This is something I have been giving a lot of attention in my articles for Facebook. Make sure your Personal Profile is all about you! So just enter only your personal name and no additions.

When you want to have a business profile, just make a Business Page with your personal profile. If you don’t want to show who created the business page, you can do that.

Stupid me, I have been making that same mistake myself on LinkedIn since 2006!

Look, this is my professional profile on LinkedIn

My e-mail address is included in my name box. Why?
In 2006 I looked at how the network builders did their thang, and adding your e-mail to your profile was a smart thing to do. This way people can add you as their contact easily.

You just click Add

Then ‘Other’ and you can enter the e-mail address:

When a request to connect comes in my inbox I carefully check their professional profile. What’s the function of the person, what company does he/she work, how active are they on LinkedIn and Twitter…

When I like what I see I will add them to my connections and send them a welcome message, usually with a question to start the conversation.

This tactic got me in contact with some great people, many whom I have never met before. But that is not an issue to me. I speak to a lot of great people on Twitter too and sometimes even get to meet them.

It is my belief that relations on social networks like LinkedIn, Twitter and Facebook are real. You meet real people, have real conversations, have real emotions. And it is a great (and easy) way to meet new people.

LinkedIn on Google

One thing I did not consider at that time but got me some great attention in the past years is that ‘LinkedIn’ is in the title of my profile this way. My professional profile therefor ranked high in the search engines when people search for ‘LinkedIn’. Lucky coincidence.

Yesterday I got a message that pointed me to this article by Anne Raaymakers Top LinkedIn Tip: Let op! Je profiel kan verwijderd worden

As you can read in the comments (maybe you want to use Google Translate), I had a hard time believing this point. Not that I don’t trust Anne, because the wording of the e-mail were a bit too personal and I could not find the sections in LinkedIn’s User Agreements.

Anne really had to point them out to me, and then I got the light bulb.

So I finally understood her point. Even though many people are doing this, examples:

• searching for +1000 resulted in 9 profiles in the Netherlands and 80 in the US
• searching for .com in the last name returned 119 results in the Netherlands and 2,300+ results from the US

The e-mail that Anne is sharing says:

Hi…,

In a recent review of your profile, the name field of your account was found to reflect information other than your first and last name. The LinkedIn User Agreement requires the use of true names rather than pseudonyms, business names, associations, or groups when registering on our site. We believe that any information other than first and last name in the name fields compromises our site and the service that we offer. Therefore, I have removed the LinkedIn profile in question.

Regards,

…
LinkedIn Customer Service

Especially that last sentence, “Therefore, I have removed the LinkedIn profile in question.”, made me feel it was maybe a hoax.

So I have also asked a question about it on LinkedIn Answers and got some responses.
Have you heard about LinkedIn profiles that were removed because they displayed more than their real names

Bryan answers:

“Yes, I’ve heard that some profiles have been asked to change and if they don’t the profile would be closed.

It’s about time LI started to enforce it. It is very difficult to search for someone when they add all the other stuff to their name.

Why can they not just add it into their Summary?”

And Bernard says:

“When you enter your details you are clearly asked for “first name” and “last name”. Unless your last name really is “Smith +2500 Tel:001 1234 567890″ then you are entering false information so are not using the site honestly and are subject to removal.”

I am a bit disappointed, because there is only one other person, that replied, heard about profiles that got a notice. With LinkedIn working on this point I expect a lot more profiles getting a warning and/or are being removed from LinkedIn. Some profiles that have a lot of connections TOP Linkers or Open Networkers or LIONs may want to change their name in the Professional Profile.

Change your Professional Profile to show only First and Last name

Anyway, I think it is a good moment to change this in my professional profile.

Go to Settings – Name & Location: https://www.linkedin.com/secure/settings?nameloc=

When you have a professional profile used as a company profile it is also a good time to change. LinkedIn has updated their company profile section, with a lot of great options like adding products. But that’s a complete new article

Do you have a clean profile or got a message from LinkedIn asking you to correct this?

My ‘new’ clean LinkedIn professional profile:

This is the addition to my Summary just to keep the possibility for easy connecting open.

Thank you Anne Raaymakers and hat tip to Harold Kip for pointing me to the article.

Post from: Erno Hannink feel free to use the content but give credit to the writer (CC BY/SA)

LinkedIn is removing profiles

Visit Dan Zarella’s blog to see the complete Infographic. The graphics below represents some of the data Dan has analyzed and published on his blog over the last year. The graphs answer questions most a lot of people have about Facebook marketing with real science.

What is the best time to post?

So 8am and 6pm clearly wins. This is before work starts and after works is done?

What is the best day to post?

Best moment to publish updates on Facebook are in the weekends. This is completely different for my blogs. Weekends are lows.
Also weird, that preferred time 8am – for the weekend? That sounds more like week days.

How often should I post?

Once in two days should be fine. Please remember that more people will stop Liking the page when there is two many updates compared to only a few updates. I guess with to many updates you are flooding the timeline of the followers.

What are the most read posts about?

Favorite subjects:

1. sex – that’s the same anywhere on the web
2. Positive – like that, positive content makes people happy and willing to share
3. Learning – most people like to learn

Article, research and Infographic: 5 Questions and Answers about Facebook Marketing by Dan Zarella

This is Dan’s book The Facebook Marketing Book

Post from: Erno Hannink feel free to use the content but give credit to the writer (CC BY/SA)

When, what and how often to post on my Facebook page

Leigh Kostianen, the star behind the Promote My Fan Page Facebook page, organised a contest for Facebook fan pages. First everyone could nominate the pages they liked best. Then everyone could vote for the 13 finalists, these pages got the most recommendations. Next to the voting there is also a group of experts that Leigh brought together to review the finalists.

Promote My Fan Page every day of the week there are actions to promote your or a Facebook page. There is Megaphone Monday, Tagging Tuesday, Work Swap Wednesday, Thirfty Thursday and Friendly Friday. Head on over and promote your page.

Reviewing these 13 finalists and a short review for a subset of all the nominees was very fun to do. As reviewer you get a chance to see very different pages, in design, attention, and interaction.

Most of the finalists had a good amount of Likes on their page, +1,000. The top pages really went into the battle in getting as many votes from their fans as they could. An occasional sarcastic comment on the wall of these pages show that the finalists took the award very seriously.

I believe that all 13 finalists are winners because of the amount of traffic they generated for themselves. Fans wrote updates on their wall trying to get their friends to vote for a page. Most of the finalists gained new Likes because of the contest.

The Promote My Page page gained 3.000 ! Likes during the contest and passed the 10.000 ‘likes’ mark. Way to go Leigh. Very good idea such an award.

An overview of the 13 finalists of the 2010 Best Fan Page Awards

“Bow”dacious

Cathy’s Creations

Cheap Childrens Clothing

Crafty Mumma’s

Dollar Dazzlers

Glamour Chids

Goals Power

Infusion Imagery

Kokokelli

Love Bytes

my facebook down syndrome family

Sassy Girls Bowtique

Stuff-a-loons

Favorite nominees

And these are some of my favorites that did not make it to the finals.

Oz Handmade

OZ Material Girls

The Herd Nerd

The Mummy Tree

Tourabout

At this moment I can not share what my favorite finalist is. We are waiting for the results from Lee and a report that includes the finalists, all the nominees and the reviews.

Will update the post when the results are published by Leigh.

What is your favorite from the 13 finalists?

Post from: Erno Hannink feel free to use the content but give credit to the writer (CC BY/SA)

Reviewing the 13 finalists of Promote My Fan Page 2010 Best Fan Page Awards

Sometimes I have the problem that the text or title of a link that I want to share do not describe the content. See below the example of a link that I want to share for a document on box.net, an online storage service.

The title is the URL and the text is something about box.net. In this example I want the title to be about the document and the text should describe the content of the document.

Let’s Customize the title and text for the link

Start by adding some text and click the Link icon:

Add the link and click Attach:

Now move with the mouse over the title or text that you want to change. It will highlight:

Click the text and enter your Title and description. Then click Share to publish it:

This is the result that you can see on my Wall.

You can use it on your personal wall and for your Facebook pages.

Inspiration: How to customize a Facebook link title and description
Ook in het Nederlands beschikbaar: Op maat titel en tekst voor een Facebook bericht

Post from: Erno Hannink feel free to use the content but give credit to the writer (CC BY/SA)

Custom title and text for a link to share on Facebook

A few smart tricks for your Facebook in this Techland video.

Doug Aamoth shows how to make sure that only your friends can see what you’re up to, or how to block specific people from seeing all your work-related updates. How to stop the incomming chat requests. And a Facebook joke.

Post from: Erno Hannink feel free to use the content but give credit to the writer (CC BY/SA)

Facebook tricks fun and easy – video

There are a lot of people with a profile on Facebook that send their Twitter messages to Facebook. Often the rate of updates on Twitter has an overwhelming effect on the Most Recent News in Facebook. Switch off those Twitter, FarmVille, FourSquare messages from other people.

See your Most Recent News in Facebook:

For me those messages have value in Twitter and not in Facebook. Be gone. How?

Move with your mouse over a Twitter message and click on the ‘X’ at the right of the message.

click on ‘Hide Twitter’

And all the Twitter messages are gone.

You can do the same with messages from FourSquare, FriendFeed, FarmVille, MafiaWar and all the other messages you really do not need to see.

Post from: Erno Hannink feel free to use the content but give credit to the writer (CC BY/SA)

Remove Twitter updates from your Facebook News Feed

Twitter is a great tool. You can meet new people, you can find freelancers, you can get a job, you can get answers. These are all examples that I experienced. However, it all depends on who follows you.

When you ask a question on Twitter not everyone that follows you will see that question. Then only a percentage of the people that see your tweet respond because they know the answer and want to share it with you. Use 1:100, 100 followers and 1 reply, as a rule of thumb.

If you want interaction on Twitter and answers for your question it is good to get the right people to follow you. It is best that you start answering questions of the people that you follow. So people can see that you are also giving to the community.

One of the questions I often get is “Where can I find interesting people to follow?”
When you start to follow people in your niche, potential co-workers, potential clients, experts, often they will follow you back. If they don’t follow you back, you can always unfollow them, if that is important to you.

One great source to find people is de Tweepguide. There are a few versions Netherlands, Belgium, Germany, UK and world wide but mostly US. It is based on what keywords people use in their Twitter profile.
It is a great resource because there are all kinds of categories e.g. blogger UK, journalist UK, Coach .com, WordPess NL.

Another great feature is that you can search in Tweepguide. Search on people with ‘social media‘ in their profile.


Other great resources are blog posts like these

• The 100 Most Powerful Women On Twitter
• Twitter Elite by TwitterGrader
• The First 99 People to Follow on Twitter
• Top 100 Geeks you should follow on Wired
• Top 100 most popular via Twittercounter
• Twitter for Social Entrepreneurship: The Top 100 Tweeps to Follow
• 100 Top Graphic Designers to Follow on Twitter
• Directory: 100 technology experts on Twitter via ZDNet
• 100 web designers to follow on Twitter
• 100 Designers To Follow On Twitter
• 100 social media experts to follow on Twitter
• 100 PR People Worth Following on Twitter
• Top Design Savvy Tweeters

Some more interesting lists can be found on TweepML. The lists on TweepML have a great ‘Follow All’ feature. Klick and you will start following all the people on the list.

What resources do you use to find interesting people to follow?

Post from: Erno Hannink feel free to use the content but give credit to the writer (CC BY/SA)

Find people you need to follow on Twitter

If you want to add more friends on Facebook use the Friend finder.
www.facebook.com/find-friends/

You can invite friends with:

1. Your contact list in the online email service like Gmail.
2. Upload a contact list from you desktop email program like Thunderbird or Outlook
3. Invite friends that are suggested
4. enter name, email address or a keyword for your niche
5. your schools or employers to find former class mates or ex-collegues (if you want to of course)
6. your Instant Messanger contacts

Use the contactlist from you local email software:

Invitations personal

When you use these options and you do send invites, please send a personal invite. Add some text why you want to connect with the other person. Where is your connection?

Invites like this, that are in my inbox, are not helping:

It is not clear for me who is in the picture. The profile page is not helping at all.

More friends

Make it easier for the people you are inviting so they can decide in the inbox or only need to take a brief look at your profile page.

Add some text to the invitation, like:

Hi,
We are connected on Skype, love to connect on Facebook.

Warm regards,
Erno Hannink

Then make sure that your Personal Profile gives enough details for people that only have met you online. Show links to the places where people can find more about you online, a link to your website, Twitter profile etc.

Post from: Erno Hannink feel free to use the content but give credit to the writer (CC BY/SA)

More friends on Facebook? Make your invitations personal

With the new notes in Facebook you can now blog in your Facebook page fast en easy. If you already have a blog you can also import your blog posts. This way you can add your posts automatically in your Facebook page.

Notes
Your notes van be found in the row of tabs, or in the drop down ‘>>’, or you will have to add them via the ‘+’.


You can use a note to create a blog for your Facebook page.
You can look at your own notes, notes on all your Pages, notes of your friends, you can even check notes that mention you.

Click on the button ‘+ Write a note’. Note: do not click on the link ‘Write a note’ because this will take you to the notes of your personal profile. We want notes on our Page. You can write a blog post here:

We want to import blog posts and not write new posts for now.
Scroll down on the notes page.

Here:

Now we will import our blog posts – Click on ‘Edit import settings’

Import your blog

1. Enter the URL for your blog – this is not the URL of your feed.
2. You import the content of your own blog – no copyright issues. Check.
3. Start importing

Confirm
The RSS feed of your blog has been found:

“We read your feed at http://feeds2.feedburner.com/ernohannink/fgTi
If you confirm this import, we’ll check the feed every couple of hours for new posts you’ve made, and add anything we find to your Facebook notes.”

Click on ‘Confirm’.

If you now go to your page you will see your notes in your Wall.

Completed.

Pros and cons:

• Your blog posts will now show up as status updates. Fans can ‘Like’ and comment on your posts. With this you will reach a larger audience within Facebook and on the web.
• The complete post is now available in Facebook and your fans can comment here. The reason to visit your blog is smaller now. There is a link of the post on each note to visit your post on the blog.
• It is not clear when the post will be imported. It can take an hour a couple of hours, but also some days. Sometimes it will posts 3 articles in a row while it was a daily post in your blog. If you write time sensitive posts this could be an issue.
• You are where your target audience is, and your articles are here.

Duplicate content and penalties:
Some people worry about duplicate content and penalties. No need. The post in your blog is the original and will get the ranking in the search engine. The note is a duplicate will not get the ranking. You will not get a penalty for your note. You want your article been read by as many people as possible? Add your blog posts to your notes in Facebook.

Inspiration for this article via Hyperarts How Facebook Notes Have Changed & Why You Should Use Them

My page for more inspiration ErnoHanninkEN

Post from: Erno Hannink feel free to use the content but give credit to the writer (CC BY/SA)

Blog posts in your Facebook page via notes

Do you already have a fan page for your company? Would you like some more traffic and attract fans for your Page? Start using your Twitter following.

Start sending your Facebook page status updates to Twitter.

This can be done easily:

1. Go to http://www.facebook.com/twitter

2. Select the page that you want to connect. Click on ‘Link to Twitter’


3. Give your Facebook page access to Twitter

4. The page is linked
Now the page is linked and click on settings

5. Adjust settings
Select what actions you want to be published on Twitter.
Maybe you want to deselect the option video and photo, depending on how many photo’s and video’s you upload.

Done, it automatically sends the updates to Twitter and includes a short link like this http://fb.me/FVkVZQ0n

Post from: Erno Hannink feel free to use the content but give credit to the writer (CC BY/SA)

Facebook Page status updates to Twitter