What does blocking on Twitter mean? Where have Recommendations gone on Facebook? These and other questions answered here…
Director of Carvill Creative Michelle Carvill is one of the resident trainers at Business Training Made Simple in London. Michelle regularly trains candidates on how to leverage and understand social media from a business perspective.
With social media being an incredibly fast paced industry, having Michelle out there on a regular basis, talking to social media users, is of great value to us – the community mangers back in the Carvill Creative office. With Michelle reporting back to us on a weekly basis about her sessions, it helps us to keep our finger on the pulse and have an up to date understanding of the questions at large when it comes to social media.
This week we thought we’d give you the answers to the top 5 questions, posed to Michelle this month by the BTMS candidates.
If you have any questions you’d like to ask Michelle or our team of community managers – then get tweeting @carvillcreative or post on our Facebook timeline and we’ll get back to you ASAP. If you’re feeling generous you could give even give us a like as well!
Q – As a Facebook Page if someone posts to you – the post goes into a little box – rather than going directly onto your Facebook Wall / Feed. Can you create settings so that anyone can post directly to your Facebook Wall / Feed?
A – Facebook only allows for posts to appear on Facebook Business timelines AFTER the page admin has approved the comment and made it visible. As a business page owner, you can make a post go live on your page by choosing from a number of settings. These settings can be found in your ‘Edit Page’ tab at the top of your screen, then into your ‘Activity Log’ tab and then once in there – look to your left hand navigation – there is a tab that says ‘posts by others’. Now choose your posts settings.
- Default allowed
- Highlighted on page
- Allowed on page
- Hidden from page
This is an interesting question and one that often comes up with clients when discussing privacy issues on a Facebook Business Page.
From a business perspective, many will be pleased to hear that they can effectively monitor what goes public on their timeline. However, what we’re still puzzled by – is that this makes little difference. Users are able to write whatever they like in a comment box that appears underneath any post made by the page itself. Whatever is written in the comment box goes live instantaneously – so why not have the same option with direct posting to the timeline?
What do you think? Should all comments and wall posts have the option to be monitored by a business page owner OR is that defeating the idea of Facebook – should people able to post freely and honestly about a brand? Tweet or Facebook us your opinion
Q. Recommendations on Facebook. Does this feature still exist and if so – how do you get them and encourage people to recommend?
A – Recommendations have changed slightly on Facebook. The old recommendation system used to allow users to basically review businesses and their products in a ‘trip advisor’ style. This was quite a useful function, living in a recommendation era it’s great for brands to be publically praised – and useful for consumers to see what others say about a service.
The new recommendation, works as a social plug-in within Facebook. Click here to view and install.
The plug-in helps people to find articles based on what their friends have liked on Facebook and shared on their timeline. When a Facebook user reads an article, a small pop-up shows up at the bottom of their screen, displaying the recommended articles and asking them to like your page. Recommendations are only based on content that friends have physically liked and shared in your app or on your website.
Just how the ‘Like’ button works now, when a person likes an article using the Recommendations Bar, a story is published back to their timeline into their recent activity and friends will see their recommendation in their news feed.
So in order to encourage people to recommend you – it’s pretty simple really, share good content!
Q. Facebook Cover shot – can you use animated gifs for the Facebook cover shot?
A - With the rollout of the new timeline from Facebook – we gained the impressive ‘cover shot’ feature. However there are some strict guidelines when it comes to what you can and can’t have in your cover shot – you can see the rules here*. In regards to animated gifs being permitted, we’re sorry to report that you can’t include them. If you try to upload a GIF to Facebook, a still image of the first frame will appear.
(*At the time of writing it appears that many cover shots break the guidelines. Many include telephone numbers, urls, direct call to actions – all which goes against the Facebook Covershot Guidelines – we haven’t seen any evidence that Facebook police this).
If you have a GIF image that is non-moving, you should have no problem uploading it to Facebook, although the quality may not be as good.
According to the Facebook Developers page, GIFs are one of many file types allowed for uploading to the platform. Other supported image file types include JPG, PNG, PSD, TIFF, JP2, IFF, WBMP and XBM images.
Q. Twitter – if you block someone – can they still see your profile but simply just not interact with you?
Answer -
- They cannot add your Twitter account to their lists.
- They cannot have their @replies or mentions show in your mentions tab (although these Tweets may still appear in search).
- They cannot follow you.
- They cannot see your profile picture on their profile page or in their timeline.
They will still be able to see your tweets if they navigate to your profile page (this includes tweets in lists). This is if your profile is public, the only way to stop this is to make your account protected!
We hope this has cleared up some social media queries – our blog is updated regularly with heaps of ‘how to’ social media advice. Stay tuned to our Facebook page and Tweets in order to get daily tips and advice on everything social!