Don’t let the headline fool you. Marketing your business over social media can be an excellent decision. However, it’s easy to put more emphasis on those ‘Like’s and ‘RT’s than actual, money-making sales. Here are five reasons why you need to include other platforms as well into your overall marketing strategy.

1.  Social Media Makes You Anti-social

While establishing your online presence, it’s easy to mistake interaction with customers on social media with conversations with customers. Regardless of how active you are in your online community, it doesn’t take the place of good, old fashioned face-to-face or phone conversations.

2. Online Trends Are Fleeting

There are those that say social media will be around forever. That may be true, but how do you know where your customers will be congregating in 10 years? Facebook and Twitter might still exist. However, ten years ago, AOL and MySpace were major players online. Here’s some free advice: don’t include them today in your marketing plans.

3. Social Media Only Works For Certain Businesses

Depending on your business, social media may not pay dividends for you. For example, generally, if you sell service to other businesses, you could actually hurt your credibility by using social media to market yourself. That time is better used making in-person connections with executives and other decision makers.

4. Lack of Effective Language

Social media is constantly updated and timeliness is key. This leaves no time for businesses to perfect their message before releasing it to the masses. Messages to your followers should value quality over quantity.

5. There Are Better Ways

In marketing, old school is usually most effective. Nothing beats in-person communication with your customers. Social media shouldn’t be viewed as a marketing revolution to forsake all other platforms for. Instead, it is an additional weapon in your arsenal, but one that should be used wisely and with restraint.

For more information, check out Alex Goldfayn’s article on Mashable.

We all use Facebook apps for one reason or another, but you may have granted those apps and their creators access to your personal information without even realizing it.  Thanks to a handful of redesigns, it is harder than ever to tell exactly what you’re agreeing to when you start using a new app.

1. A Single Button

Instead of giving you a choice between a button that allows access to private information and a button that does not, Facebook apps now use a single button that grants you access to the app and the app access to your information.

2. Tiny Gray Font

Let’s be honest, most of us ignore the fine print, especially when it blends into the background of the page.  Facebook apps are using that to their advantage and using that tiny gray font to tell you what permissions you are about to grant.

3. Hidden Symbol

Rather than explaining what information you are agreeing to grant an app access to, an app launch page now features a nearly indiscernible question mark that links to that information.  Most users never see it and agree to give access to information without even knowing it.

4. The Action Line

Most users find the “main action button”, usually the one that says “Play Now” and is brightly colored, and ignore anything below it.  Facebook has utilized that area under the main action button, which is often overlooked, for important information about your loss of privacy.

5. Friendly Jargon

Facebook’s App Center previously used language that made it clear you were granting access to personal information.  Now, rather than a headline of “Request for Permission” and buttons labeled “Allow” and “Don’t Allow”, there is simply a large blue button that says “Play Game”.

Avi Charkham, head of Product and Design at Lool Ventures, has more information in his article at TechCrunch.

In a recent change Facebook made, posts made to the wall now have a date, time, and a location placed at the end. Something similar to “Yesterday at 11:18pm near Tulsa.” This isn’t something that everyone is exactly happy to have shared.

Facebook has a community forum that got some attention about this. On the forum there was a discussion on how to remove the links to the map and the location tags that show up on the map. The map itself is not going to go away, but you can remove the points that show up on it.

You can find all these posts on the timeline by entering the Activity Log and choosing “Posts with location” when you do a filter. Here you can see all posts that have location information and a map tag, and then remove the ones you want to using the instructions on the link.

Read more here:
Facebook Publishing Users’ Private Location Data