Tagged: Facebook

The Weird Facebook Sidebar

Quick Thought

As of July 7, 2011, Facebook changed their chat popup to include a seemingly random group of friends rather than friends who are available to chat with in real time. This seems illogical. I used the Facebook Chat popup because it was extremely useful. One of the first things I would do when opening up Facebook would be to see who is online that I might want to chat with. A green dot means that they are currently online and a moon meant that they were idle. This worked out perfectly because it was akin to someone hanging out at a social space that may or may not want to engage in a conversation if prompted. Continue reading →

Facebook Will Not Kill Google

There’s been a lot of talk on the Internet about how Facebook has the upper hand on Google in search and therefore Google is dead; this due to Facebook’s extraordinarily vast amount of social data. Stories such as Why Google Wont Survive the Facebook Threat and TechCrunch’s assessment of Google’s dataset as being an ossified relic akin to the Dead Sea Scrolls all paint of picture of Google’s algorithm chasing down “fossilized” content.  Claiming something is dead when it isn’t is merely media power-word talk to get eyeballs and we should be critical of such headlines and stories. Continue reading →

The Danger of Facebook Ads

Traps, Snares and Pitfalls You Should Know Before Starting a Facebook Ad Campaign

This post is all about the issues and pitfalls I encountered with Facebook advertising and since Facebook’s ad creation guide is so simple I’ll keep the detail of the precess very minimal. Late in January we decided to start a Facebook advertising campaign for the Ask Adam League. What followed was a very simple and easy to understand process yet an eye opening one at that.

Creating the ‘Creative’

Step 1. Design Your Ad. Facebook has a way of making everything uniform including the ‘creative’ of the ad that you are developing. And I find it humorous that the act of any creative process of the ad development is taken away from the user and is almost completely automated. Anyhow, the process of creating the ad is presented below in brief, only for those who are interested in the criteria that I put in the ad.
Here’s the design of the ad and you probably have seen a billion of ads just like this, because they are all generally the same. Continue reading →