Awlpoint

07/04/2017

Dave here: Tip for Facebook business page owners, in case this happens to you. I woke up this morning and found that about a week's worth of postings had mysteriously vanished from the main page for one of my clients. Nobody had deleted the postings; they were just gone from the page. Even stranger, they were all still listed in the Insights panel. It seemed like just kind of a glitch.

So I did a search on the problem, and found a thread in Facebook Help where somebody suggested this magic solution: Simply publish any new posting on the page, and all of the missing content will come back.

Really? Crossed fingers, gave it a try, and boom: It worked like a charm. All of the missing posts immediately reappeared on the page. I'm posting this here partly to help me remember this fix if it happens again!

03/03/2017

We can relate.

A cartoon by Benjamin Schwartz. Swipe through more cartoons with the New Yorker Today app: http://nyer.cm/sCbObRL

01/02/2017

Useful article from CreativePro.com, with tips for how to use some of the groovy font-related features in current Adobe Creative Cloud apps.

Timesaving tips for finding the perfect font in Adobe Illustrator, Photoshop, and InDesign.

26/10/2016

Because we've heard a number of folks asking about this lately ... here's confirmation that thanks to a recent change, Facebook now embiggens the shortest status updates.

It could be part of a plan to stem a reported decline in users sharing original content.

21/10/2016

This confirms what longtime Mac users generally experience: It costs more to buy a Mac initially. But over the long term, you usually wind up saving money because you spend less on service and replacements.

IBM employees prefer Macs, which is actually saving IBM about $543 per computer.

16/10/2016

Happy National Dictionary Day! In honor of the occasion, Dictionary.com released their list of the 30 most commonly mispronounced words.

We tried our best to pronounce some of the most commonly mispronounced words in the English language. And we got a lot of them dead wrong.

15/10/2016

So ... if you were Boss of Twitter and could make any one change to how it works in order to help it grow its user base, what would you do?

We'll go first: Raise the character limit to 400 characters instead of 140. After the first 140 characters the rest could be hidden behind a "see more" link, like on Facebook.

Blasphemy? Unthinkable? Any other ideas?

A 25 per cent drop in the company’s market value this year has ratcheted up pressure for a sale.

24/08/2016

Above and beyond the political angle, checking out your Facebook ad preferences (as explained in this article) is a great way to get some insight into why Facebook shows you the particular mix of ads it does.

And while you're in there, you can delete anything that seems inaccurate or inappropriate. (Just click the little x on any interest box to delete it.)

Take these steps to discover how the social network categorizes your political leanings.

23/08/2016

Just a quick tip, based on an experience with a client today: If you're uploading a new cover photo or profile pic to your page, and you have the option, *always* save the image as a PNG rather than a JPG.

The reason is that due to the compression Facebook applies, when you upload a JPG you may see blurriness or pixelation as well as unexpected shifts in color once the image has been uploaded. But if you resave your image as a PNG and upload it again, those problems will usually go away.

12/08/2016

How informative are your Facebook postings?

It's worth thinking about when you're creating content for your pages, because Facebook has found that people really like postings that make them feel informed. So "informative" is the latest quality that's been factored into Facebook's news feed rankings.

The newest tweak to Facebook’s News Feed algorithm, announced Thursday, is focused on delivering more stories that users find made them “feel more informed about the world around them.”

29/06/2016

Here's the scoop on Facebook's latest tweaks to the news feed algorithm, for those who are keeping track.

The main headline is that posts from friends and family members will be given even more priority in the news feed going forward.

Friends and family come first in Facebook’s News Feed, as the social network detailed the latest tweak to its algorithm and detailed the values that guide that algorithm.

11/05/2016

More on the interesting differences between digital and print reading:

Digital readers scored higher on a test of concrete details and lower on a test of abstract interpretation than print readers.

05/04/2016

Good writing. It's not just for literary magazines ...

Hat tip: Lynne Shotola

Report shows more than $3.1 billion is being spent annually on remedial writing training.

24/02/2016

This is a good overview of how Facebook's new Reactions may impact engagement for those of us who manage business pages.

For the time being, Facebook says that all of the different reactions will be treated equally in the News Feed algorithm — so they're all equivalent to a Like. But eventually it seems plausible that the algorithm might handle a posting that's overwhelmingly marked as sad differently from one that's overwhelmingly marked as funny, for example. So if you're a person who tends to respond more to funny posts than sad ones, Facebook might choose to show you more comedy than tragedy. Or vice versa.

Your Facebook newsfeed is about to get a whole lot more meaningful. After nearly a year of testing in various markets around the globe, Facebook has now released their new, supercharged ‘like’ button. For the first time, Facebook users globally can now react to status with more than just a thumbs up…

07/10/2015

Useful development for local businesses using Facebook ... this gives you a way to mark your page as the legitimate, official one for your business (in case there are any knockoffs out there).

Facebook is making it easier for local business pages to get the sought-after verified checkmark.

27/08/2015

This should be a wake-up call to online advertisers and media sites:

By requiring companies to run ads that are simple and transparent, Mr. Blanchfield said, PageFair would return sanity to the ad business. “We as an industry have lost the trust of our users, who are right — there are a lot of very bad ads out there,” he said. “We have one shot as an industry to get this right.”

The adoption of ad-blocking technology is rising steeply. Some see an existential threat to online content as we know it, but others see a new business niche.

11/05/2015

This is very interesting, as here at Awlpoint HQ we've often wondered how separate the Twitter and Facebook audiences really are.

Drumroll: It turns out that 93% of Twitter users also have Facebook accounts. Of course, just because a Tweeter is also on Facebook doesn't necessarily mean they spend a lot of time there.

Twitter users do not confine themselves to tweeting, as a survey by GlobalWebIndex found that 93 percent of them also have Facebook accounts.

07/05/2015

Another one from Wired on the relationship between creativity and "goofing off" ... and how social media just might help.

Contrary to recent research about social networks and efficiency, taking a break from work to read that tweet about Lady Gaga's lingerie might actually stoke creativity and enhance problem-solving skills.

06/05/2015

Some data to back up what we've been saying for years now: When it comes to posting on a page, quality is more important than quantity.

There's no need to bombard fans with a dozen posts per day — one well-chosen post will do a better job of connecting with them, and keep you from wearing out your welcome in their news feeds.

How many times should pages post in a given week. There is no right answer, but social analytics and reporting firm Locowise did some digging on the subject.

05/05/2015

Terrific article from Wired with insight into the connection between creativity and boredom — why you might get some of your best ideas riding the train or taking a shower. Contains the wonderful phrase "fructifying boredom," coined by Bertrand Russell.

The Power of Boredom — How dull activities can spark creative thinking:
http://contentviewer.adobe.com/s/Wired/5857345fd35d4d1f9a1f00273013f68a/WI0415_10_Folio/3040_2304EW_thompson.html

01/04/2015

If you run a page that creates events, you might want to let your fans know that they now have the option to click the new Subscribe button on your Events tab. That way they'll get automatic notifications from Facebook about your events.

With the oft-mentioned drop in pages’ organic reach, page administrators of event-heavy pages, such as those for musical artists, have been hit hard. The social network launched a feature this week aimed at solving that issue.

17/03/2015

This is a good 2015 update on the state of the algorithms formerly known as EdgeRank. Photos dominated Facebook's News Feed for so long that, understandably, many of us still think that's the case.

But the reality is that Facebook has bumped photos down in the hierarchy — and right now links, videos, and text-only status updates all outperform photos in term of organic reach.

The conventional wisdom about pages is that organic reach is virtually nonexistent and posts with photos perform the best, but a study by Locowise poked holes in those theories.

13/03/2015

Everybody loves a good glossary, right?

This is from 2014, but not out of date: a useful compendium of social media terms you might bump into and scratch your head about.

Welcome to the 2014 edition of the Hootsuite Social Media Glossary.

08/03/2015

Facebook expressionism?

A cartoon by Jason Adam Katzenstein. For more from this week’s issue: http://nyr.kr/1APk23J

23/02/2015

This is a nice roundup of handy-dandy keyboard tricks for social media sites.

Keyboard shortcuts on social media can save you a ton of time, quickly advancing your status from newbie to power user.

12/02/2015

Those of us who advertise on Facebook are getting a new tool to help us judge the success and quality of our ads: Relevance Scores.

Facebook wants to give advertisers better feedback, and the company announced Wednesday that advertisers will see relevance scores (on a scale of 1 to 10) in their ad reporting tools

11/02/2015

If you're on Twitter, this is a great list of do's and don'ts for 2015 — ways to make your tweeting time more effective.

Mistakes are a natural outcome of trying something new. When you first start on Twitter, it may seem that there is a lot to learn, and the potential for mistakes while learning is high.

10/02/2015

Interesting survey results ... how marketers in Ireland are using social media.

Two thirds of marketers in Ireland believe that Twitter is the most effective social platform.

21/01/2015

Facebook is moving ahead with Operation Hoax Cleanup ...

"The social network announced in a Newsroom post by software engineer Erich Owens and research scientist Udi Weinsberg that Facebook recently added an option for users to report stories as false, adding that those stories will not be removed, and Facebook will not review their content, but distribution of those posts in News Feed will be curtailed, and messages will appear atop those posts indicated the fact that users have reported them as false."

The latest initiative by Facebook to clean up its News Feed is an attempt to warn users of hoaxes.

18/01/2015

Too many businesses still don't understand that social media is a two-way conversation.

It's not enough to just set up a page: You have to actively monitor it and respond to your customers in a timely way.

Ignoring customer questions on Facebook is as bad as opening a shop and then not bothering to answer the phone when it rings.

pages are answering more questions posted by users, but more than one-half of those queries are still left hanging, according to the latest research from social...