TheWayoftheWeb

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Google+ adds embedding for posts

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Joining Facebook and Twitter with easier ways to share Google+ content, you can now embed any Public Post made on Google’s social network by selecting the Embed option from the drop-down on every post.

The embed code can then be put onto any website, and will look and function just like it would on Google+, including the ability to follow the author, +1 a post, add comments and read them etc.

Google+ Embedding Posts

There are more details available for developers, including loading the JavaScript asynchronously to improve page load times, explicit rendering and loading etc.

In addition, Google has also integrated Google+ Sign-In’s with Google’s Authorship program, which means that if you sign in with WordPress.com and TypePad, you’ll automatically have your articles associated with your profile. It’s coming to a number of other sites in the future.

Facebook testing new tools for business and personal use

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Facebook continues to quietly launch and test new services for both businesses and individuals. On Monday, they announced that selected news individuals can now integrate real-time information by using either a Public Feed or Keyword Insights API.

That means the likes of Buzzfeed, CNN, NBC, BSkyB and Slate can now hook into a feed of public posts for a specific word, or the total number of posts that mention a specific term in a given time frame, which can also displays anonymous, aggregated results based on gender, age and location.

FBGrowthGraphic_V2

These tools will become available for other media partners and Facebook Preferred Marketing Developers in the near future. The benefit for Facebook is that it is likely to be used far more in coverage of news and events, alongside the existing usage of Twitter.

For individual use, Facebook is also testing the option for users to add Professional Skills to their personal profile – it’s similar to LinkedIn, allowing you to add list the skills you’ve acquired in your education and career. It’s currently available on a limited number of personal profiles during testing, and could then be rolled out to all users in the future.

Facebook updates rules for Facebook Page Promotions

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Facebook has made it easier to run promotions on Facebook, which is good news for all page owners. The requirement for all promotions to be run through dedicated applications has now been removed, meaning that you can promote your page and business on your Page Timeline as well as in an app.

That means you can:

  • Collect entries by having users post on the Page or comment/like a Page post
  • Collect entries by having users message the Page
  • Utilize likes as a voting mechanism

One area which Facebook has now tightened up on is tagging – the new Page Terms now prohibits Pages from tagging or encouraging people to tag themselves in content they are not actually in:

  • It’s OK to ask people to submit names of a new product in exchange for a chance to win a prize
  • It’s not OK to ask people tag themselves in pictures of a new product in exchange for a chance to win a prize

You can download the full Facebook Promotion Guidelinesas a PDF, here.

TheWayoftheWeb on Facebook
TheWayoftheWeb on Facebook – click to go and Like us.

 

Great news for small businesses:

This is particularly good news for smaller businesses who may not have had the knowledge or resources to choose a good Facebook Promotions or Competition App, or might have found the process to run it confusing.

While we’ve worked with several low cost Facebook Apps for this purpose, starting from a typical cost of $10, it can be slightly time consuming to set up, and dissuades brands from last minute offers, giveaways and competitions, which remains a prime reason for choosing to follow a company on Facebook.

And it will encourage more experimentation with promotions, which is only a good thing.

 

Also good for larger businesses:

It’s also good news for bigger companies, as often promotions and giveaways are constrained by time and effort, rather than budget and availability. This means that bigger Facebook pages will also be able to get more exposure and benefit from any contests and promotions which might be available last thing on a Friday, rather than missing the opportunity due to the hassles of setting up applications.

 

Top tip: Have boilerplate terms and conditions ready to go:

The one thing that all companies and promotions will still require are suitable terms and conditions to be legal in the country in which your business operates. Far too many companies fail to consider this in the planning stage and then find themselves unable to run offers and promotions, so it’s well worth investing some time and effort to ensure you have a standard boilerplate Terms and Conditions which can be easily changed to be applicable for any promotion, and possibly a longer version available via a link to your website.

 

WordPress 3.6 is now available

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The latest version of WordPress, which is version 3.6, is now live with some new functions and features. As always, we’d recommend backing up your site before starting any upgrade procedure, which is a process we undertake for many of our clients.

The release is codenamed ‘Oscar’:

Features for WordPress users:

For general users and authors, the main features of the new release are:

  • New Twenty Thirteen default theme.
  • Revamped Revisions to save every change with a new interface
  • Post Locking and Augmented Autosave to allow saves by authors and taking over post editing when more than one author is working on an individual post.
  • Built-in HTML5 media player for native audio and video embeds.
  • Improved integrations and oEmbed support for Spotify, Rdio and SoundCloud.
  • Easier Menu Editor.

Developers also benefit from a new audio/video API with access to metadata like ID3 tags, HTML5 markup for more elements, better filters for revisions, and a long list of additional changes.

WordPressUpdate

We’ve already updated this site to 3.6 and some other test sites, and haven’t experienced any substantial problems. But it will depend on the plugins and frameworks you are currently using, so please do make sure you back up before updating, especially if you don’t have regular backups already taking place.

Facebook rolling out option to Embed Posts

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Facebook has announced that you will soon be able to embed public posts within your website or blog. It’s launched the new feature with CNN, Huffington Post, Mashable, PEOPLE and Bleacher Report, and will apparently be rolling it out more widely very soon.

In use, it’s very similar to the process for embedding individual tweets into a blog or website. If a post is public (Shown by a globe icon), then it will be able to be embedded via an option in the drop down menu for any post, as shown in the following example:

You’ll then be shown some embed code to put into your page (in HTML view in WordPress for example). In addition to displaying in a reasonably nice way, the embed option also allows visitors to like, share, like the author page, and see shares and comments from within your website, rather than visiting Facebook.

Whether or not you want to use this option rather than embedding a screenshot image will depend on whether you want to allow your website visitors to interact in that way.

FacebookEmbeddedPostExample

But it’s certainly worth considering how you can use this alongside Facebook Open Graph and the Twitter equivalents to drive traffic to both your website and your social properties.

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