1. Your Profile Picture Is Of A Cat
Or a picture of a small accessory dog. Let’s face it, using a picture of anything but yourself is sketchy at best. People who know you probably already know that you are completely obsessed with your cat or tiny dog and obviously need Ceasar Millan’s help. The question is why make your first impression to people you just meet and friend as a crazy cat person. You chose to be on Facebook and have your life posted to the web and found by people so put your best foot forward and save the obsession for one of A&E’s new series like Hoarders or Obsessed.

2. You Invite Me To Play Games, Fan Pages Or Become Part Of A “Cause” All The Time
If the only time I hear from you on Facebook is to be invited to some pointless time suck of an action you want me to take part in then we will have to part ways.  Don’t get me wrong I use Facebook for fun as much as everyone else but if I don’t know you well and don’t know anything about your Page, the new Game you found or some random Cause you chose to invite everyone to why would I want to be a part of it? You are spamming us, please stop it.

3. You Overshare
You ever talk to that guy in your office who, when you ask him how his day is going he goes into some personal story that is just all kinds of TMI (too much information). Don’t be that guy. You can easily overshare on Facebook just like you can on Twitter or in the example above. You don’t want to know what everyone is doing at every second on their timeline, it  would clog up all the other things that are happening with your other friends, not good. If you overshare I might not remove you as a friend though, I will just ignore your life-stream, this means you don’t exist anymore to me on Facebook unless you IM me or Message me. you can thank FB team for that one.

4. You Only Post Pictures Of Food To Your Profile
Everyone needs to eat and everyone likes to eat good food. The presentation of food can get very creative at times, I know I have been impressed before with many restaurants and their presentations (especially desserts). Consistently posting pictures of food to your profile makes me feel like you need an intervention of some kind. I get you like food and a once in a while picture of food can be tolerable but know when to say when. If we wanted to join a food blog or the cooking channel we probably would have. Know your audience, not everyone wants or needs to see what you are eating all of the time.

5. I Don’t Know You
This one is pretty simple. We might have become friends a long time ago, don’t know you, never talked to you before, you don’t say anything interesting, you never share anything of value, I mean heck…I don’t know you. I have become very selective of people I allow to be my friend on Facebook. If I don’t know you either through business dealings, through my personal life or through a friend of a friend then 99% of the time I am not going to connect with you. I mean really why else would we be friends anyway?

What Is Choice Paralysis?
Is it possible to have too many choices? Most people would say no, the more choices the better; but it’s not true. Give someone too many choices and they are very likely to choose nothing. Think about it for one second, there has probably been countless times in your life where you were indecisive because of too much choice, God knows I have. I am now seeing this happen on countless websites with their social media sharing features.

Examples of Choice Paralysis
Imagine you find this amazing video that you have to share your friends across one of your social networks. You hit the share function on the site, usually below the video, and the image below pops up:

SHARING OVERLOAD. With so many choices people get intimidated, overwhelmed and it then becomes to much of a hassle to share so they abandon their efforts (and your site). Why have so many choices when we all know that there is an 80/20 rule with social media. 80% of what everyone does when sharing content happens on less then 20% of the sites out there. By finding the top 2 or 3 most commonly used share buttons and focusing on those you will cut down on abandonment by 85% or more.

Think of McDonald’s and why that franchise became so successful. No matter where people went they found a familiar and consistent place to eat and they knew what they were getting when they went there. Same thing goes with social media. People are used to one or two sites they frequent and that’s it. Too many choices equals no choice. Too many sites make the error by trying to cater to everyone and every possible choice out there and in the process they end up catering to no one.

YouTube is even guilty of over-sharing. Although they give you a few more share buttons than they should to choose from as you see below, they put the most used buttons in the front so people don’t get too overwhelmed. I mean who uses Myspace anymore…I mean really? 

Best Practice
This part is simple, less is more. Choose the 2 or 3 most commonly used share buttons on your site and that’s it (usually facebook, twitter and email). It’s a proven fact that when you give people too much choice they don’t choose at all. Stay laser focused on this best practice and other consumer experience best practices and you will end up winning in the long run.

You can track referrals from Facebook or Twitter in Google Analytics, but what if you want to track specific links within your social media profiles to measure their effectiveness? For example, what if I want to see how many people visit pamorama.net by clicking on my Twitter profile link? This tutorial will teach you the simple steps you need to take — and this method can be used in conjunction with any of your social profiles: Facebook, LinkedIn, or the legion of others.

1: Create a trackable link

Head over to Google’s URL Builder to create a URL that can be tracked separately in Google Analytics. Fill in the spaces as indicated in this screenshot with information about your social media profile:

2: Shorten your trackable link

Google’s URL Builder will create a very long URL, so it’s a good idea to shorten it with one of the many available online shorteners. For the example below, I used bit.ly, but any of them will do the trick:

3: Add your shortened trackable link to your social media profile

You’ve created a trackable link and shortened it — now you need to add it to the the social media profiles you want to track.

4: Track your URL in Google Analytics beginning the next day

Since you used Google’s URL Builder, the link will be tracked automatically in Google Analytics each time someone clicks on on it. You’ll be able to see your referrals by going toGoogle Analytics -> Traffic Sources -> Campaigns. Google Analytics takes about a day to begin reporting the referrals.

First seen on thecustomercollective.com March 23, 2010 by Pam Dyer

What are the most effective twitter posts you can send to your followers? It’s a good question right? Everyone is still trying to measure social media efforts and its impact on their specific businesses. How do we know when we tweet that we are sending the most effective message to our followers? What are we using to measure this with? So after over a year of testing I have some answers to these questions that continue to prove themselves correct time and time again.

The # 1 Most Effective Tweet
The most effective tweet you can send is a twitpic.com or tweetphoto.com link. The click through rate (CTR) is five to ten times greater then any other link you can post to your followers. Sharing your life through photos with your followers creates more of a connection due to the voyeur in all of us. We want to see what you are talking about. It’s as close to real time as it gets, just like facebook life-stream updates tweet photos are addicting. It’s the same reason US Weekly is so popular. A company wanting to leverage this high CTR could build their own Tweet photo sharing location so that said company does not lose the value of the tweet by driving it to somewhere other then their own site.

The # 2 Most Effective Tweet
The next best type of post is one with an actually link to the site you are trying to drive people. Some might think the link shortening services such as bit.ly or tinyurl.com would be best to save room; not always true. By using the link shorteners you are not allowing your followers insight as to where you are driving them. Not only do you followers not know where your sending them but you get absolutely no SEO value due to the link not having your domain in it anymore. A good solution here would be for companies to build their own custom link shorteners, this would address both issues quite nicely.

Of course the next best choice is using bit.ly,  tinyurl.com or ow.ly tags to shorten your links. Not only does it give you the ability to track how many clicks are happening (instant gratification) it also gives you the ability to fit more verbiage into your tweet. Obviously explaining where your link is going to drive your followers is crucial to earn their trust so be as descriptive as possible. This is also your chance to get back that SEO value but mentioning the URL to your site (example: “Watch this on youtube.com).

Street Creds Tweet
The last tweet you can give your followers is a regular update with no links in it at all. In some cases this could be an epic tweet where your followers re-tweet your comment like crazy. Most of the time these tweets are just funny little quirky things you might come up with that are wicked clever (yeah I am from the East Coast). FML is a common topic along with trending topics you can then re-tweet with your own two cents to spice it up.

Over Tweet = Bad Times
Twitter etiquette is one of the most commonly miss-understood and abused problems we face in the constant chatter that is going on. Obviously the worst thing you can do is give everyone an update on everything you are doing at every moment of your day (Example: “brushing my teeth.” “I am hungry.”) don’t be that guy or girl. Engage in communication with your followers back and fourth, Twitter is not a one way communication ticker (although some use it as that). Most of all have fun and be social.