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Facebook Quizzes may be the death of your facebook

March 7, 2016 by Moran Media

Facebook Quizzes are fun right? Or are they a back door to your account?

Online quizzes are fun, facebook quizzes are fun, but we need to be careful. If you are taking a quiz and it asks you to login with facebook, avoid that quiz! It’s just not worth it. You can find other quizzes that don’t require you to login, anything that needs your login is getting too much information. This can lead to far too much information about you being taken by the company writing these quizzes. They can sell that information or use it for purposes you don’t agree with. Worse yet this is one of the ways facebook accounts can be hacked! Soon your account will be trying to sell Oakley sunglasses and Ugg boots to your friends by tagging them or inviting them to events. No one wants that.

I’m not the only one talking about this, and this isn’t new information. Way back in 2011 PC Magazine was telling people to be careful. Five years later and article after article are being written about the dangers, in this Beta News article they point out how evidence that these quizzes are essentially malware isn’t persuading anyone to stop doing them and giving away their information and accounts. Fight Identity Theft has a really great article that not only tells you it’s bad, but it shows you how these quizzes work and how they steal your information and account access. They even have a petition to make facebook crack down on this stuff.

I encourage you to read these articles and remember, no quiz will be fun enough to risk losing your facebook account over. Besides, you already know in your heart which Harry Potter house you belong in, you don’t need a quiz to tell you that.

Marketing Monday: make shared blog posts look good

December 1, 2014 by Moran Media

When you post to your blog, you can share to facebook, twitter, google plus, and other outlets there are small previews that show up on social media (as seen in the images above). Every few cycles it seems like things change, but for now, this is how posts on facebook look. You will notice that the posting on the left looks much more attractive, something you will want to click on more than the one on the right. (And if your post doesn’t have an image, the odds of people clicking it are pretty slim, people like pictures over just text).

How can you make facebook links look pretty like this?

I have discovered through trial and error that what you need to do is when you add an image to your blog post* you need to post the full size image, not the small or medium image. (as seen in the image to the left) This works best with images over 600 or 800 pixels in width. Using the featured image option in wordpress also helps. (As you can see from the image on the right.)

*Assuming you are using a wordpress install as your blogging platform which is what I recommend to all of my customers. If I built a website with blogging enabled, then it is built upon the wordpress software.

You can always change the image size once you posted into the blog post by clicking on the pencil icon on your image and typing in the size you want, as seen below.

This also works on tumblr and google plus, look below for the examples of both using the medium and the full size image formats. Thankfully twitter just handles all images the same way.

Any questions?

Marketing Monday: Schedule Facebook Posts

October 27, 2014 by Moran Media

Did you know you could schedule facebook posts?

If I have set up a website for you with a blog you know already that you can write your posts ahead of time and schedule them to post for you. That’s what I’m doing with this post. I’m writing it on a friday and scheduling it for a monday. I find using this tactic lets me work on a post and get it done ahead of time, but conform to a post schedule I have made for myself. Also, I find sometimes I have more time to write posts, and sometimes more inspiration, if I schedule the posts then I have a nice backlog of posts. So when a week rolls around when I just don’t know what to blog about or I am swamped with work for a client, or I’m on vacation, my posts can continue to come out without me having to log into the website to hit post.

I love this feature, and have grown used to it. I have at times wanted to do this with social media. With tools like HootSuite you can schedule tweets, facebook updates, you name it. Hootsuit has a very limited free version now, and two levels of paid. It’s a great programs and I have helped a few organizations learn to use it to maximize their social media presence.

Today (friday) I learned that facebook pages has added this feature to their interface and you can post to facebook ahead of time! Not just what you post on your blog and automatically share (if you aren’t doing this, let me know and I can walk you through it) to your facebook page, but regular statuses, images, and videos!

This is fantastic, I have scheduled a few posts from my archives to my brand new facebook page (like it if you haven’t already) so things I wrote in the past can be found there. To schedule a post is simple, just write your status as normal, and then click on the little clock icon in the bottom left side (as seen in the image to the left), you can pick a time and a date. Then, when you visit your page you can also see what is set to post in the future, in case you have any second thoughts.

Marketing Monday: Facebook ads and why they can hurt your brand.

October 20, 2014 by Moran Media

I have had a lot of clients and other organizations I work with suggest we pay to boost posts on facebook or use facebook ads to gain likes on. I always tell them it’s a bad idea, but I haven’t used the scientific method to prove my theories. I didn’t want to risk the reputation of these people or the brand to prove my theories either. Below is a video from Veritasium who demonstrates how these ads work, and how they work against you. The video is about 9 minutes, but it is completely worth the watch. Being involved in social media is a great way to grow your brand, but the best way to get ahead is word of mouth, being engaged with your audience, not paying to boost your posts.

This also is good advice for how you promote your page. When pages first started you needed 50 likes to get a custom URL, so when you started a page you would ask everyone you knew to like it. Now you don’t want to do that, you want to suggest people like your page only if you think they will interact with it. If I had a page that was for a Vegan restaurant for example, I wouldn’t ask my husband, a staunch Meatatarian (meatatarian; one who doesn’t like vegetables and eats mostly meat and starches) to like the page. His like wouldn’t help me, because when the page shared it’s latest Tofu dish he wouldn’t like the post or comment on it, nor would he share it. His lack of interaction would tell facebook that the post is un interesting and unwanted, so they wouldn’t put it on other people’s news feeds. Now if I were to invite my Yoga Instructor, or Chef friend, while they may not be strictly vegan, they may be more open to the latest Tofu dish and would comment or like it, telling facebook the post is interesting, and let it spread to others.

Facebook is insidious in trying to get you to buy these ads and pay to boost these posts. In this screen capture you can see that they tell me that 27 of my friends have paid for post boosts. I have to wonder how accurate that is. I know a few people who have admitted to paying to boost posts, they all told me how their engagement went down after too, but 27? That seems like a high number. I have to wonder how true this number is. Even when you open a page they build a payment method into the creation of the page, skip that, always.

How about you? Have you ever paid to boost a post on facebook? Does this video change your mind, or confirm it, on how advertising works on facebook? Let me know in the comments.

Marketing Monday: Oreo’s ad campaign

October 1, 2012 by Moran Media

Welcome to the first installment of Marketing Monday, my weekly column on all things graphics, design, marketing, and anything else related. Each week I will focus on something I think is clever or just something I think designers and customers need to keep in mind.

This week I want to talk about Oreo’s social media campaign and their new Ad ascetics. I’m sure you’ve seen a picture of an Oreo similatr to the one posted here. It’s clean, simple, a white background with the cookie transformed into a symbol for an idea, in this case it’s the earth (north america centric) to celebrate the first flight around the world on September 28th. The look of the ad is eye-catching, since an Oreo cookie is iconic they are using their product as the main focus. It’s clever seeing the orea as different symbols.

The company hit a bit of controversy with their Pride ad on June 25th, an Oreo cookie with seven layers of creme, all layers a different color of the rainbow to celebrate Pride Day. Thanks to that controversy Oreo’s facebook page has earned 27 million likes and those 27 million people get a daily image of an Oreo in a different symbol.

People are entertained by the concept, this supports the concept of the Advertising Contract often mentioned on the Age of Persuasion, a CBC radio show dedicated to advertising history. The Advertising Contract is an implied agreement between the consumer and the marketer that in exchange for being exposed to ads, you the consumer must be entertained. It’s an implied contract that began in the 20’s (listen to the linked episode for the full story) and is often forgotten today. Thanks to TiVo, DVR, PVR, Video on Demand, Music on Demand, Netflix, and many other sources of media that limit advertising, the consumer can skip all the ads they want. To get people to pay attention to your ads, you need to entertain them, you need to show them something special. Oreo is doing this, oreo is in 27 million people’s daily lives thanks to their daily ad campaign that is hitting every area of interest.

I recommend you take a look at Oreo’s facebook page, check out their website The Daily Twist, see them on Twitter, They hit up tumblr, they are even on Pintrest, they are everywhere, entertaining people and encouraging them to share their ads. We as consumers are doing this, because we have a bit of nostalgia for the cookie, but more because the cookie is pushing our favorite areas of interest.

How can you use the example of Oreo’s campaign in your social media campaign? How can this be used by smaller companies and organizations? Keep them entertained. Leave your suggestions in the comments section.