How to Use Wolfram Alpha Personal Analytics for Facebook

Photo by CarbonNYC

In this tutorial, I am going to show how to use Wolfram Alpha to generate useful statistics based on your Facebook data. Wolfram Alpha is a computational knowledge engine that you can use to generate reports or calculations on any scientific or mathematical inquiries.

Recently, Wolfram Alpha launched its personal analytic for Facebook.  Now you can use this powerful search engine to draw insights on your social media activities and interactions. The only thing you need to do is get a basic free account and type in “Facebook Report” on the search bar and hit enter.

Take a look at my step by step tutorial to guide you on how this is done.

View this document on Scribd

As you can see, creating the report is quick and straightforward. You would also notice that the report is quite interactive and can provide you with the most detailed information you require.

What’s inside the report?

The first major part of the report shows statistics on Facebook activity. Here is a sample report which is based on my Facebook data.

Number of posts per month

My Facebook profile is quite new. I post a lot of links mostly social media stuff I read from blogs and websites.  I do need to post more of my own content.

Weekly Post Distribution

I work between 9 AM to 6 PM. I am most active on weekdays and my most active day is Monday.

number of likes, comments and post lengths

Yes. I do share a lot of post from YouTube, Twitter, Google+ and blogs mostly about social media stuff. Here is a word could of my posts:

Word Cloud

As you can see, I do a lot of sharing from my other social networks. I connected my other social media account to my Facebook. Some of my connections are automated. For instance, my Twitter feed automatically post recent tweets to my Facebook wall. My recent blogs from WordPress are also automatically promoted on my wall. I also share my pins from my Pinterest boards.

Weekly App Activity

Another major section of the report tackles statistics on your friends. As seen from the results below, most of my friends are male.

Facebook Friend’s Gender Distribution

Majority my friends are married. You can also see that most of my friends between 20-30 years old are single, engaged or on a relationship. Beyond that range, my friends tend to be married.

Facebook Friend’s Relationship Statuses Distribution

Here is the age distribution of my friends.  It is also fun to know who is the oldest and youngest among them.

Distribution of Reported Ages

It is noteworthy to know where your friends are. Do you have a friend in each country?

Facebook Friends Location

As of the moment, Wolfram Alpha can only generate this report for your personal Facebook account. I would be great though to have the same information for Facebook pages. Would you agree?

How to Use ShortStack to Create a Facebook Contest

Would you like to increase the engagement activity in your Facebook page? You have a marketing strategy and that you would require names and emails of your target customers. Would you like them to give you their information?

Why not run a contest? Stir up a buzz by doing a sweepstakes. Everybody loves free stuffs and winning it by chance makes it even more exciting.  Raffle off a very nice price that they won’t want to miss out on.  This is a great way to promote your page and increase your fan base. You can also do a photo or video contest. Let your fans participate by submitting their own photos or videos; or voting for the photos or videos they like. I am sure this will build a lot of hype and engagement to your page.

Running a Facebook contest, however, is not that simple and straightforward. There is a right or should I say ‘legal’ way of doing so. According to the Facebook Page Terms and Standards, promotions should be run using a third party app. This includes sweepstakes and contests of any form. Using the like button and other features and functionality within Facebook is not allowed in any promotional activity. If you do this, Facebook can delete or remove your page.

So, what is the right way of doing a contest? Use an app. In this tutorial, I show you how to create your own Facebook contest the right way by using an app template available at ShortStack.

View this document on Scribd

ShortStack is a design tool which allows you to create your custom Facebook tabs to suite your promotional needs. It also has a variety of widgets and templates which you can use to run your contest right away.  You can use ShortStack for free if you just need to run a simple sweepstakes contest. However, you need to avail of their paid services for several features like database storage for storing your promotional entries and analytics for monitoring your interactions over time.

Go to my Facebook page to see my sample contest. Let me know if you have any questions regarding this tutorial. Have a great day!

How to Use Woobox to add a Pinterest Tab to your Facebook Page

Like us on Facebook

In the last blog post I shown how to add a blog and Twitter feed tab to your Facebook Fan Page. This time around, I am going to share to you how your fans can connect with your Pinterest via Facebook.

Woobox.com has come up with an easy and quick way how to  add a Pinterest tab to your page. It is free to use, so, what more could you ask for?  Now your fans can engage with you on Pinterest through your Facebook Page. With this app, you can direct your visitors to your Pinterest boards. You can also use this app to reach out to more Facebook users and expand your fan base.

Just follow my step by step guide below on how to do it.

I hope you found this tutorial helpful. If you would like to see the app in action, visit my Facebook page.

Feel free to comment below with any questions you might have.

View this document on Scribd

How to Use Involver to Connect your Blog and Twitter to Facebook

By dkalo

For today’s blog post, I am going to show you how you can customize your Facebook Page via involver.com. This websites offer a lot of applications which you can install to your Facebook page. There are five apps, namely, Youtube Channel, Twitter, RSS Feed, Flickr and Static HTML which you can easily install for free.   You are only allowed two free applications to install per page; otherwise, you can avail of their application suite for a fee and install as many as you want.

The tutorial below demonstrates how you can add Blog and Twitter feeds your Facebook page. In the end, you will be able to create tabs in your Facebook page which contains latest post from your blog and Twitter account. This is a simple way to keep your fans connected to your other media channels.

Do you know any other applications you can use to jazz up your Facebook page? Please share your experience via the comments section below.

View this document on Scribd

How to Create a Facebook Page for your Business

At this point in time, having a Facebook Page for your business is a must. With 800 million users¹, Facebook is still the number one social media platform for online promotions and customer engagement.

By Alessio85

Facebook is free to use, so there is no worries if you are a small business with little or no budget for putting your business online. Having a Facebook page for your business is a good marketing strategy to build your online presence, engage your customers and expand your network by meeting new clients and business partners.

With Facebook, you can put up your company profile and share different types of information, such as photos, videos, blog posts, links to other sites, and other media to promote your business and services. You can now easily alert your customers whenever you have updates to share about your business.

Facebook got a new face

Last March 30, 2012, Facebook fully launch its new layout called Timeline. Even though there were some who literally ‘unlike’ the changes, Facebook has push through with its implementation of the new layout and a long with it some exciting features in posting updates and facilitating engagements.

One very distinguishing feature it presents is the cover photo. Located at the top of the page, your cover photo is the first thing visitors see. It has become the first and foremost face to promote your business or brand. They say, first impression lasts, so it is advantageous to have a unique and eye catching image that represents your page.

The Facebook cover photo is an image file (jpg or png) that’s 851 pixels wide and 315 pixels tall and less than 100 kilobytes. Your image can be the main product of your business, a photograph of your customer enjoying your service offerings or some events which highlight your company’s milestone.

Another identifiable part of the page is the profile picture. It is the 180 x 180 pixel image on the lower left corner of your cover photo. Since the cover photo and the profile picture overlap, many users even had the vision to blend them together into one single image.

Your cover photo is not limited to photos per se. You can also use text, charts, or graphs that you feel can convey your point across to your audience.

For example, this my current cover photo which is a wordle base on this blog.

wordle base on livingavirtualassistantlife.wordpress.com

The possibilities are infinite. However, there are some rules to consider. These are:

No Price or Purchase Information.Do not put “40% off”, “Download it in our websites” and other similar statements regarding your prices and other promotional information you advertise. You can do these things on your timeline but not in your cover photo.

No Contact Information. Don’t include your website, Email, snail mail address and other contact information. Your contact information is better off listed in your page’s About section.

No References to User Interface Elements. Don’t include “Like us”, “Share” and other Facebook engagement actions on the photo cover. Arrows pointing to the like button is not allowed as well.

NO Calls to Action. Don’t put “Get it now!”, “Tell your friends about us” and other similar statements which suggest a certain action towards your visitors. You can do these things on your tabs and timeline.

Facebook timeline photo cover rules

Your cover photo is the part of your pager where you really need to experiment and be creative in order to grab attention right at the very start and get that page like you deserve.

 

Highlighting, pinning and milestones

There are new ways to showcase you post in your timeline. Now you can “highlight’ or ‘pin to top’ your post so that your audience any important posts or events you need them to know immediately.

Your timeline is divided into two columns, in which, your most recent post occupies the top left corner of your timeline. When you ‘pin to top’ a post it automatically sends the post to the top left corner of your timeline. That posts now becomes the first article of your timeline, thereby, giving it a greater chance for engagement. A pinned post stays in that position for 7 days or until you create your next post after said number of days. You can only ‘pin to top’ one post at a time.

Highlighting makes the post wider. A highlighted post takes both columns on your timeline. This makes the post very noticeable and hard to miss. You can highlight more than one post. The best posts to highlight are photos and videos.  Note that you cannot “pin to top” and highlight a post the same time.

Highlighting lets you see the whole picture.

Milestones are important events you want to insert in your timeline.  Examples of milestones are the day you launch your company or a product, your first sale, the completion of a very big project and any other events you want to document. Now you will be able to remember these dates from your timeline. Milestones are like highlighted posts which occupies the full length of your timeline.

These are just some of the new features in the new Facebook timelines. To create your own Facebook page for your business, follow my step by step tutorial below. It also includes instructions on how you can upload your cover photo, post your updates and highlights.

View this document on Scribd

There are a lot more features which I hope to cover in future tutorials so keep coming back or better yet subscribe to my blog to get future updates and tutorials. Please like this post or leave a comment if you have any questions about things I discussed or fail to discuss here. Thank you and I hope hear from you soon!

How to Use BO.LT

By B Rosen

Last month, I shared with you a tutorial on how to use Pinterest.  As a quick review, Pinterest lets you pin your favorite photos on the Web and share it with others. What if, instead of a photo of the camera, you want to save a blog, an article or a product review of it. Then, it would be better for you to use BO.LT instead.

BO.LT is a web page sharing network.  It lets people copy any page in the web. With BO.LT, you can actually grab pieces of the web, put them together into one collection for you to come back and review them.

Now, after the pin, comes the bolt.

A copy of any page saved in BO.LT is called a bolt. Once you made a bolt, you can share it right away via Twitter, Facebook, Tumblr, Pinterest and Buffer. You also have an option to keep your bolts private. You also get to save your bolts into your own customized collections based on your topics of interests.  With collections, it is easy to organize the bolts you’re creating. You can also share these collections to your friends and followers in BO.LT.

BO.LT is also a networking site. You can find lots of bolts from other users which you can ‘rebolt’ to your own collection. You can also do other social engagement by liking, sharing and commenting on numerous bolts submitted by other users.

I find this very useful considering I read a lot of contents on the web. I am a constant star pusher in Google Chrome. Yes, I do have a cluttered bookmarks bar that I can’t seem to organize.  And sometimes, I get even more frustrated when the page I bookmarked disappears for no apparent reason at all. And I am left wondering if I ever get to see that wonderful page again.  Now, with BO.LT, saving them permanently would solve this major bummer.

Here is a step by step tutorial on how to use BO.LT. It contains instructions on how to open your own account and some basic setting features which you need to know about in using BO.LT. You can also find here easy instructions on how to make a bolt.

View this document on Scribd

Follow me at https://bo.lt/app/account/cosmicdoggerel/ . I will follow you back and see your wonderful collections. Do you find BO.LT useful?  How?

How to Use Empire Avenue

Do you want to increase traffic to your website, blog or social media stream? Then consider playing Empire Avenue. It is a social network game that allows users to expand, engage and evaluate their social networks in a fast an effective way.

Buy me at Empire Avenue

Empire Avenue is based on game theory wherein real work is played like a game.  Empire Avenue based its system like a stock market. Every user at Empire Avenue is a stock. When you sign up, the first thing you’re going to do is to create a ticker for your user account. With that ticker, you will be assigned a stock price. Your stock price starts at 10 eaves. Eaves are the virtual currency of the Empire Avenue community. Just like the stock market, as more people buy your stock, your stock price goes up.

You can earn eaves when other users buy your stock. The number of eaves a person buys from you; you earn 50% of it. When they buy your stock, they become your stockholder. You can also earn eaves when you buy stocks at a lower price then sell your stock position when the price goes up.

Another way to earn is through dividends. When you sign up to Empire Avenue, you will connect all your social media accounts to your account.  You can connect your Google+, Youtube, Facebook account, Facebook pages, twitter, LinkedIn, WordPress, Flicker, Instagram and so forth. Like the normal stock market, your stockholder also earns dividends based on your productivity. People who own your stock receives dividends based on how much activity you have on all the networks that you have.  So if you do a lot of tweeting, Facebook posting, blogging, etc. throughout the day, your dividend will go up. So an Empire Avenue user earns some eaves from you simply by owning your stocks.

Finally, you can earn more eaves when you engage in missions.  Missions are paid using eaves. A mission can have a reward as low as 500 eaves and up to 50,000 eaves.  Through missions, an Empire Avenue user can ask other users to visit their websites or social network sites and render social media interaction. For instance, a user can ask other users to view their recent YouTube video and give a like (or dislike), share it to their social network or make a comment on the video. They can even require them to subscribe to his YouTube Channel. And all this, they will do in exchange for some eaves.

You can also create these missions yourself after a few days or weeks of playing. I didn’t have my create missions button the first few days after I created my account. It only appeared after a few weeks when my stock price hit 50 eaves.

What makes Empire Avenue an effective tool for Internet marketing is that it gives you the ability to create missions.  You can ask other users to go to your websites or social media account platforms and do some interactions. The power of Empire Avenue is that it can help you direct hundreds of real live honest to God human beings (real live users and players) to your websites and online media so that they can give social media interactions.

Here is a tutorial I made on how use Empire Avenue. It covers how to create an account using your own Facebook account. In addition, you would also see some basic functions, one of which is on creating missions.

View this document on Scribd

Don’t think that this is a game. Look at what it can give you. You are here for the potential traffic it can give your network or website; and the future revenue it can bring. So if this is what you want, then you only need to do is create missions within Empire Avenue.

Not yet in Empire Avenue? Click here.

How to use Pinterest

Pinterest is a relatively new and popular social networking site. It is a basically a photo sharing site which allows you to pin photos to your wall and share them to other Pinterest users.  So you might be surfing the web and you find a particular photo or video and store them into a board. The pinned image links back to the site from where you found the image. So, what you are doing basically is bookmarking that image to your Pinterest wall or board and sharing the image forward to others. The boards here are categories you set for yourself based on your interests.

By ShardsOfBlue

So if you are motivated in the Art, Fashion, Do-It-Yourself Crafts, Photography, Travel, and so forth, you can use Pinterest to create visual boards that you can use as inspiration for your work or projects.  Pinterest also allows you to pin videos.  I have tried it by pinning some favorite music videos I regularly listen to in Youtube.

Pinterest relies heavily on photo sharing. If you like collecting and sharing photos based on your personal interests or business, Pinterest is for you. In an internet marketer standpoint, you can use Pinterest to market your product. With Pinterest, you can drive more traffic to your site. Pinterest is also heavily linked with Twitter and Facebook.  You can share your pins and boards to these networking sites.

To join Pinterest, you need an invite. You can go to www.pinterest.com to request for an invite. Usually, Pinterest will respond to you and give you your invite within a week. Another way to get an invite is through your friends who already have a Pinterest account. I requested an invite from a Facebook friend and I got the invite in just 3 days.

Check out my tutorial on How to use Pinterest. It includes instructions on how to get invited in Pinterest, how to set-up an account, and basic functions of Pinterest. Also follow me on Pinterest at http://pinterest.com/cosmicdoggerel/. See you there!

View this document on Scribd

How to Use HootSuite

I like using HootSuite in managing my Twitter account. HootSuite is a web-based social media management tool.  It is so user-friendly. With HootSuite, I get to view all my home, sent, mentions, search and list feeds quick and easy. They are all arranged neatly in columns of streams in my HootSuite dashboard.

Another feature I like in HootSuite is the schedule tweet option. With this option, I can send my tweets on a particular time and date I want it sent; even when I am away from my computer. You can also shrink your URLs in HootSuite, which is another useful feature to have in hand, especially when you want to tweet websites with long virtual addresses.

I use HootSuite’s basic plan for free. This allows me to add up at most 5 of my social profiles. I was able to add my Facebook  and WordPress profile in my HootSuite dashboard. However, I am hoping that HootSuite can include Google+, YouTube,Tumblr, and other popular social media sites for their basic plan users. The integration of these social sites are only available in their paid subscription plans. Wouldn’t it be great if we can get these for free too? I just can’t resist putting a little wishful thinking here.

It is so awesome that HootSuite is web-based. I really like tools that are web-based. I don’t need to install anything in my computer. It saves hard disk space and I can sign in in any computer with Internet connection.

Now it is your time to try. Just follow my tutorial on how to use HootSuite. Happy Social Networking!

View this document on Scribd

Photo Credits: http://www.flickr.com/photos/46542207@N04/