The problem is that people are not very rational when using their online services such as Facebook. Why would someone say something like that out of nowhere, and why would you just click on it with out thinking first?

I put together a video showing the different ways that a profile can get hacked and how to prevent it but let me also explain it in text so the interwebs can pick it up in search.

#1 Clicking on links that direct to password phishing sites or other malicious sites.
To avoid accidentally giving away your Facebook credentials to a hacker simply pay attention to what you are clicking on and DO NOT enter your login information unless you are 100% certain that you are on Facebook.com. A Phishing site is a website that was setup to mimic the login page of another website in an attempt to trick people into entering their username and password.

The Facebook login page is easy to recreate and anybody with five minutes of web design experience can make a fake one. What typically happens is that you are redirected to this page that makes you think that you got logged out (this is not AOL, you don’t just get logged out of things for no reason anymore). Once you enter your information and click to login you are redirected to your Facebook page making you think that you successfully logged in. Since you were never logged out it in the first place you think that all is well. The problem is that the fake Facebook login website just added your email address and password to it’s database of other suckers. Who knows how they will end up using that data. They now can post anything to your Facebook that you can post. They have 100% access.

What you need to do now is change your password. Change it to something good. Your Cat’s name is not good enough. It needs to be something more secure. If your Cat’s name is the only thing you can remember than you can make that name more secure by changing out letters for other keyboard characters. For example: If your Cat’s name is Whiskers you can make your password Wh1sk3rs. Notice that I changed out the letter I for a 1 and the letter E for a 3. All you have to remember is that the vowels in Whiskers were exchanged for the numbers that they look like. Since a letter I looks like a 1 and a E looks like a 3, it should be easy to remember. Of course no password is secure if it’s user is clicking on links they shouldn’t be and accidentally typing in their password to Phishing sites.

#2 Giving Access to Applications on Facebook that are Malicious, Old or Outdated
Everything these days has Facebook access. We can post to Facebook from everything, even your refrigerator. Giving access to your Facebook profile for the most part is harmless. Most of these apps or websites just want to allow you to post to your wall from their service. However, if one of them becomes out dated and was accessed by a hacker, who knows what could happen. This is why I regularly go into my Apps page under Accounts in Facebook and delete old apps that I no longer need to have access to. It’s best to be safe and delete these. You will probably be surprised at what has access to your Facebook profile.

How To Avoid Clicking on Potentially Malicious Links Altogether!
How do you know if one of those links is bad or not? Simply Ask. If you get a Facebook message from someone that sounds Phishy to you, don’t click on the link. Send your friend a new message asking them if they meant to send you that link. If they did then you can click on it, if they didn’t know about that link being sent to you then you can ask them to change their password because their profile was probably hacked.

A moment of patience goes a long way. Take a deep breath and use your best judgement before clicking on something. If you see something on your wall that you didn’t put there, remove it. If you see something on somebody else’s wall that you know they didn’t put there, don’t click on it. Send them a message or a new wall post asking them to remove it and suggesting that they read this blog post.

Please be careful and only click on links that you are familiar with. Never enter your username and password into a website unless you are 100% sure that you are on the website you intended to be on.

If you have any tips on prevention, please share them with us in the comments.

Since I make a good habit of blogging about things I could not easily find I thought it would be a good idea to demo this concept here and give the answer away in exchange for a “Like.”

Step 2: Log into your WordPress Admin. Under the Plugins section click on “Add New”. Up at the top under the title “Plugins” click on “Upload.” Choose the zip file you just created in Step 1b. Click Upload.

Step 2a: Your host is probably “localhost” your username is the FTP username for your host account, the password is the password for that host account. This may be different from your WordPress login.

Step 3: Plugin is installed. You can view the documentation that came along with the plugin which will explain how to use it.

This plugin will allow you to hide specific content just as I did and will allow the reader on your blog to make that content viewable once they click on the “Like” button. Pretty cool!

If many of you find the install to be confusing I will record a video tutorial in the future to show how to install a plugin. Yes it will require the click of a “Like” button in order to view it.

I am going to teach you how to create a landing page for your Facebook Business Page, how to install it and assign it as the first page someone will see when they come to your Facebook Page. I have also created a video that will walk you through the process.

Creating a Facebook Landing Page

Difficulty: Intermediate

Here is what you will need:

• A Facebook Page
• The code – https://gist.github.com/979697
• Static HTML – iFrame Tabs App – http://apps.facebook.com/static_html_plus/
• An image to place as your welcome message
• A account somewhere, such as Photobucket.Com to upload and host your file. Or, you can use the template file shown below.

Watch the video to see the process as I walk through installing a Landing Page on my Facebook Page.

You can view this video fullscreen. It’s full HD.

I thought I would toss together a quick image you could use until you get something designed of your own. Download it here.

Facebook Landing Page Template – Download

If you like this article, please share it with someone. If you Love this article, please link to it from your blog or website. I would also appreciate you “Liking” my Facebook Pages.

My Photography Page: http://facebook.com/jeradhillphotographer
My Personal Page: http://facebook.com/jeradnhill

Installing this plugin on a static HTML website is quite easy, but installing it to work on a WordPress website, such as the website you are reading this blog post on, is a bit more tricky. I am sure that someone will quickly release a nifty plugin for WordPress that will make adding this functionality even easier but for now you can watch my tutorial and get it done yourself.

Items you will need:
A self hosted version of WordPress – http://wordpress.org
A FTP Client (Mac: Cyberduck, PC: Firezilla)

Facebook’s official company statistics outline the breakdown of the sites over 400 million active users. While the site points out about 70% of Facebook users are outside the United States, it doesn’t dive deeper into the U.S. numbers. Muhammad dug deeper and designed this nice info-graphic outlining details about the users of Facebook in the US.

Also check out another Facebook demographic post I shared a few weeks ago here.

Original link to this info-graphic

Traditional print and media marketing is equal dumping a bucket of water off of a 50 story building. Some people will get hit, most will miss it. Before social networks there was no way for a business to connect one on one with their target market. Today, the target market is a friend request away. With out the right etiquette and mindset going into social networks, you can easily do more damage than good.

I am all about promoting business. I love making suggestions for products and services to friends of mine when I find that they have a need that I know one of my contacts can fill. For example, I was on Facebook yesterday and one of my friends posted an image of their car that was just damaged after hitting a dog that ran out in front of them. I personally know the owners of the premier body shop in the town that I live in so I contacted her directly and made a suggestion. Dealing with things such as who to trust with your car is a big deal and if I was in her shoes I would have appreciated any suggestions that could have been made. Knowing so many business people in my community I could easily take advantage of my friend’s desires to share their daily ins and outs with me, but I don’t give in to that temptation. I understand how good it feels to help someone out but I also understand when it is welcome and when it becomes annoying. Here are some tips and suggestions that I think should be considered when thinking about promoting yourself, your business or the businesses of others through social networks.

1. Always make your suggestions private.
Social Networks are super public. Most people allow anyone to see their posts and the posts of their friends. The average person on Facebook has 180 friends. This is very exciting to a business person who feels that they have something that could help. However, the public space is not where you want to do this. Although most will want to place their suggestion in public with hopes that all of their friends will see it the suggestion will come across as nothing more than a shameless plug. Shameless plugs = Annoying. I personally take offense to it, give one warning and then unfriend the person. In real life, if someone was to jump into a conversation with out being invited it would be considered rude. How is a person’s Facebook wall any different?

The right way to make your suggestion is to contact the person through their email or through private message. On Facebook you can message people privately as well as on Twitter you can Direct Message them. If the recipient of your suggestion takes you up on it and has a good experience I am sure they will post about it. They post about everything else so why not about their great interaction with your business? After business has closed and you feel the transaction went well you can even ask if they would post something to their Facebook wall or Twitter feed. How much better is a recommendation or testimonial from a happy customer then from your mouth?

Painful Example of poor Social Networking Etiquette: When I post something to my Facebook wall or Twitter feed about something and people make a shameless plug about their product or service that is not even relevant to what I was talking about. An example of this would be if the product or service was not available in my area. There is no relevance to what I posted nor that of anyone else who was posting comments under it, the plug was completely shameless and brought no value to the conversation. Why don’t you just slap me in the face while you are at it!

2. Invites to Groups, Fan Pages or Lists.
Creating a list, group or fan page for your business is a good idea. I have one and would recommend you get one for your business. You can even go as far as suggesting to all of your friends that they become a fan of your page, add you group or list as well. However, do not become relentless in attempting to get all people on your list or fan page. They saw it the first time. If they did not add it, they did not want to add it. If you continue to be persistant with getting people to add your page you are frustrating them and almost guaranteeing that they will never do business with you. This is equal to chasing people down and making them come in your door. Have you ever been to Las Vegas or certain parts of San Francisco where the bars and restaurants have people out front trying to get you to come into their establishment? It’s obnoxious, and you only put up with it long enough to walk by. Internally you are telling yourself that you will never go into that place and you probably even feel insulted.

To get people to become fans of your page, group of list you should ask those who are already fans to share it with others. Ask them to type a short message that they can send with the invite. This short message would explain how your business or product helped them. You are more likely to get fans who actually want to know more about you and your product this way.

Painful Example of poor Social Networking Etiquette: There is a local restaurant who has both a Facebook profile and Fan page. There is no indication of personality behind these profiles, they seem to strictly be there to be recognized and I have noticed no intention to be an active part of the community. This business would “suggest” that I added their page as a fan every single day. It was really annoying to click “ignore” every day as these suggestions would add up with the others and there is no easy way to “ignore all”, nor can you just ignore all future suggestions for a certain friend. You just have to unfriend them. This is exactly what I did. One week later they attempted to add me as a friend. Maybe they thought that somehow our friendship had been accidentally terminated, because you know how that happens all of the time. I decided to accept the friend invite but I also posted to their wall that I would be more than happy to have them as a friend, but I am not interested in being a fan of their page. I only fan pages that I feel are relevant to me and unless I completely love the business and am willing to shout it from the roof tops, I do not want to be their fan just for the sake of making their fan count ego feel good. Since that post, I have not received a fan request since.

3. Automated Responses
My policy is that if I can not respond personally, I will not respond at all. My Mother used to tell me that if I didn’t have something nice to say that I should not say it at all. To me, a automated response is nothing nice. When someone accepts your friend request or even adds you as a friend they deserve a personal response. If you do not have time to give personal responses then don’t respond at all. The only people who can get away with this are celebrities, if they even care to give you any time of day at all. However, the large majority of us are not celebrities and should not send automatic responses. I have 100′s of examples from Twitter that I could post images of but I don’t feel like throwing anyone under the bus for just being ignorant.

Many of us turn off email notifications from the social networks because of the amount of emails that end up coming in. My suggestion is that you head over to Gmail.Com, set up a free email account such as jeradsocial@gmail.com (not an actual email) that you can set as your email address for notifications on these social networks. Let the new friend notifications pile up and go through them one at a time sending a short personal message. You can even pick and choose who you email. If you are a realestate agent and another realestate agent adds you as a friend, they probably are not going to enjoy the canned response you came up with thinking that the all of your new friends are potential home buyers.

Painful Example of poor Social Networking Etiquette: Quote from a recent Twitter direct message: “Thanks for the follow. I’ll look forward to connecting with you! You might also enjoy http://blogname.wordpress.com.” The truth is that this person could care less about connecting with me. I have yet to communicate with her and she has not made an effort to communicate with me either. To me it feels just like going to a Chamber of Commerce event where people are running around like zombies with business cards trying to eat you alive.

In Closing:
If you get one thing out of this I hope that you walk away with a desire to treat people in social networks like you would treat your neighbor. Truth is that we are more in contact with people online than we are our own neighbors living right outside our walls. Respecting people is just as important online as it is offline. Give people your respect and they will respond with theirs.

What does 400 Million users look like? Well the population of the United States of America is about 100 Million shy of Facebook’s user base. What I really find powerful is how much communication happens each day on Facebook. There is probably no way of knowing the ratio of face to face communication to online communication but my guess is that more is being shared online then offline. Think about the interactions you have day to day with people. They are short and to the point. You make sure they are over fast so you have time to get back to Facebook and see what the people you actually care about are sharing. I know that there are people in the world who do not have Facebook or refuse to take part in it but the fact is that most of our nation and modern world is logged in to Facebook. I would be interested to know what the statistics are for my local area. If Facebook was to make that information available I guarantee you businesses would finally see the light and hire someone to evangelize for them. I think Facebook will be the topic of the next episode on Jerad Hill’s Secret Public Network Marketing Podcast.

For years now I have been using these sites to build SEO for my websites and expand my personal brand. I have been posting articles to StumbleUpon and Digg for years and have seen great results, posting images to Flickr and communicating through Twitter and Facebook. These sites have been huge contributors to the traffic many of my websites receive. There are many different social media websites, each of them with a different purpose.

While browsing around online I came across a single PDF Roadmap that explains everything in plain english. You can download a large PDF here (right click, save target/file as). Drew McLellan put this beautiful breakdown together and it’s content is very sound. As I explained before, different social media sites help with different functions of your purpose and brand. Use it to figure out where to post which types of media for the best results.

It is not rocket science, it just takes someone to put it all together in plain english. If you do not have accounts on these websites, get them. If your website is not set up with buttons such as the buttons you see below for sharing content, then contact your website designer and have them added. Encourage your readers to share your content if they enjoyed it. And please for the love of all that is sacred, stop encouraging the talking heads out there, take initiative and do it yourself.

Finding tools like the CMO Social Landscape help me continue to get better at promoting myself, my business and the content I create.

Jerad Hill is a personal brand strategist helping people get referrals online. For more videos from Jerad subscribe to the RSS feed or the iTunes Podcast!

My Facebook Fan Pages – Feel free to become a Fan!:
Jerad Hill Photographer
Jerad Hill
webdesign.jeradhill
DailyAppShow