Fun Facebook Tricks and a Halloween Treat

Welcome to Techie Tuesday here at More Cowbell! This is the day each week when I unleash my inner geek and we talk about some groovy piece of technology or a technical point of writing.

Today, we’re delving into Facebook with some fun facts and figures.

I picked the best FB person I could find as an early Halloween gift for all of you. Lisa did a post on Kristen Lamb’s blog last week* that really got me thinking about how I use Facebook. See I’m a Twitter girl at heart, but she’s trying to convince me to come over to the dark side.

[Actually she tied Kristen up and took the place over last week, but I’m on to her. I laid out a path of Halloween candy for her to follow to get here and I’ve got my Cowbell ready if she gets too feisty with all this Facebook business.]

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Thanks for letting me unleash my inner Facebook geek here on Techie Tuesday 🙂 I’m a huge fan of Facebook and I hang out there a lot. Probably too much. But I am paid for some of the time I spend there so I can usually find a way to rationalize my addiction.

I wanted to dig up a couple of fun tricks to geek out your Facebook fans here at More Cowbell.

Facebook now allows emoticons.

These have been available on the chat feature for a while, but were recently enabled on comments. I haven’t had any luck getting these to work on a status update, but they do work with comments.

Here’s the complete list, and the photo gives the corresponding emoticon all in order (there are other lists around involving strings of numbers, but I’ve not been able to get them to work). If you find this confusing, this website lists out each emoticon.

: )  😀  >: o : o : ( ; )  :’ (  :* :p 😡  :3 ^_^  -_- O:) 3:) :v  : |] 8) 8| O.o  :42: <(“)  (^^^)  :putnam: (y) ❤

I’ve been having lots of fun with the angel and shark.

Insights Helper

In line with Jenny’s Techie Tuesday post last week, I thought I’d share a fun resource to help you interpret and read those loooong excel sheets Facebook spits out for your page insights. Insights are what FB calls the stats they collect from your page concerning fan engagement, reach, etc. at post level.

Jon Loomer created the Insights Helper that he’s giving away for free. This is a simple excel sheet that he’s programmed to extract the relevant data and plugs it into attractive graphs that are easy to read and interpret.

This is a really useful tool and the data is helpful in spotting trends that impact your page. Here’s the updated version of Insights Helper which gives you the option to include promoted posts and fixes a few bugs in the first version.

A fun and free diagnostic tool is edgerankchecker.com

The free version will give you interesting data based on your edgerank including a score, average post lifetime, fan growth, day of the week you get the most/least new fans, etc.

I’m a little bummed that this tool doesn’t work if you are running any kind of Like campaign, sponsored stories or promoted posts. I’ve never bought the pro version, but have found the free version a fun diagnostic tool if delving into your insights data seems overwhelming.

Finally, I thought I’d share this little bit of info after Jenny made the comment below on a guest post I did on Kristen Lamb’s blog last week.

I find it very annoying when people cross-post to FB from Twitter (as a general observation). People post on Twitter a lot more often than they post on Facebook and clutter up newsfeeds.

Repeating the same tweet is acceptable on Twitter if the tweets are appropriately spread out, but repeating yourself on Facebook will get your posts hidden from newsfeeds.

I have a statistic to back up that I’m not the only one who feels this way. Auto-posting to Facebook decreases likes and comments by 70% (source here). For me, knowing that someone is cross-posting is advertising that you’re not even on FB, so there’s no point in trying to start a conversation.

For the record though, I’m a big fan of Jenny’s “happy” and think she should hang out on Facebook way more often. 🙂

Hope you found some of that useful. I’m going to turn the place back over to Jenny before she shakes that cowbell at me.

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This is Jenny. I found it ALL useful!

I hope you will show Lisa some comment love, because today we are going to do something different with today’s comments. One lucky commenter will get a free Facebook page or profile critique from Lisa for FREE. (This is a $50 y’all!)

You’ll get at least two pages of helpful advice on how to better utilize Facebook to build your platform.  Also, since y’all are soooo full of Cowbell today, if you sign up for Lisa’s class Own Your Own Stage—Using Facebook for Author/Artist Branding and enter in the code WANAFB, you’ll get $30 off Lisa’s class.

That’s SIX WEEKS of WANA International Awesomeness for only $99. Kristen did the math on this one (better her than me) and that is only $16.50 a week, $2.36 a DAY for $0.68 an hour! I can’t even get coffee for $0.68 an hour.

Which social media platform do you like best? Do you have questions for Lisa? Let it all hang out in the comments, y’all! ~ Jenny

About Lisa

Lisa writes dark fantasy novels that honestly face harsh struggles, where life is gritty and messy, and change how a character thinks, acts — who they are.

In addition to fiction writing, Lisa is a freelance writer published across Canada specializing in marketing copy for faith-based non-profits, and short non-fiction pieces for magazines and newspapers. She specializes in interviews, profiles, and social justice initiatives. Lisa is passionate about making this world a better place one get-off-your-butt-and-do-something article at a time.

Lisa has won awards at the Canadian Church Press, the Canadian Christian Writing Awards, and her co-written blog (with Marcy Kennedy) was nominated 3 times at the 2011 Canadian Weblog Awards. Check out Lisa’s freelance portfolio here  or learn more about Lisa Wilson Communications here. You can also find her Blogging Through The Fire each week.