting comments on Facebook, it became clear her apparent migraine was just a ploy for an extra day off. She no longer works for the firm. 

9. Amount Time Spent Online While At Work: Dozens of council staff have been disciplined in the north of England for inappropriate use of the Internet, with at least one member of staff being fired for “excessive use of Facebook”. A recent freedom of information request found that Facebook was accessed by Stockton Council computers over 7 million times in 2011.

10. Proof You Behave Like an Idiot: Staff from Great Western Hospital in Swindon were fired after playing the “Lying Down on the Job” game. They were discovered after posting photos of themselves lying down on hospital floors, the helipad, and even resuscitation tables. Not smart.

Conclusion

Would you want your hospital to employ staff who discussed your medical records on Facebook? Thought not. Would you phone your boss, call him a “pervy w&^*#^” and expect to keep your job? I doubt it. What would you do if you owned a restaurant and one of your waitresses purposefully insulted your customers to their face? 

The underlying theme for all of the above dismissals is that the protagonists behaved unprofessionally. If used in a professional way, social media is no more a threat to a person’s employment than email, the phone, or good old word of mouth.

Guest author David Richter is the Marketing Manager for Octopus HR, a company that provides online HR Software for SMEs in the UK.

Why Social Media Could Get You #sacked Social Barrel - The Latest on Social Media

Gerry Moran, a MarketingThink.com blogger, shares the following 5 steps to using social media for your company. The steps are creatively presented as given by Yoda, one of the greatest Jedi masters who ever lived in the history of the Star Wars universe. Apparently, a marketer wanted help on becoming a ‘social media jedi.’

Moran emphasizes that activating a personal social brand on social media platforms is different from activating social media messaging on these channels. When customers and potential customers access your company’s social media page, it should be a humanizing experience to them.

Moran says that the brand is extended and amplified by regularly putting up status updates, making these updates relevant by including links to informative articles, sharing relevant blog posts, liking posts, and commenting, retweeting liking and sharing.

Here are Moran’s 5 steps to incorporate social media into your company.

1. Set an objective before you start using social media. You should ask yourself why you need to start social media for your work. The following are examples of simple yet effective goals. First, you want to start using social media so that you can expand the reach of the message of your company. Second, use social media to provide content that is relevant to the needs and the interests of your audience.

2. Improve the “curbside appeal” of your social media profile. Moran suggests that you should make your social media profiles, such as your Twitter or LinkedIn profiles, smart and neat so that you can get your audience to purchase from you.

For the most part the only important part of a search engine results page is the first page. In particular, studies show that 94 percent of searchers only scan the first page. Your LinkedIn profiles, although they rank higher than other social media profiles, will only make it to the first page if it is complete.

In addition, making your social media profile neat, trim, elegant and smart can only do good things with regards to your credibility.

3. Track, then Talk. Observe by stalking a couple of social media channels from some companies, thought leaders, media publications, competition, prospects, clients and coworkers. Use their guide so that you will know what kind of content to share, what words you should use, and the links that you should provide.

Moran points out that social media content has a rule of thumb: 1 percent create content, 9 percent revise content, and 90 percent read content. You should be a part of the 10 percent that create and revise content, so that you can reach the 90 percent who read.

4. Be an expert of a few social media channels. According to InSites Consulting, the maximum number of brands that an average person interacts with is five. Moran suggests that you should not concentrate on just using one social media channel; neither should you try out a lot of channels at the same time. First, be an expert in Hootsuite, Twitter and LinkedIn, then try out other channels after that.

In particular, Moran says that you can use LinkedIn and Twitter to reach out to people who aren’t following you. Hootsuite is also useful for social network integration for various social media channels, helping you manage your messaging and listening.

5. Understand the Rules of Engagement. The rules of engagement have differences for each social media channel. This implies that for each social media channel, you should know what the best message timing, cadence, tone and overall style should be. In order to make a difference, you need to know how to deliver that right LinkedIn status or make that one or more effective tweets.

So these are the 5 steps to incorporate social media into your business as shared by Moran. The following is the infographic version of the list, featuring Yoda the Jedi master.

Being a “social media jedi” can be done in 5 steps as suggested by Gerry Moran. (Image: via business2community.com)

How to Start Using Social Media for your Business Social Barrel - The Latest on Social Media

A Facebook engineer who helped build the News Feed told InsideFacebook.com that only 1 out of 500 stories will make it through the News Feed. That was six years ago. The social network has yet to update the statistic, but it’s highly likely that its algorithm, EdgeRank, filters more stories now than in 2007.

PostRocket, a Facebook Marketing blog, has released a new infographic that confirms two things: the news feed is competitive, more than ever, and photo posts dominate it.

The number of photo posts from November 2011 to January 2013 grew from 20 percent to 50 percent – a 150 percent increase that proves how user engagement on Facebook is leaning towards status updates with images. Facebook marketers have to take advantage of this statistic.

Photo post optimization starts with the proper dimensions so ensure that it meets Facebook’s recommended standards for photo page posts or sponsored stories, cover photos, profile pictures, and link preview images.

Without further ado, here’s the infographic by PostRocket.

Optimizing Photo Posts For Efficient Facebook Marketing [Infographic] Social Barrel - The Latest on Social Media

People who have been managing social media accounts either for personal use or for business use may have noticed that their fans on social media roughly fall into clear categories.

According to this infographic, there are seven popular types of social media fans and each type can benefit the owners of the social media accounts they follow.

The infographic, made by ReachLocal.com, also teaches social media users how to benefit from each of the seven types of fans discussed.

Here are the seven types of social media fans discussed in the infographic and what they are likely to say:

1.       The Quiet Follower – “Sometimes I’ll read your updates, if they catch my eye.”
2.       The Casual “Liker” – “I genuinely like some of the things you post.”
3.       The Deal Seeker – “Let’s make a deal; you scratch my back, and I’ll scratch yours.”
4.       The Unhappy Customer – “I had a bad experience, and I’m not afraid to talk about.”
5.       The Ranter – “I want to yell about something!”
6.       The Enthusiastic Cheerleader – “I love your brand and everything you post!!! #YouRock”
7.       The Loyal Fan – “I’ve got your back, no matter what.”

It seems counterintuitive that a Facebook Page owner or Twitter account owner will benefit from the “Unhappy Customer” or the “Ranter” but the infographic explains the challenge social media managers need to overcome to turn something negative into something positive.

How To Benefit From The 7 Popular Types Of Social Media Fans [Infographic] Social Barrel - The Latest on Social Media

The seemingly simple inclusion of an exclamation point in a tweet boosts its chances of getting retweets, new data shows.

The data comes from Dan Zarella, a social media expert, in an article on his site.

According to Zarella, he was prompted to look in to “the relationship between exclamation points in tweets and retweets and clicks” by a question from one of his followers which was aptly-sent through a tweet.

Zarella says that he used a dataset of over 2 million link-containing tweets sent by accounts with at least 1,000 followers.

The social media expert says that he “found something interesting” as “Tweets with exclamation points got more retweets-per-follower, but fewer clicks-per-follower.”

So how can social media managers use this new finding? Why include an exclamation point if it increase retweets but results in fewer click-throughs?

This may be particularly useful in campaigns that just want to spread the news so remember that the tweet should include everything needed to understand the message. Do not use links that are crucial to understand the message.

Exclamation Points Boost Retweets On Twitter Social Barrel - The Latest on Social Media

None of us is safe. Identity thieves lurk in the shadows, waiting for the right moment to pounce on their prey. These malicious minds continually find ways to hack an unknowing victim’s social media account.

Be reserved. Be cautious. While we try to protect ourselves against cybercriminals, the names of the people we are looking for may already be in our list of friends or followers. Do not click any unfamiliar link or download files from an untrusted source.

NextAdvisor.com, a consumer information site that offers independent reviews of online services, has released a new infographic to prove the alarming presence of identity thieves on social media sites.

The study, conducted by Javelin Strategy and Research, found that more than 12 million people in the United States were victims of identity fraud in 2012.

NextAdvisor’s infographic reveals this truth with stunning statistics about identity theft on social media, educating online users to be smart in using their private information.

Most identity thieves attack social media profiles through four ways: sending a private message and asking the victim to visit a scam website, targeting an identity threat, accessing accounts without permission, phishing through socially engineered links to reveal passwords and other user info.

The study found that Americans shared these personal information on Facebook, the world’s largest social networking site: full name, family members’ names, current employer, and home address.

Hackers easily work their ways through Facebook accounts not because they are skillful with their craft, but because users either forgot to set their Facebook profiles to private or have no knowledge of their Facebook privacy settings.

Although we always are reminded to use different passwords on our social media accounts, some of us reuse these passwords not only for social media, but also for online banking. This is not safe. And we should change our online passwords at least every month to ensure that we still control our accounts.

Sometimes we need a reminder, although we know it already. As NextAdvisor would say, “It’s easy to get comfortable using social media because it is part of our everyday lives.”

Social Barrel already covered this infographic in this article written by my colleague Solon. The numbers are so alarming that we need to be reminded on how important this is.

Check out this other infographic by Protect Your Bubble, where it reveals that every three seconds someone’s online identity is stolen.

Identity theft is far from funny and passing. And this time it’s up to us to prevent it. If not, we have to fix the damage before it goes out of hand.

Is Your Private Information Safe On Social Media? [Infographic] Social Barrel - The Latest on Social Media

According to Facebook’s latest earnings report, the social network has seen several improvements from the first quarter of last year to this year: 665 million daily active users, a 26 percent increase; 1.11 billion monthly active users, a 23 percent increase; and 751 million mobile monthly active users, a 54 percent increase.

The numbers led to higher ad revenues for the company year-over-year: $1.46 billion total revenue, a 38 percent increase; advertising accounted for 85 percent of total revenue, a 43 percent increase; and mobile advertising revenue accounted for about 30 percent of advertising revenue.

The point is that these figures mean businesses have to capitalize on Facebook marketing, now more than ever.

Mark Zuckerberg, founder of and CEO at Facebook, said the company has seen strong growth and user engagement across its community, as well as new product launches.

The company launched Facebook Home for Android devices, an attempt to socialize the whole mobile experience by putting people first than apps.

During the first quarter of 2013, Instagram, the photo-sharing service acquired by Facebook, crossed the mark for 100 million monthly active users.

Lookalike Audiences, Managed Custom Audiences, Partner Categories – these are just some of the marketing tools that Facebook launched this year to help advertisers target their audience.

With these business highlights and advertising opportunities, Facebook marketing is now at its peak. Social media marketers have to take advantage of the platform’s tools if they want more exposure and build networks.

But it’s not all that easy. Although Facebook has openly confirmed that it wants to generate more revenue from ads, the company is still searching for the right balance between ads and user content. With this goal in mind, the social network built filters on its members’ Pages and News Feeds.

Then Facebook created EdgeRank, the algorithm that decides what stories show up in each user’s News Feed.

Featured image from edgerank.net

Now that there’s a formula, is there a thing called EdgeRank Score? Can it be measured? Well, no, for both questions.

While it’s impossible to check an official Facebook EdgeRank score, the effects of the algorithm may be measured by third-party Facebook analytics tools such as EdgeRank Checker and PageLever. These EdgeRank score checkers usually measure the number through varying factors: the number of people reached, user engagement, and more.

Unfortunately there’s no general EdgeRank score, because each Facebook user has a unique affinity score with each page. Facebook remains mum and secretive about it, while constantly changing it. This means the values of a comment, a like, a photo, and other variables are not constants – the textbook definition of variable. Also, fan pages do not appear in News Feed.

Simply put, no third-party tool can measure EdgeRank Score. Facebook keeps too much private data that if a fan likes a status update, no one can ever know how tightly connected he or she is to other fans. The closer the fan, the more impact his or her Like has on the affinity score of the status update for other fans.

So it’s a blind alley for Facebook marketers and the world will end in 5 minutes? Again, no and no.

This is Facebook EdgeRank as we see it now: a completely closed-door, proprietary algorithm that filters content in the News Feed.

Should Facebook allow the public to see their real EdgeRank scores or not? Drop us your comments below.

How To Measure Your Facebook EdgeRank Score Social Barrel - The Latest on Social Media

In a recent interview with Entertainment Weekly, Fast & Furious star Vin Diesel joked that Facebook owed him billions of dollars.

However, apart from making people laugh at the joke, the Hollywood superstar actually offers a valuable lesson to Facebook Page owners about how they can get more likes.

In the interview, Vin Diesel shares how he was once the owner of the world’s most popular Facebook Page.

When asked what he attributes his massive following on Facebook to, Diesel asked Entertainment Weekly if they have ever seen the film “Social Network”. “Do you remember what they said the reason was to make Facebook?” he asked.

The publication quipped “To meet girls?”.

Diesel joked that that is what Facebook was for. He said that when “The Social Network” movie was made, “nobody had a million fans.”

What he observed is that Facebook was promoting it like “We came up with a new way for people to check marital status.”

He said that this is “not what Facebook was. That’s not why Facebook would be successful.”

Nobody cares about people’s marital status. “That’s as dated as MySpace!” he said.

According to him, Facebook did not realize that something big was about to happen.

“That was — for the first time in history, and it’s kind of a fluke they didn’t see this coming — when I jumped on that page in April 2009, I started talking to people. In the realest ways,” he continued.

“Imagine if you could’ve been a Facebook friend to Marlon Brando, or whoever your role models are. Imagine, if you were able to Facebook Elvis, and talk to him, and hear from him without the Hollywood of it all,” he added.

He recalls that when he started his Facebook Page, the only person who had over a million fans was Barack Obama because he just got elected.

“So, when I started talking to the fans, I became the No. 1 page in the world. Over Coca-Cola, over huge companies. And it was only because I said: ‘Hi, guys, I love you.’” he said.

Vin Diesel also revealed that Facebook once asked him to go to their headquarters to talk about what he was doing to get such a massive following on the social network.

This is where he shares his secret: be real and interact with people.

He said:

“What was unique was: I never let anyone do a post, I never let anyone post for me in the last four years. My audience knows me so well on the page that if my producing partner’s in the room when I post, they’ll know somebody was around me. That’s kind of cool, that’s how sophisticated they are. Facebook really owes me billions of dollars. But whatever.”

Via Entertainment Weekly

Learn From Vin Diesel To Get More Facebook Page Likes Social Barrel - The Latest on Social Media

The Facebook development team includes a special group of about twelve engineers who monitor the algorithm of News Feed. This software engineers tweak EdgeRank – the algorithm – almost every week, conducting tests for beta features and adjustments to the program.

But what is Facebook EdgeRank?

EdgeRank is the algorithmic rule used by Facebook, the world’s largest social network, to fix the variables on each user’s News Feed. The three variables that help determine where and what posts appear, and that make up EdgeRank, are affinity, weight, and time decay.

AFFINITY

For the Facebook News Feed team, “affinity” means the relationship between the author of the story and the viewing audience. This affinity is directly proportional to EdgeRank; the closer the relationship, the higher the score. For example, News Feed will likely choose cheesy stories from your sibling against insightful status updates from a relatively unknown acquaintance, who made it into your Friends list a few weeks ago.

Affinity is one-way. Heavy interactions with another Facebook user will increase the chance of his or her story stories to appear on your News Feed, but this does not necessarily work in the other direction. Your stories may not show up on his or her News Feed.

WEIGHT

The type of post you put out on Facebook News Feed follows a ranking system according to its weight (in proper order): photos and videos, links, and plain text updates. The higher the weight, the higher the score.

Facebook posts with new features encourage widespread usage, so the social network assigns higher weights to these updates. You can reach more fans through these new features.

User engagement also affect a post’s weight. For example, an otherwise simple, plain text update with many likes and comments from other users may carry more fused weight than a photo post without user engagement, despite the initial weight of both posts.

Photo Post > Text Post but Photo Post (no engagement) < Text Post (with engagement)

TIME DECAY

Like most earthly things and affairs, a Facebook post loses value as it ages. EdgeRank works this way to ensure that your News Feed remains fresh with the latest news. But you cannot blame it for your own fault.

The speed of a post’s depreciation depends on the Facebook user. For example, if you access your Facebook account only once a week, less-than-a-week-old stories may still appear on your News Feed.

Facebook’s war room, where its engineering team is turning on new messaging features. Featured image by Robert Scoble / Flickr (CC)

WHY EDGERANK MATTERS

As a social media marketer that specializes in Facebook marketing, you have to know and understand that numbers from demographics are effective tools for projections on the social network.

Here are some Facebook statistics, from comScore’s Power of Like paper in 2011, that prove why EdgeRank is important in your campaign.

1. 96 percent of fans do not return to a brand’s Facebook Page after initial engagement.

2. A Facebook post is 40 to 150 times more likely to reach fans in the News Feed than your page.

3. Facebook users spent 27 percent of their time looking at the News Feed. This is equivalent to 10.5 billion minutes per day, excluding users who access the site through mobile devices.

4. Facebook users in the United States spend more time on Facebook News Feed than six major news sites – ABC, MSNBC, Yahoo! News, CNN, New York Times, and Huffington Post – combined.

5. On average, only 16 percent of your fans will see your posts.

HOW TO IMPROVE YOUR PAGE’S EDGERANK

Post Rocket, a website that specialized on Facebook marketing, recently published a list of 18 tips for Facebook Page posts. Some of these tips and statistics apply to News Feed.

1. Keep it short. Posts between 100 and 250 characters receive 60 percent more likes, comments, and shares than posts with more than 250 characters.

2. Be visual. Photo albums, photos, and videos receive 180 percent, 120 percent, and 100 percent more user engagement, respectively.

3. Ask for what you want. Simple opinion-driven questions or updates will draw 90 percent more user engagement than the average post.

4. Post daily. Post updates often to reach out to your fans. Remember that 96 percent of fans no longer return to a Facebook Page after initial engagement.

5. Be relevant, but not pushy. Post about topics in your niche, not directly about your brand. Save your sales pitch on the actual article or blog post, not on Facebook News Feed.

6. Be timely. Monitor the best time span for your target audience – times when they are more likely to be online and share your posts – and stick to it.

What is Facebook EdgeRank? Social Barrel - The Latest on Social Media

There is nothing sweeter in the eyes of a digital marketer who is using Twitter than to see that their tweets have a lot of retweets.

So how does a marketer increase retweets?

Social media scientist Dan Zarella shares five scientifically proven ways to get more retweets.

He says that through the years, he has done a “tone of research on retweets” and so has decided to share five specific points that are the most powerful ways to get more retweets.

The first way is to include links in your tweets. Tweets that have links get more retweets than tweets that have none.

Another way to get retweets is to ask for retweets. Furthermore, the way you ask for retweets affect how much people will retweet your Twitter post.

According t Zarella, saying “Please retweet” is the most effective way to ask for a retweet (51 percent RT rate). Lesser people retweet when they read “Please RT” (39 percent RT rate). Not including this request got just 12 percent RT rate.

For tips 3 to 5 to get more retweets, read the infographic below.

5 Proven Ways To Get ReTweets [Infographic] Social Barrel - The Latest on Social Media