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This afternoon Facebook posted an update to their blog regarding the viral note circulating around the web about third-party ad networks. According to their post, the company is concerned about the user experience and so far they have shut down two ad networks (as we have previously written) and have forced some ad networks to remove the deceptive ads previously in question. The most important component of their blog post is as follows:

The advertisements that started these rumors were not from Facebook but placed within applications by third parties. Those ads violated our policies by misusing profile photos, and we already required the removal of those deceptive ads from third-party applications before this rumor began spreading.

We are as concerned as many of you are about any potential threat to your experience on Facebook and the protection of your privacy. That’s why we prohibit ads on Facebook Platform that cause a bad user experience, are misleading, or otherwise violate our policies. Along with removing ads, we’ve recently prohibited two entire advertising networks from providing services to applications on Facebook Platform because they were not compliant with our policies and failed to correct their practices.

While the post clearly explains how Facebook attempts to monitor the platform, there is no clarification as to their policy about how third-party ad networks use your images in advertisements. As I’ve written twice already, modifying your ad settings (as described in the original download squad article and the viral note spreading around Facebook) will not remove your photos from third party ad networks.

While Facebook is clearly concerned about the users’ experience with their platform, the company is in a challenging position of determining how to manage this issue. Preventing ad networks from using user images all together will be an overly aggressive action. Extending the privacy settings so that third-party ad networks are forced to check the privacy setting when displaying an ad is costly to Facebook in terms of development and costly to ad networks in terms of ad display processing overhead.

Right now Facebook has a terms of service in place that should protect users (including limitations on data caching, and limits on how ads are displayed). You can read more about the company’s ad guidelines here. One thing that doesn’t appear to be listed in the terms is how user images can be used in advertisements.

I’ll have to do some more digging to see if there is any clarification of that anywhere in the terms. So far I have not found any clarification and as far as I’m aware, third-party ad networks currently don’t have restrictions on which friends are displayed in ads. I’ve reached out to Facebook for clarification and am waiting to hear back.

Update
I’ve spoken to Facebook and they’ve made some relatively strong statements, the most important of which was that ad networks “need permission from the owner of whatever photo they use.” That means unless an ad network asked for permission to use your image, they can’t use it. Additionally, here are the policies that are applicable according to Facebook:

• The data section of the platform guidelines indicates that just because a developer gets access to user data doesn’t mean that they can use it
• Developers are not allowed to pass user data they get from FB to ad networks.
• Apps cannot break the law, and there are rights of publicity issues that come into play here. Facebook is granted permission in the terms to use a user’s photo in an ad but this permission does not extend to developers or ad networks.
• Not doing anything misleading (indicating a user has taken a quiz when they haven’t is misleading)

The only question I have now is when did any ad network on the Facebook platform ever ask for permission to use my photo or anybody else’s?

Update 2
As I recall from over a year ago, the main loophole in this system is that the majority of users’ photos are publicly accessible via Google. That means ad networks have the capacity to view some of your friends and their photos via crawling the public version Facebook.

This morning I’ve received numerous messages from people about the viral message going around the site about how to opt-out of Facebook advertisements. Following a misinformed article by Download Squad from last week, users are now going crazy about their images using in Facebook advertisements. While your image may be used, most users aren’t educated about how they are being displayed.

For many months now, Facebook has been using our friends’ images in advertisements about groups, Facebook Pages, and applications. When it was initially launched, the blogosphere was debating whether or not Facebook’s decision to make consent a default setting was the right way to go. One University of Minissota professor and former Harvard Berkman Center fellow, suggested the ads were illegal. That was in reference to Beacon and what was then called “Social Ads”.

“Social Ads” have now become Facebook ads but the same endorsement feature exists. Over a year and a half later, the masses appear to understand a small amount of what’s going on and it’s being spread throughout Facebook via the following note:

Facebook has agreed to let 3rd party advertisers use your photos in their ads without your permission (and so presumably, forever). TO OPT OUT: Click on ‘Settings’ (in top nav bar, next to logout); Drop down to ‘Privacy Settings’; select ‘News Feed and Wall’; Select tab for ‘Facebook Ads’ and ‘No one’ in the drop down. Save changes and PASS THIS ON.

The Download Squad article was clearly the initial impetus behind this message. While Facebook assumes that the user consents to share this information, that’s not the main issue. Facebook continues to let third party ad networks use your photos as well, and making the privacy setting changes outlined in this viral message will not remove your photos from third party ad networks.

That third parties can use your image without your consent is the primary issue at hand and now that the issue has been brought to the masses, Facebook will need to publicly announce a policy decision. If Facebook decides to prevent third-party ad networks from inserting user images, the effects could be disastrous for third-party display advertisers on the platform and could cost a lot of money for many developers.

It will be interesting to see how things play out over the coming days. What do you think Facebook’s policy should be on third-party ad networks use of user images? Also, should Facebook assume consent by default for using your images in their ads?

NOTE
Facebook has posted an udpate regarding their policy.

As Facebook becomes a center for our personal communication there is an etiquette that has become standard. Over the past few months I’ve been talking with people about their experience with Facebook and the more people I speak to, the more that I learn there are a number of best practices when using the site. After talking to a lot of people, I’ve noticed that I break the rules daily so hopefully you don’t make the same mistakes I have.

1. Update Your Status About Mundane Activities

It’s seriously great to know that you just pigged out on a half pound filet mignon but unless you are giving context to your experience, your friends probably don’t care. Status updates were not made to let your friends know about the fact that you are standing on an elevator, or even on a boat! If you’re going to take the time to enter your status, at least take the time to be a bit creative with it. While it may be cathartic to let people know about the horrendous service you just got, it really doesn’t provide much value, so just quit it!

2. Keep On Poking Away

What the hell is a poke? I think we all know what it means to poke people. You are trying to flirt but if you keep it up, it shifts from funny to annoying. When was the last time that something positive came out of walking up to someone in a bar and beginning to poke them until they responded? If you can successfully turn a poke into a lasting relationship then you are truly a master of manipulation because most people would find it flat out annoying.

On Facebook, poking wars can be fun at first but there’s an unspoken threshold that can be surpassed. Don’t surpass it if you don’t want to piss off your Facebook friends.

3. Sharing Your Quiz Results

It’s great to know that you are destined to be a “True New Yorker”, but do all of your friends really need to hear about it? There are thousands of entertaining quizzes on Facebook but keep the entertainment to yourself rather than share the insignificant results with your friends. While you may be good in bed, do you really need a quiz to tell you that? Also, do your friends really want to know about the most private details of your life as described through quiz results? Probably not.

4. Invite Your Friends To Some Sort Of Battle

There are tens of thousands of applications on Facebook and while there are plenty of games that are fun to play, not all of your friends are interested in joining you in a battle on Mafia Wars. Yeah, all those invites will quickly result in your friends removing you from their Facebook contacts. Don’t believe me? Keep on sending those Farm Town invites to all your friends and see what happens. Seriously, when you’re clicking on all your friends to invite them to the next game you are playing because you think it will boost your score. The only thing your going to end up accomplishing is annoying the hell out of your friends.

5. Reply To Broadcast Messages

You’ve seen it before: one of your friends sends out a broadcast message to update their friends about an event and then suddenly a threaded conversation erupts. We know that you’ve probably been too busy to catch up with many of your friends recently but don’t take mass messages as the opportunity to reconnect. You’re flooding everybody’s inbox with information that isn’t relevant to them and it’s flat out annoying!

6. Tag Your Friends In Unattractive Photos

Not everybody can look attractive from every angle but that doesn’t mean you should take this opportunity to highlight the angle that doesn’t work. Even worse is that you continue to tag everybody else that’s in the unattractive photo so that it can be circulated among all our friends. If you want to quickly damage your relationship, go find the most unattractive photo of your friend and tag them in it. Don’t be surprised when you end up unfriended for doing it!

7. Friend People Who Hated You In High School

While this one isn’t going to damage your existing relationships, it’s just bad form. Remember those people that you hated back in high school? They were part of the inspiration behind becoming successful yet for some reason they now want to reconnect years later. Personally, I don’t really mind since I don’t have any unforgivable experiences but most people are not going to friend you after you put them through years of torture. If you were a jerk, don’t expect to become mister (or miss) popular now that we’ve all grown up.

Are there any other Facebook etiquette tips that we’ve missed here?

Update
There have been angry readers in the comments and I think some people have misunderstood the purpose of this article. This article is partially my opinion and it is also intended for entertainment. Ultimately it’s up for you to decided where social boundaries exist in the digital world!

When Facebook first released the username tool a few weeks ago, they said that you better like the username that you select because you’ll never be able to change it. Now Facebook is modifying that policy to allow users to “change their username once”. It’s pretty easy to switch your username. All you need to do is visit your account settings page and click on “Change” next to the “Username” setting. Facebook will then let you know if the new username you’d like is available.

So why is Facebook letting users change their username now? Facebook hasn’t made an official announcement but as far as we know, one of the main reasons was that a number of people thought it would be funny to steal their friends names (like this facesquatter). There are also many people that didn’t want the names they came up with.

My guess is that Facebook has received countless emails about username issues so to make things easier, they’ve gone ahead and let users make a one-time change. I’m not quite sure why they don’t let users change it at will but my best guess is that these usernames will be tied to other products later down the road. Check out Read/Write/Web for more on this new policy.

You’re the owner of a local small business and you are trying to figure out the best steps to get on to Facebook to drive new customers. It can be a daunting task and with little extra time in the day, how can you be expected to spend time promoting your business on Facebook? I completely understand the challenges of running a small business and after speaking with lawyers, florists, dentists, and many other small businesses, I’ve compiled the following list of strategies that should help ease the process.

1. Go Slow And Steady, Don’t Overdo It

Any form of promotion is like compound interest. It takes time to build up the residual returns but if you stick with it, the pay off can be substantial. Many people hear that Facebook is a great way to promote their business but after trying it out for a few days or even a couple weeks, they don’t see significant effects so they give up and decide to keep paying for Yellow page advertisements. Who knows how well Yellow Page ads pay off but that monthly check must be going towards something, right?

The difference between Facebook and more traditional promotional channels is that the small business owner needs to invest a little bit of their time. The extra effort can go a long way and can even provide a rewarding experience as customers begin to provide feedback and communicate directly with you. So how much time do you need to be spending? Not hours a day! While promoting via Facebook can become an addictive process, you can allocate little more than an hour a week to your promotional activities.

While it’s never bad to start off enthusiastically, you don’t want to waste all of your efforts in the first few days. Build up your fan base steadily and you’ll begin to see the benefits.

2. Contact Your Fans Directly

While digital media companies and large brands may have thousands upon thousands of fans, most small businesses don’t end up with as many fans, especially if they are local. When you first start growing, it’s a good idea to interact with each new fan on an individual basis. Send users a message after they’ve become a fan of your Facebook page. Build a relationship with each fan and they’ll become a fan and a customer forever.

Once you build a connection there’s a good chance the user will tell their friends. I’ll be discussing that strategy further in an upcoming guide. The main point here is that each new fan can be considered a new lead for a small business. Selling on Facebook though is subtle and should not be done in an overly aggressive way. Just because someone became a fan does not mean you should send them a message saying “Buy my stuff today!!!”

Instead, reach out to each new fan individually to welcome them to your Facebook Page and begin a dialogue. In many times these initial conversations will lead to lasting business relationships.

3. Don’t Spam

I’ve written about this before and it never gets old: don’t spam your users. As the owner of a blog, I get countless people who try to spam the comments and I’ve seen the same thing take place on Facebook. Spamming your users with too many links or trying “black hat” tactics to rapidly drive up your Facebook Page fan base is not worth it. Facebook is aggressive at stopping spam and there is a good chance that they’ll stop you somewhere along the way, and it can potentially cost a lot.

4. Consider It An Educational Experience

Rather than looking for an instantaneous return, look at it as a long-term educational experience. As you improve your strategy, you’ll attract more fans. It takes time to master Facebook promotion and time to reap the rewards but the payoff can be significant. The main point of this rule is clear: stick with it for the long haul. As I outlined in last week’s Facebook advertising guide for marketers, it’s important to plan for the long-term.

If you blow out your budget in the first few days and expect to have a massive response, you will be seriously disappointed. Learn from the experience, take notes, and improve your strategy over time. It may sound like a lot of time but you can do much of this in as little as 15 minutes a day. One other benefit of considering it an educational experience is that the whole process is deductible in your taxes.

You can write off the expenditure ad advertising or as education (you need to speak to your accountant to determine the best way to file an entry for this).

5. Limit Your Advertising Budget

As I just mentioned, more dollars on advertising does not always mean more revenue. Start off with a few dollars a day to test out Facebook’s advertising system. You can create your first ad here to test out all of Facebook’s targeting capabilities. Make sure that if you are spending money that you’re investing in some long-term goal, otherwise you’ll end up spending a lot of money aimlessly. Trust me, I know from experience! As your performance improves and you figure out which ads work most effectively you can begin to steadily increase your ad spend.

Figure that you’d spend a few hundred dollars on a Yellow Pages advertisement so be willing to test out a similar budget on Facebook. If all goes well and your business starts to increase, you can always invest in more advertising as necessary. As I mentioned earlier, this is an educational process and with so many resources on the internet, learning has never been cheaper. Don’t spend all your money when you don’t have to!

To most effectively manage your budget, start off with one Facebook advertising campaign which has a limited budget (as pictured below). For all of the initial ads use that same campaign rather than creating separate campaigns for each advertisements.

6. Create A Facebook Page, Not New Profiles

A quick way to get banned from Facebook is to set up multiple accounts and multiple profiles. I have multiple friend requests in my inbox currently from people who’ve set up separate accounts to promote their business. Don’t do this! You can go here to set up your own Facebook Page while keeping your existing profile. Under no circumstance should you be creating separate accounts. Not only is it against Facebook’s terms, but it provides no additional value.

I could spend more time explaining why this is flat out a bad idea but I won’t. It’s much better to spend the time focused on the activities you should be doing!

7. Use Coupons And Other Incentives

So now that you’ve got a Facebook Page, some ads running, and a few fans of your Facebook Page, what should you be doing? In addition to engaging users on Facebook, you also want to get them making purchases. Keep in mind, which incentives you use depend on the type of business you are running. For example, a florist may have price sensitive customers, and special deals may be an incentive to make a purchase.

A florist may want to post something like “There’s never a better time to show that special someone that you care. Today only we’re providing a bouquet of _______________, ______________, and _______________ for only $9.99, and we’ll deliver them to your work for free!” However if a dentist posted “50 percent off cavity fillings”, I have a feeling that they wouldn’t get the same response.

There are plenty of other creative incentives to drive people back to your page and to your business so test out different strategies and see which work best.

8. Emphasize Mobile Subscriptions

One of the best components of Facebook Pages is the ability to receive updates via your mobile device. Once updates come to your phone you can also reply to the updates, making it possible for instant two-way communication. It’s a model that’s similar to Twitter except that on Pages you get more features for engaging users. The mobile component adds an additional layer of interaction which can be used to build relationships with your new and existing customers.

As I outlined in the 5 phases of the Facebook sales funnel, Facebook is a relationship marketing platform, not a direct sales channel. That’s why it’s important to build your relationship with others through Facebook. Configure your Facebook Page to function with your current mobile device and communicate with users while on the go. This can make for some great, instantaneous dialogue.

Ultimately most internet based promotions are going the way of mobile, and it is in every business’s best interest to take advantage of that trend including on Facebook.

9. Post Occasional Entertaining Statuses

When was the last time you saw an update from your dentist in your news feed? You probably never have and you may even be weirded out to see one, unless of course it was a funny joke. For example if the dentist posted occasion updates about eating candy and junk food in general, you may get a quick smile and possibly even post a status update. Whatever the response, at least you are getting one, which is one additional level of interaction that you never previously had with your customers.

Keeping your fans engaged is an important component of any good Facebook strategy. How much time does it really take to come up with a clever status update? If you’re like me then catchy ideas occasionally pop into your head (or at least ones that you think are clever) when you are on the go. If you’ve properly configured your Facebook Page to work with your mobile device, you can instantly update your Page’s status while on the go.

It takes very little extra effort to bring a smile to your fans and it’s something that they’ll remember.

Conclusion

Every small business can take advantage of the promotional opportunities that Facebook presents. By using some of the tips listed in this articles, small businesses can get a great start on promoting their company on the site. While there are many other strategies to increasing the number of fans you have on the site as well as driving new business, much of that can be learned through experimentation. The best thing to do is to get started and figure it out from there!

If you would like to learn more about ways that your small business can benefit from Facebook and social media in general, fill out your information in the form below. We promise to not spam you and take your privacy seriously so we won’t give your email to anybody.

Learn More About Using Social Media For Your Business

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Facebook previously enabled iPhone users among other users to email in their photos to have them uploaded but then the service was eventually disabled. As of today, anybody can email their photos to be uploaded to their Facebook profile via their personalized photo upload email. Everyone has their own email address which they can find via the Facebook mobile page. You can email as many photos as you’d like and all you need to do is enter a subject which will be used as the caption for the photos.

There are no upload restrictions on how many photos you upload, making this an extremely useful tool for uploading images. One strange component of the mobile email is that they are often hard to remember. My email resembles eltaik966time@m.facebook.com. So how will I remember that email address? I won’t, but thankfully I have the Facebook application on my iPhone to upload images and tag friends in them.

Many users have restrictions as to how they can send in messages and frequently email is the easiest way to do it, which makes this extremely useful. The easier it is for users to share, the more that Facebook is fulfilling its mission. I only wonder why Facebook opted not to let users use their username as their photo upload address (e.g. nickoneill@m.facebook.com). I can understand that it’s to limit who can upload the photos but couldn’t Facebook just accept uploads from verified addresses?

Either way, I’m sure that a lot of users will be happy about this new feature. If you’d like to learn more, go check out Facebook’s blog post about it.

Update
The commenters are giving me a hard time and effectively explain why Facebook uses this form of authentication. Check out the comments for more information.

As Facebook prepares to surpass Yahoo in terms of global reach (they already surpass Yahoo! in terms of time spent on the site), Yahoo! has redesigned their site to incorporate Facebook into the homepage. The company is also letting developers create other applications that can be integrated into their homepage. Sound familiar? It’s similar to Facebook’s strategy and it’s an ongoing strategy that started months ago when the company launched the Yahoo! Social Platform.

Facebook is on track to surpass Yahoo! on all metrics in the coming months. The only thing that Facebook doesn’t have is a robust web search engine, although they recently revamped their search offering which is currently in beta. Facebook has some lofty ambitions and current growth charts suggest that the company could eventually become the largest site on the internet.

The company has already surpassed Youtube, the third largest site, and is rapidly approaching Yahoo according to the latest Alexa charts. With Facebook in the rear view mirror, Yahoo! is taking drastic steps to combat the social behemoth. This homepage redesign appears to be a continuation of the Yahoo! open strategy which was first announced over a year ago.

You can add any application to your homepage including the ability to “easily create their own app on the fly by adding virtually any URL of their choice.” Facebook continues to expand its reach around the web through Facebook Connect and that’s essentially what the Facebook application on Yahoo! provides. By letting users access their Facebook feed from the redesigned homepage, Yahoo! hopes to keep users at their site for longer.

However with many popular applications, Facebook has increasingly become the destination site of choice, something that Yahoo! previously dominated. Social games and social applications in general have been a huge hit, essentially morphing Facebook into the “open portal” of yesteryears. AOL and Yahoo! have continued to push the portal strategy whereas Facebook has been pushing one of openness, forcing others to follow suit.

With Facebook sucking up users’ attention from everywhere on the net, it will be interesting to see if the Yahoo! homepage redesign can keep people returning to the site.

Last night Eric Eldon confirmed that Super Rewards, the offer-based virtual goods monetization platform, had been acquired by Adknowledge. Super Rewards, a direct competitor of Offerpal Media (both sponsors of this blog), has become one of the leading ad networks on the Facebook platform as well as other large social platforms like MySpace. According to Venturebeat the company could pull in close to $60 million in revenue this year, which wouldn’t be surprising considering Zynga, the largest Facebook app developer, is expected to bring in almost twice that.

While the relative “life time value” of affiliate offers has been debated, with Facebook’s continued growth, there are no signs that this area will be slowing anytime soon. Interestingly enough, all of the ad network consolidation has been occurring primarily through Adknowledge who has acquired multiple ad networks in the past year including Cubics, Adknowledge, and Lookery’s ad serving business.

The size of this acquisition is reportedly $30 million although Adknowledge claims that this number is obviously inaccurate. With many ad networks in the Facebook ecosystem, Adknowledge will have to make a more acquisitions over the coming months if they plan to continue the strategy of growth through acquisition. Then again, the company now is pulling in more than $250 million a year in revenue which isn’t a bad place to be sitting.

That social platform advertising ecosystem continues to get more interesting by the day. If you learn more about it and meet the people that are building this ecosystem, you should attend this year’s Social Ad Summit where Super Rewards among many others will be presenting. What ad networks do you think will be next to be acquired?

This afternoon Facebook announced that Facebook Connect is now able to extend their service to 64 languages and locales. When developers implement social widgets, they will be able to decide which language they’d like to have as the default. Implementing Facebook Connect in another language is extremely easy, requiring the developer to only modify the include source of the Facebook Connect script.

It would also be interesting to see this system automatically determine the visitor’s default Facebook language and cater to that, however that’s not something that has been implemented yet. It’s not a huge upgrade, but it’s definitely important as Facebook expands their user base internationally. With over 250 million users and growing quickly, Facebook decided to crowd source their translation to make the process more efficient.

Developers can also choose to use Facebook’s translations application to make their applications available in multiple languages. According to Facebook, Connect has been implemented on 15,000 sites, devices, and applications so far. If you want to read more about the internationalization of Facebook Connect, check out the developer blog post.

According to the people at addtoany, the volume of information being shared around the web through Facebook has increased dramatically over the past year. Specifically, Facebook now accounts for 24 percent of all items being shared in contrast to email which now accounts for 11.1 percent. Not surprisingly, Twitter now accounts for 10.8 percent of all items shared. I reached out to the company to find out what sampling size the company has.

While Pat Diven of AddToAny couldn’t provide specific details, he said that their widget is accessed over 1.5 billion times per month. The other two leaders AddThis and Share This also have a large number of implementations around the web, providing for a significant sample size. Justin Thorp of AddThis, which is 20 times larger than AddToAny, told us that Facebook is also the largest sharing site through their platform, accounting for 23.5 percent of shares, almost identical to AddToAny’s statistics.

What’s clear is that Facebook continues to single handedly eat away from email as one of the primary communication channels. The platform is also now the largest for sharing information although Twitter appears to be taking a large volume away as they have a large percentage of the market of users who actively share. The next step for Facebook is to become one of the primary communication channels by improving their inbox.

The company has steadily improved the inbox product, however it is still significantly lacking. There’s no way to export messages and there is no email support. It’s also not easy to sort through a large number of messages. Regardless of all the downfalls, Facebook has become the most dominant sharing platform online and continues to grow daily. If Facebook can keep this up, the number of links passing through the site could potentially rival the number of links being crawled by Google.

Do you use Facebook as your primary sharing channel?