DACS General Meeting
December 2013
Meeting Review:
Facebook and Pinterest—with Bill deRosa

By Richard Teasdale

At our December 3, 2013 general meeting, Bill deRosa gave DACS a well-presented overview of the online social networks, Facebook and Pinterest. His company, Talking Finger, is an award-winning marketing agency whose mission is to help businesses leverage social media. Bill has expert knowledge of Facebook and Pinterest, and of other social media services.

The presentation addressed two important aspects of Facebook: business pages, and Security and Privacy.

To begin the discussion of business pages, Bill warned the audience that anyone who today is using a personal profile on Facebook for their business will soon be forced to stop doing so. This is because of government pressure on Facebook to protect the privacy and security of personal users. But he pointed out that there are several very good reasons to make the switch - pages provide many more options and opportunities to market a business than do personal profiles.

Note: some of the features of Facebook that Bill demonstrated will not be available to general users until the next version of Facebook is released - currently expected by about mid-January 2014. As a Facebook developer, he has early access to new versions of the software.

Business pages in Facebook are built on a website-like platform, whereas personal pages are not. This allows a business page to function in many ways like a conventional website and provides a low-cost way for a business user of Facebook to build a website.

Facebook is putting much effort into providing search engine capabilities so that business pages can be found easily. The Facebook Graph Search is being enhanced: whereas currently a user searching for a business must know the name of its page to find it, Facebook will soon allow searching for terms, e.g. product names, as Google does for conventional websites. Facebook is already a search engine and its use as such is expected to grow rapidly.

With search engine capabilities will come the desire by business page owners to use SEO techniques to improve their rankings in search results. Business pages include an "About" section which will be indexed heavily by Facebook. It will be very important for About to contain relevant keywords. As with conventional SEO, inward and outward links will help to improve page rankings. The About section should contain outbound links to other online resources important to the business, e.g. conventional websites, pages on other social media systems, other Facebook business pages, etc. A "landing page" should be used for inbound links instead of just directing visitors to the Facebook wall.

Facebook supports applications that can be embedded into pages, to provide features such as Pay-per-click advertising and other types of social media marketing. Applications require custom coding. Although the basic infrastructure of Facebook is free, there is a cost associated with creating applications since someone has to provide the code that runs them. Bill mentioned $60 as a typical price for basic Facebook applications.

Bill stressed the importance of Call to Action. Encourage visitors to Like your page so that  in the future, they will routinely see the content that you add.

Bill's second topic was Security and Privacy while using Facebook. He described and demonstrated the use of several measures that can enhance a Facebook user's security and privacy.

The first technique is the use of lists for controlling who can see the posts a user makes on Facebook. As an example, Bill mentioned that he wants only family members and close friends to see photos of his kids. By setting up a list of family members and a list of close friends, he can limit who sees specific personal posts to the approximately 10% of his Facebook friends who are in one of those groups. When the post is created, the user chooses which lists of friends will be able to see it; all others are blocked from seeing the post. The control can be even more granular - specific list members can be excluded from a particular post.

One drawback to the current implementation of lists is that the particular set of lists and exclusions that are chosen for a post can not be saved. So if you want to make a second post, visible to the exact same set of friends as the first, you have to again select the lists and specify any exclusions from them. However, a nice feature of Facebook posts is that the list selection can be changed after a post has been published. If the user makes a mistake in selecting who will see the post, it can be corrected after the fact.

Various other security and privacy techniques are available in Facebook. Bill demonstrated the Activity Log, the View As feature, the Who can see my stuff? feature, and the Who can contact me? feature. Most of these are self-explanatory.

Bill mentioned that all online social networks enable users to find out who their followers are (although Facebook limits it to the most recent 50).

The final part of the session was devoted to an overview of Pinterest. Pinterest is a very visually-oriented social network: a post can not be made without an image of some kind, usually a photograph with a subtext. It is best thought of as a bulletin board for posting images.

Pinterest users can create any number of pinboards to organize their images or pins. Although Pinterest is free and open to anyone, up to 3 secret pinboards per user can be created, which are visible to others by invitation only.

Pins can be image files or they can be links. Pins that are actual images are created by upload from the user's computer or from a website. Pins that are links can be to images, or to videos, e.g. on YouTube. Links can be used to lead traffic to another website, e.g. to a site where a shopping cart allows users to buy things. The titles and text associated with pins are searchable.

The most common use of Pinterest is for creating personal links and bookmarks. Bill showed us examples of using Pinterest for planning home decorations, listing books worth reading, pursuing hobbies, recipes, summer activities, etc. Although Pinterest is not very profitable today, the site is working to monetize itself through the development of paid advertising.

In response to an audience question, Bill was unaware of any Pinterest user groups in the area. However he mentioned the Greater Valley chamber of commerce, in Shelton, CT, which runs user groups and a Technology Council whose monthly meetings focus on specific topics like Facebook and Pinterest.

For people interested in learning the details of how to use social networks, Bill recommended searching YouTube and SlideShare for how-to information about specific tasks. Audience members added that the Danbury library and SCORE regularly run seminars about technology-related topics, including online social networks, and that the New Milford library recently ran Facebook presentations.

Bill invited the audience to call him if they need help with the details of implementing any of his recommendations. He will not charge for 10-15 minute conversations for that purpose.

Bill concluded the presentation with the following piece of advice about using online social media for business: Know which networks your target audiences are on. For example, Facebook is now used the most by people in their 30's and older, whereas younger people are on other networks, e.g. Instagram, Vine, Pheed, Twitter. A business which aims to market to 18-25 year olds is likely to fail if it tries to do so only through Facebook. There are today approximately 60 working online social networks, many of which have only small numbers of users, so it's important to be aware of the demographics and interest groups which are attracted to each one.

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