• How many people do you follow on Twitter.
• How many friends do you have on Facebook?
• How many connections do you have on LinkedIn?

Do you feel the need to keep on eye on their updates in these social network sites? Do you feel you are missing updates of friends?

You could be right.

A study by researchers at Indiana University pegs the maximum number of friends a user can truly keep in contact with on sites like Twitter and Facebook at 150-200 people.

Conclusion of the research

Social networks have changed they way we use to communicate. It is now easy to be connected with a huge number of other individuals. In this paper we show that social networks did not change human social capabilities.

We analyze a large dataset of Twitter conversations collected across six months involving millions of individuals to test the theoretical cognitive limit on the number of stable social relationships known as Dunbar’s number.

We found that even in the online world cognitive and biological constraints holds as predicted by Dunbar’s theory limiting users social activities….

Bruno Gonclaves and his colleagues studied the web of 380 million tweets sent by 3 million Twitter users over four years and found that most people start tweeting and increasing their number of Twitter friends until they become overwhelmed and pull back, focusing on contacts they have stronger connections to. The saturation point, as the researchers refer to it, occurs at about 150 -200 friends.

British anthropologist Robin Dunbar predicted that same number as the maximum tally of friends a person ought to be able to handle based on his study of other primates, and he did it in the 1990s, long before Twitter was ever conceived.

No precise value has been proposed for Dunbar’s number. It has been proposed to lie between 100 and 230, with a commonly used value of 150.

R. I. M. Dunbar. Neocortex size as a constraint on group size in primates. J. Human Evo., 22:469, 1992.
R. I. M. Dunbar. The social brain hypothesis. Evo. Anthro., 6:178, 1998.

I started looking for this number after a discussion earlier today on Facebook. A friend found that she was missing updates and she wanted to see more updates. She has over 1,000 connections on Facebook.

So I showed her this:
“Do you want to see more updates from your friends in your News Feed? Click ‘Sort’, top right of your News Need. Select ‘Most Recent’. It will not show you all but a lot more than ‘Top Stories’. I prefer ‘Top Stories’ I don’t mind missing updates of Spotify updates for example.”

But she already knew this option and she was looking for a way to see ALL updates of her friends.

You will always ‘miss’ updates. Actually, if you don’t know they are not there you will not miss the updates. What I mean, you will not feel that you are missing something.

There is only so much information we can absorb and connections we can keep up with as the research above shows. If you really want to miss nothing, you will have to drastically limit the number of connections on the social network sites.

This is not what I want. Looking for interesting people to follow and see the most interesting updates via tweets, retweets, shares and likes.

I let the software (Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn) do its work and my network does the rest. This way I will not see all the updates (thank you), I will have a chance to see the most important ones.

About three times a day I will look at the stream on Twitter and see what is going on. I do look at replies and direct messages and reply.

Credit image The world in Facebook

How do you connect

Do you connect with many people and don’t mind missing updates?
Are you keeping your online network small so you can keep up with your friends?

Share it.

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

Do you feel you are missing updates? Add no more than 150 connections.

Earlier today I was reading Buy•ology by Martin Lindstrom and it reminded me of an article I wrote last year on ErnoHannink.nl. With Martin’s book I now found research to support my post.

In Chapter 3 of his book, Martin talks about mirror neurons (Mirror Neuron on Wikipedia). Interesting part of the book on how we experience feelings by looking at others doing something.

Martin mentions a ‘smile research’ on the effect of joy or happiness on shoppers. Some of the results are:

• Visiting a shop with a smiling salesclerk gives you more happy feelings
• A smiling salesclerk makes you want to visit the shop again

Then Martin refers to a fmri-research by Tsukiura and Cabeza showing photos of smiling and neutral looking people. For the testpanel it was easier to remember the names of the photos with smiling people.

We are drawn to people that smile and we want to remember the names of people that are nice to us, just in case we meet them again.

5 tips for your perfect profile photo that attracts clients:

1. Smile

Smile on your profile photo so people want to remember your name and you create likability.

Guy Kawasaki (@guykawasaki) writes in ‘Enchantment’ about how you can get ‘likability’. For me building trust is really important, people need to trust you before they want to buy from you. So people need to like and trust you.

When you approach people with a smile on your face, you will notice that the other person will be more open and often starts smiling too. This has a lot of effect on your first meeting with this person. Test it at the next networking event you visit.

The same is true for first virtual meetings. A photo that clearly shows you with a smile will be received with more confidence.

With a real and open smile we use 2 muscles in our face:

• Zygomatic major muscle (which raises the corners of your mouth)
• Orbicularis oculi muscle (which raises the cheeks and forms “crow’s feet” around your eyes)

This kind of open smile is called the ‘Duchenne smile’ and indicates genuine emotion. Named after the French physician Guillaume Duchenne.

Make sure you have a beautiful ‘Duchenne smile’ on the photo that you use for your online profiles to gain likability and makes people want to remember your name.

The photo for your identification (drivers license, ID, passport) does not make a good profile photo since you don’t smile on it.

2. Show your Face

Use a photo with as much of your face as possible in the frame. A face is the most important point how people recognize and remember you, thus trust you.

A photo where you are completely in the frame, tells us something about the way you dress, maybe about what you do, where you are, your posture, but we can hardly see your face.

A profile image with a logo is more business like and therefor less reliable. On a profile with a logo we expect more marketing talk and less real conversations. Social networks are all about real conversations. Interactions between people.

Use a profile photo where we can see your face.

3. Large profile photo

On Twitter you can upload an image of maximum 700kb. On Facebook and LinkedIn there is an upload limit of 4 Mb. On YouTube maximum size is 1600×1600 pixels.

Most of the profile images or avatars are square. When you upload a rectangular photo you need to crop the image on the site. You can also edit your photo and make it square before uploading. Use software like paint.net or Snagit to do this.

Save the profile image with a filename that includes your name and file size, i.e. firstname-lastname-400×400

Formats: jpg, png or gif.
An overview of the displayed sizes for the most important social network sites.

Twitter timeline: 48 x 48px
Twitter profile: 128 x 128px

LinkedIn timeline: 50 x 50 px
LinkedIn profile: 80 x 80px

Google+ timeline: 48 x 48 px
Google+ profile: 200 x 200 px

Facebook timeline: 50 x 50 px
Facebook profile: 180 x 180 px
Facebook page: 180 x 180 px

YouTube timeline: 46 x 46 px
YouTube profile: 88 x 88 px

The images are shown in these sizes on the timeline or your profile. You can prepare your profile photo of 400 x 400 px of about 500kb. This size can be used on all platforms and the site will reduce the photo to the above mentioned dimensions.

The advantage of uploading a larger sized photo is that there is a larger photo with higher quality connected to the profile photo. When people click the profile photo they will see the originally uploaded photo.

4. Consistency

Use the same profile photo on all the social networks. Use the same username on all the social networks.
This way people can always find and recognize you in all the networks.

When people are getting into a new social network they are looking for familiar faces to connect. When you use the same photo, people will connect with your more easily. Consistency builds trust.

Using the same photo builds trust.

Often I hear “I see you everywhere.” This means that they see my profile photo on the social networks they are using.

5. Gravatar

A good solution to get consistency on your profile photo while commenting on blogs, is Gravatar. On this platform your profile photo can be connected to one or more email addresses. When you comment on a blog and the blog uses Gravatar, your profile photo will be shown next to your comment.

Gravatar is owned by Automattic, the same people of WordPress.com. This means that when you comment on a WordPress blog or hub that it often will use the profile photo that you uploaded to Gravatar.

Use Gravatar to be recognized with your comments.

Ribbons and logos

There are times that people want to show they support something by using Ribbons.

Twibbon and PicBadge are sites where you can add a ribbon or batch to your profile photo.

For most of these ribbons I have no clue what these mean or what you support. Do you?

Limit the usage of ribbons or batches on your profile photo. The photo is already small and with the ribbon you might draw away the attention from your face.

Your face is unique. A way to be different. Use it.

Comparison of different profile photos

See some profile photos in this presentation of Social Media Hive. Find out what profile photos you favor and use that when you create your profile photo.

Source:

• Buyology: How Everything We Believe About Why We Buy is Wrong (aff)
• Enchantment: The Art of Changing Hearts, Minds, and Actions (afF)
• Smile Research http://swoba.hhs.se/hastba/papers/hastba2003_2007.pdf
• Duke University – ‘Just a smile’, Leitzell, K., Scientific American, April/May 2008

Credit Photo: True Passion by Uggboy

Do you change your profile photo

Do you change your profile photo often?
Do people recognize you from your profile photo when they meet you in person?

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

The perfect profile photo for Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, Google+ and more – 5 tips

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