Facebook

Do you want to know what information Facebook has about you?

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Here’s how you can find and download what information Facebook has on you (and has probably shared with other people).

Log into your Facebook account. At the top right corner is an arrow. When you click on it you will get the drop down like the image on the right.

Towards the bottom is the “Settings” link. Click on that.

At the very bottom in small print is a link that says “Download a copy of your Facebook data”.

Click on that and you will need to fill in your password again to verify it’s you.

You will need to keep an eye open for the link email. Once you get the download link you only have a few days to download it or have to start the whole process over again.

The download will be in the form of a zip file, which you can extract on your computer.  In the extracted folder you will see a file called index.htm.

If you double click on the index.htm file or drag it to a browser it will open up a page where you can easily see the files you downloaded. While you are viewing the different files in your browser, all this information is now saved to your local hard drive on your computer.

Have a good day!

Paula

 

 

Don’t miss out on the new

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There is something comfortable about what is known. We know what to expect and don’t have to work harder than necessary. While I am a great fan of exploring the unknown and will always take the road less traveled, you can still get stuck in a rut, or even get overwhelmed by all the options that are out there. With so much information, products, and options available to us, it is easy to be inundated by choices.

Take food graters. We have one that was pretty cool. It was a circle on top of a catch pan that you could rotate around for the grating type you needed. Not your mother’s metal square thing that left a mess. But after spending waaaay too much time trying to grate some lime zest my daughter had the brilliant idea that we really needed a new one. Not technically the language she used but you get the point.  Sure enough, there is this wicked awesome one on Amazon that I ordered and love!

What does this have to do with writing? Everything.

Do you even know what options are out there for you? I know that the written word may not have changed much but the options are pretty cool. Have you checked out adding audiobooks for your title? This is a very hot commodity right now, and there are many advances that make it easy for you to create a quality audiobook that will definitely set your title apart.

What about social media? For one of my paying day jobs, I work for an ebook promotions site. As a courtesy, when we prepare a sponsorship and post it on Facebook, we always try to find the author’s Facebook page and link to it. But there are so many authors who don’t have a page and miss out on this extra opportunity for publicity.

Not every new thing is better. But you won’t know until you look and see.

Have a great day!

Paula

 

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Quick Link: How Authors can Utilize Facebook Live

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Quick links, bringing you great articles on writing from all over the web.

Want a great tool to boost your social media reach and be able to interact with your fanbase? Alan Parks from Indies’s Unlimited gives a great tutorial on how to use Facebook Live.

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How Authors can Utilise Facebook Live

by Alan Parks

Almost every single Indie author that I know is on Facebook. Most of us spend time trying to sell our books to our friends, and many authors I know still insist on spending time copying and pasting a generic post to 20 or 30 Facebook groups and hoping that it will get them sales. STOP. There is a better way.

Facebook is still the best form of social media to use to sell your books, but you have to be smart. In recent months, Facebook has generously given us the best new tool for reaching and interacting with readers that we have had for years, and I haven’t seen anyone using it. It is called Facebook Live.

As authors, we hear a lot about algorithms. Whether it is Amazon algorithms or Facebook, all we hear is that these algorithms are working to stop people from seeing our posts/books. Facebook Live is different. If you have the Facebook app installed on a smart phone or tablet, you have the ability to use the live video to reach new and, crucially, different readers.

How to ‘Go Live’

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If you liked this article, please share. If you have suggestions for further articles, articles you would like to submit, or just general comments, please contact me at paula@publetariat.com or leave a message below.

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Quick Link: Facebook profile, Page, or group? An author’s primer

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Quick links, bringing you great articles on writing from all over the web.

Facebook is a strong tool in the author’s marketing toolbox. But did you know that there are three different types of Facebook pages you can create? Build Book Buzz explains the differences and how to tell which one is best for you.

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Facebook profile, Page, or group? An author’s primer

ThumbFinal_4.9.15Of all the social networks you can use to help promote your book, Facebook might have the most potential for a few reasons.

First, it gives you several ways to interact with your target audience. Second, it reaches a wider range of people than other social networks, and those users spend a lot of time on the site. Third, it offers affordable advertising options that, when implemented properly, can be effective.

For that reason, it’s important to understand the three primary ways you and your book can have a presence on that social network:

Profile
Page
Group
Do you have a Facebook profile, Page, or group — or any combination of the three? I’ve noticed many authors using the three interchangeably, as if they’re all the same.

They aren’t.

And when you’re unclear about whether you’ve got a profile, Page, or group, you’re going to be equally unclear about how to use each to its fullest potential.

If you’re confused, you’re confusing others, too
For example, an author recently emailed me about an online discussion. She thought she had seen it here on this blog; could I direct her to the right link? I clarified that it was in the Build Book Buzz Facebook group. Since she’s a member, I suggested she go to the group and scroll down to find it because it was recent.

Minutes later, she replied that she couldn’t find it.

I suggested using the group search box.

It didn’t take her long to come back and say that searching didn’t uncover it either.

That’s when the proverbial light bulb went on over my head.

“Are you searching the Build Book Buzz group or Page?” I asked.

“Whoops,” she replied. “I was on the Page.”

A profile, Page, and group all serve different purposes. Here’s a quick primer on each.

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If you liked this article, please share. If you have suggestions for further articles, articles you would like to submit, or just general comments, please contact me at paula@publetariat.com or leave a message below.

Quick Link: Secrets to Turning Your Facebook Page into an Epic Marketing Tool

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Quick links, bringing you great articles on writing from all over the web.

More marketing tips today, dealing with one of the largest social media platforms out there – Facebook. Penny Sansevieri, guest posting on Writers In The Storm, gives us some excellent tips on how to turn up the volume on your Facebook marketing.

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Secrets to Turning Your Facebook Page into an Epic Marketing Tool

Penny Sansevieri

ThumbFinal_4.9.15May 9th, 2016

According to a recent New York Times article, users spend an average of fifty minutes on Facebook. Fifty minutes! And though this number includes Instagram and the Facebook Messenger app, you can bet that the lion’s share is still spent  on their main platform.  Now more than ever it’s really important to turn your Facebook Page into something that isn’t just getting you likes, but making you sales as well.

I don’t know about you but I sort of have a love/hate relationship with Facebook, when it works it works well but when it doesn’t work, well… crickets. The challenge is that Facebook is always changing and as it does, our strategies need to change as well. Whether you have a strong Facebook page, or want to try and up your engagement on an existing page let’s have a look at some of the new and exciting features Facebook offers.

Facebook Livestreaming

In the past few months many of you have probably seen the little icon for the new Facebook Live, which gives you the opportunity to do livestreaming video right onto your Facebook page. To start a livestream, open up the status bar as though you were going to write a new post and click the little head with the circles around it. This will push you into a cue to start your livestreaming. You will then be prompted to name your video feed and choose your audience, meaning you can choose to Livestream to everyone, or just selected followers. Once you do that, you’ll click the button to go Live and voila, you are now broadcasting to your Facebook audience.  Also important to note, you can save the video if you decide you want to share it later – so perhaps add it to your YouTube channel, etc.

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If you liked this article, please share. If you have suggestions for further articles, articles you would like to submit, or just general comments, please contact me at paula@publetariat.com or leave a message below.

Quick Link: The Pros and Cons of Using a Facebook Profile But Not an Official Page

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Quick links, bringing you great articles on writing from all over the web.

Continuing to dig deeper into social media, specifically Facebook, what do you do if you already have a personal Facebook page. Do you use it as your author page as well? Or would it be better to create a separate “business” page? On her site,  Jane Friedman talks about her experiences and the solution she finally arrived at.  What have you done? I struggle with the same issue for a future Publetariat Facebook page. It could be a lovely way to connect. But it is also like a puppy, you think you want one but once you have it you have to feed it and clean up after it.

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The Pros and Cons of Using a Facebook Profile But Not an Official Page

by Jane Friedman

One of the first marketing tasks given to authors by agents, publishers, and publicists is: Start an official Facebook page.

So far, I have not done this for myself. Instead, I use my Facebook profile with the “following” function turned on. That means I have private friends, but also public followers.

I want to discuss the pros and cons of this choice, but first I’ll describe the history of my experience and how I ended up in this situation to begin with. (Scroll down to the pros and cons if you’re impatient.)

2006–2009: “Real” Friends Only

I joined Facebook in 2006. At first, I only friended people I knew well and had met in person—and I rarely received requests from strangers. These were the days (hard to imagine now) when few people used the site.

As I started speaking and meeting writers at conferences, and especially once I started blogging, I tentatively started friending people I had virtual relationships with, but had not met. It felt a little dirty, because at that time, Facebook used to ask for confirmation on how you knew someone, and if you couldn’t verify it, you received an informal reprimand.

Then I noticed that some of my colleagues with even more liberal friend policies had engaged communities of people around them, and valuable discussions were happening in the comments. So I decided to open the door to anyone who asked. (At this point in the game, Facebook didn’t offer a way for people to “follow” you.)

2009-2011: Everyone’s a Friend!

My Facebook use has been fairly conservative when it comes to the private details of my life. Probably the most personal things I share are travel photos and cat pics.

Read the full post on Jane Friedman

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If you liked this article, please share. If you have suggestions for further articles, articles you would like to submit, or just general comments, please contact me at paula@publetariat.com or leave a message below.

The Telling Signs of Content Flops, and 6 Ways To Fix Content Marketer’s Worst Nightmare

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This post by Olsy Sorokina originally appeared on the Hootsuite blog in 3/15.

Even the best-love brands have their haters—that’s unavoidable. So for marketers, it’s often better to focus on being memorable and stand out from the crowd. Think of all those commercial jingles that just won’t get out of your head, or anticipation of products associated with the coming of a new season (Pumpkin Spice Latte, I’m looking at you). Brands that achieve this do so by straying off the beaten path. Marketing guru Seth Godin calls this “finding your purple cow,” a term inspired by a short 19th century nonsense poem and used by Godin to describe being remarkable, and succeeding in advertising by thinking outside the box.

Should you be thinking about finding your own brand’s purple cow? Finding that truly unique way of telling your story means taking risks and surprising your audience. That means the first step down the path to a more memorable bovine brand is to figure out if you’ve been boring your followers.

 

3 warning signs that you might be boring your followers:

1. Your Twitter engagement rate is low

Once Twitter has rolled out their analytics tools to all users, determining how well your messaging is performing on the microblogging network is easier than ever. Perhaps the most telling of all metrics available to users is the engagement rate, a number calculated based on the number of impressions (i.e. how many people saw the Tweet) and the number of engagements (link clicks, favorites, retweets, etc.) with your Tweets. Obviously, the higher the engagement rate, the better you’re doing. We experienced this ourselves when we doubled our Twitter engagement rate in two months.

 

Read the full post, which includes two more signs you may be boring your readers and six tips for fixing boring content, on the Hootsuite blog.

 

Whose Game Are You Playing?

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This post by John Pettigrew originally appeared on Future Proofs on 5/4/15.

We hear a lot about Amazon, the new giant in the playground. But Amazon may actually be the least of the industry’s problems, because they at least play by rules we recognise. There are plenty of other giants out there who are playing entirely different games – but who may still stomp all over our playground. The question is, what do we do about them?

The publishing industry feels under threat from a lot of places these days. And the most commonly mentioned cause of this fear is surely Amazon. Starting off as just another book retailer, Amazon has grown hugely and very cleverly to become a true global giant.

Amazon seems to be the kid everyone’s afraid of – bigger, stronger, and not afraid to use its muscle to get what it wants!

Playing by the rules
However, Amazon is still playing in our playground, basically working with the same rules publishing companies are used to – getting books to customers more effectively and more cheaply than ever before. This is a game that publishers understand and play all the time. And we can see this by the way that publishers and Amazon are always talking about this or that, arguing about a particular situation and coming to new agreements.

The problem, it seems to me, is that Amazon isn’t actually what publishers should be most worried about. We fear Amazon, I think, because we understand it pretty well and so can predict clearly what effect its actions are going to have on us.

 

A different game
The true danger may not be Amazon but other giants who are playing entirely different games. Companies like Google and Facebook, who use content (including content from publishers) as part of their business but who don’t really care much about that content because their real business is selling advertising.

 

Read the full post on Future Proofs.

 

Facebook Ads: Should Indie Authors Buy Them?

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This post by Frances Caballo originally appeared on his The Book Designer on 5/14/14.

If you have a Facebook page, have you noticed that fewer of your posts are reaching your fans’ news feeds?

You’re not alone. As Facebook moves further in the direction of monetization, and as it adjusts its algorithm, fewer of our Facebook page posts are reaching our fans.

Facebook’s reasons for the recent improvements make sense to some extent. A brand page (also called a company page or an author page) you liked when you were 37 may not be a page you have any interest in when you’re 42. Similarly, a friend you were close with four years ago could have moved away and may no longer be in your tight social sphere.

Facebook whittles your news feed to reflect your changing preferences based on your actions in the form of Likes, Shares and Comments.

According to a February 2014 Pew Research Center report, half of all adult Facebook users have more than 200 friends in their network. Users who are 29 and younger have even more.

In addition, last year AllFacebook reported that the average user had liked 40 pages but that figure is higher for residents of the United States, where the average user likes an estimated 70 pages.

In light of these numbers, Facebook assumes that the average user doesn’t have sufficient time to review every post from every friend and author page they’ve liked in the past several years. So the network steps in and determines which friends you’d prefer to hear from, based on your most frequent interactions, and decides which of your own posts from your Facebook page will appear in your fans’ news feeds.

In other words, if all of your fans don’t engage with your page on a regular basis, fewer and fewer over time will see any of your carefully written Facebook posts.

 

Research Proves that Organic Reach on Facebook Is Plummeting

 

Read the full post on The Book Designer.

 

8 Common Facebook Mistakes To Avoid

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This post by Donné Torr originally appeared on the Hootsuite blog. It’s targeted to social media managers, so if you’re an author acting as your own “social media manager” this will be valuable information.

Among the many tasks social media managers face, one is learning how to navigate the ever-changing world of Facebook. Previously on our blog, we discussed the most common social media strategy mistakes. Today, we want to focus on specific Facebook mistakes social media managers need to avoid.

To put it plainly, there is much anxiety surrounding the do’s and don’ts of social media, especially when it comes to what social media managers should do. In light of the recent changes to Facebook’s algorithm, the following are 8 common mistakes that can be avoided on Facebook.

 

8 Facebook mistakes social media managers should avoid

Overly promotional posts

According to the recent changes with Facebook, they will be reducing the number of overly promotional page posts in users’ News Feeds. This is as a result of an ongoing survey with Facebook users, in which the most common feedback was that people wanted to see more stories from friends and Pages they care about, and less promotional content. An overly promotional post is one that solely pushes people to buy a product or install an app, enter promotions and sweepstakes with no real context, or reuse the same content from ads. The best way to avoid creating overly promotional posts is to leave product promotion to Facebook Advertising.

Example of this type of post:

 

Read the full post on the Hootsuite blog.

 

Social Media Without Draining Your Day

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This post by W. Terry Whalin originally appeared on TWJ Magazine.

How in the world, have I tweeted more than seventeen thousand times? Yes, that is an accurate accounting of my activity on Twitter.

First, I was an early adapter and have been on twitter for seven or eight years. While there are times when I have not blogged or put out my newsletter or other ways to touch my audience, there are very few days that I haven’t sent out consistent information about publishing on twitter.

The result is that I’ve built a large following on this platform. Publishers are looking for authors who have a large and on-going social media presence. I’ve often written about platform-building ideas and even have a free Ebook on this topic (use the link to get it immediately).

Social media doesn’t have to consume your day and hours of time. It can—but doesn’t have to do so. It does not drain my day and I’m active in the social media area. For example, I have over 130,000 twitter followers. I want to give you several tools and insights of what I’m doing to consistently have a growing social media presence yet I do it with focused effort.

 

Read the full post on TWJ Magazine.

 

Socially Awkward: A Simple Guide to Social Media

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This post by Jandra Sutton with Steph Rodriguez originally appeared on San Francisco Book Review on 3/20/15.

Chances are you’ve read countless articles about the best ways to use social media outlets, like Twitter, Facebook, Google Plus, or LinkedIn, and devoured list after list of quick-tips—even “for dummies”—at an attempt to implement a wealth of information with varying degrees of success. It’s great that you’re using social media, but that’s only one part of the equation. You’ve already mastered all the basics to be accepted by the social media in-crowd: “like,” “share,” “tweet.” Yet, what about the things you should avoid at the risk of becoming a social media outcast? By following these simple guidelines to online etiquette, even the most socially awkward computer user will roam the halls of social media with much success.

 

Tasteful Self-Promotion by Online Appeal

Facebook and Twitter are perfect outlets to express a variety of thoughts and experiences like: how great the bike ride to work was, photographs of a tasty dish from that new, swanky restaurant in town, an interesting article you read, or even as a means to self-promote your brand or new novel.

Still, as a general rule, only 1 out of 5 posts should be blatantly self-promotional, like those including a link to buy your book. The other four, leave open to share a new blog post, comment on a topic relevant to your book, ask followers a question that interests them, or retweet that insightful article you read over the weekend. Flesh out your social media pages with more than just attempts to sell. This will further engage your loyal followers.

 

Read the full post on San Francisco Book Review.

 

Facebook's Like Affair With Brands Is Over

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This post by Will Oremus originally appeared on Slate on 3/24/14.

Facebook is ending the free ride, wrote Valleywag’s Sam Biddle in a post that has been greeted with widespread alarm. No, it’s not forcing ordinary users to pay for its service or to share pictures of their babies. Rather, the claim is that it’s deliberately bringing an end to the era of free advertising for businesses via their Facebook pages.

Citing an anonymous source, Biddle reports that Facebook is in the process of slashing brands’ “organic page reach” to just 1 or 2 percent. That means only a tiny fraction of the people who have liked a business on Facebook will see each of its posts in their news feed, unless that company pays Facebook for wider promotion. The organic-reach squeeze would affect “all brands,” Biddle writes, from corporate behemoths like Nike to local merchants like New York’s Pies ‘n’ Thighs restaurant. He casts this as a cruel bait-and-switch on Facebook’s part:

Facebook pulled the best practical joke of the Internet age: the company convinced countless celebrities, bands, and “brands” that its service was the best way to reach people with eyeballs and money. Maybe it is! But now that companies have taken the bait, Facebook is holding the whole operation hostage.

That’s one way of looking at it.

Here’s another one: People don’t really like seeing a bunch of ads in their news feed.

 

Read the full post on Slate.

 

How Facebook Calculates What Appears In Your News Feed

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This post by Mari Smith originally appeared on her site on 7/18/14.

The problem with Facebook organic reach can be summed up in one single graphic: Only 6 percent of your fans are seeing your content in their news feed. The other 94 percent are not.

Some sources indicate that organic reach may drop to 1-2 percent in the near future. Others say it’s destined to hit zero; it’s only a matter of time.

These stats are a big drop from the already low 16 percent that Facebook indicated back in April 2012.

What is causing the decline in organic reach?

The simplest answer is there is a significantly greater amount of potential content flooding into our news feeds on a daily basis. This bigger firehose of content is caused by several factors, including:

– The average number of Facebook friends users have is 338 (that’s a big increase compared to 130 back in 2008).

– 15 percent of Facebook users have more than 500 friends.

– There are between 1500 and 15,000 pieces of content that Facebook could potentially show in your news feed each time you log on to the site!

– The Facebook news feed ranking algorithm (some folks call this formula ‘EdgeRank’) uses more than 100,000 weights* to determine what you’ll see.

– Ultimately, out of the 1,500 – 15,000 potential stories, Facebook passes them through the mega algorithm and displays approximately 300 stories in your feed.

*Examples of weights: how many mutual friends like the person/page/content, how often you interact with the person/page, when the post was published, when the last comment was made, what types of content you typically interact with: watch more videos and Facebook will show you more videos, like more links and Facebook will show you more links.

 

Click here to read the full post, which includes charts, an infographic and 12 concrete tips for expanding organic “reach”, on Mari Smith’s site.

 

Do You Make These Online Marketing Mistakes?

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This post by Jason Kong originally appeared as a guest post on The Book Designer on 6/4/14.

Imagine you’re making an appearance at a bookstore to promote your latest novel.

Someone approaches you to chat. This person gushes that she’s read all your books and is excited to read the latest one. She holds the newly purchased book in her hands, hoping that you’ll sign it.

Immediately you launch into an elevator pitch, explaining the genre you write in and a quick summary of your storytelling style. You conclude with the various places your books can be purchased, and that you hope she’ll give your books a try.

Clearly, a longtime fan doesn’t need an introduction to how you write and the stories you’ve written. Having the right person pay attention does little good if the wrong message is shared.

Maybe you don’t make this kind of mistake when you’re face-to-face. Can you say that’s also true when you communicate over the internet?

 

The downside of using online media

We all know about the promise.

A platform in cyberspace meant you had a stage to project your voice. Your digital words could travel far and wide, attracting and corralling those who care about what you do. With one click, you could reach just about everyone.

 

Click here to read the full post on The Book Designer.