14 Ways To Get More Facebook Shares

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From Mari Smith:

Share is to Facebook as retweet is to Twitter. It’s all about how VIRAL you can get your fan page wall posts. Of course, you want plenty comments and likes on each post — this activity certainly helps boost your post visibility in the news feed of your fans. But, if you can craft the majority of your wall posts in a way that inspires your fans to say:

“Wow, I just *have* to share this with my friends!”

…then you’ll begin to notice a nice uptick in shares. Shares have more weight in the news feed. Basically, Facebook’s algorithms determine that the more people share a post and make it go viral, the more people want to see it. Makes sense.

In this fun INFOGRAPHIC, prepared by ShortStack, you’ll find 14 different ways to help boost your Facebook visibility and inspire more SHARES!

http://www.marismith.com/14-ways-get-more-facebook-shares/

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Facebook Pages Terms – New Fan Page Rules

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Facebook has quietly changed the rules about what content you can have on your fan page cover image!

https://www.facebook.com/page_guidelines.php

All covers are public. This means that anyone who visits your Page will be able to see your cover. Covers can’t be deceptive, misleading, or infringe on anyone else’s copyright. You may not encourage people to upload your cover to their personal timelines. Covers may not include images with more than 20% text.

social confusion

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The new Facebook Graph Search

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The new Facebook Graph Search will surface People, Photos, Places and Interests. It won’t search and display actual profile or fan page posts (yet). Everything is privacy-aware, meaning a non-friend cannot search and see content you’ve only shared with friends. (“Graph” refers to “social graph” – meaning you’ll be able to find all kinds of new connections depending on the relationships between people and the things they like).

Now is a good time to review ALL your privacy settings. We may see a flurry of users reviewing and editing their interests and pages they’ve liked in the past… as all this will be searchable with the new Graph Search feature. Perhaps some users will even trim back their thousands of friends? ;)

All in all, the new search product will be amazing and provide users yet another way to spend more time on the site… which means good news for business owners… and advertisers! (And no, this new search isn’t a threat to Google. Zillions of folks will still use Google for everyday searches).

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ONLINE ADVICE FOR B&BS AT TOURISM SUMMIT

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SMALL hotels and B&B establishments can use social media to steal a march on larger corporate competitors.

http://www.in-cumbria.com/online-advice-for-b-bs-at-tourism-summit-1.1010804?referrerPath=news-archive

That was the message from award-winning travel blogger Zoë Dawes who addressed the Eden Tourism Summit at Lowther Castle near Penrith.

She told The Cumberland News: “When you ask people if they have a Facebook page or a Twitter stream, probably 50 per cent have.

“But when you ask them how well they are using it, they shrug their shoulders.

“For a small investment in time they can have a huge impact.

“They can share their stories with customers and potential customers.”

Ms Dawes says that a rural B&B could post about squirrels in the grounds, the autumn colours, hens laying, the sort of detail that paints a vivid picture of what it is really like.

She added: “People in the hospitality industry tend to think in terms of media marketing and PR but telling a story like this can be more effective.

“It’s putting you on a world stage very quickly.”

Ms Dawes, who is based at Carnforth in north Lancashire, blogs as www.thequirkytraveller.com.

More than 70 tourism businesses from across Eden attended the Travel Summit.

Other speakers included David Edwards of Visit Britain, Ian Stephens of Cumbria Tourism and Alistair Kirkbride from the Lake District National Park.

The Importance of Broadband for Rural Business Growth

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ASUS eee PC901 & Vodafone Mobile Broadband

The Country Land and Business Association has just published a new policy paper entitled “Broadband Fit for Rural Growth”. In it the CLA claims that businesses in rural areas are being put at risk because of lack of broadband access and the Government is not doing enough to help the situation. The CLA has calculated that currently, between 15% and 20% of those who live in rural areas are unable to receive anywhere near the Government’s stated benchmark of 2 Mbps. This is a national figure.  In Cumbria 21% of our population (around 100,000 people) have their access to the internet limited to a speed of less than 2 Mbit/sec. This will affect 55% of the 22,500 businesses in Cumbria that are registered for PAYE and VAT that are situated in the rural areas. There could be half as many again that are not registered plus the many more people that qualify for help from the £15.4m ERDF bid. The range of business type found in the rural villages is wide with construction, accommodation, food services and professional near the top of the list provided by the Cumbria Intelligence Observatory. The same source indicates that 7,000 businesses operate from villages, hamlets and isolated properties.
According to CLA President Harry Cotterell, “broadband acts as an economic driver for rural business”. The current delays to the broadband project nation wide, with its implications for Cumbria, could seriously inhibit rural business growth.

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SOCIAL MEDIA GIANTS TO DESIGN GRADUATE COURSES

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TOP graduates are to be offered up to £20,000 to train as computer science teachers on courses designed with help from Facebook and Microsoft.

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MICHAEL GOVE

Ministers have turned to the social networking giant and other leading technology firms in a bid to improve the quality of computer science teaching in schools. Education Secretary Michael Gove said that current information and communications technology (ICT) teacher training courses would be axed from next year. Instead, new computer science courses, supported by top technology firms such as Facebook, Microsoft and IBM, will be introduced. Students who graduate from university with at least a 2:1 degree will be eligible for a scholarship worth £20,000 to train on one of the new courses, which have been set up with BCS, the Chartered Institute for IT, the Department for Education (DfE) said. Scholarships will be awarded to candidates who already have a good understanding of computer science concepts such as algorithms, data, networks and the internet.

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Around 50 will be handed out in the first year, the DfE said. Existing ICT teachers will also be trained as experts in computer science. The government said the move was part of an attempt to improve the quality of computer science teaching in schools.

Mr Gove said: “Computer science is not just a rigorous, fascinating and intellectually challenging subject. It is also vital to our success in the global race.

“If we want our country to produce the next Sir Tim Berners-Lee – creator of the internet – we need the very best computer science teachers in our classrooms.

“They need to have the right skills and deep subject knowledge to help their pupils.”

The ICT curriculum has been scrapped to allow schools to decide what to teach in the subject.

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A £3.5m investment is set to create hundreds of rural jobs in Cumbria, the government has claimed.

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Around 900 jobs and almost 500 new businesses would be created following the creation of a Rural Growth Network in the county, said Junior Defra minister Jim Paice.
Cumbria is one of five regions to benefit from a Rural Growth Network, set up to help rural areas overcome the barriers to economic growth.

Mr Paice announced the Rural Growth Network funding during a Rural Roadshow visit to Cumbria on Tuesday (21 August).
The roadshows aim to ensure ministers hear first-hand about rural issues from communities and businesses, discovering what help is needed to support rural growth and jobs.
The direct access to ministers will help ensure that rural England has a strong voice at the heart of Government.
Mr Paice visited the Blencathra Business Centre in Keswick which will be transformed into eight new work premises.
Business services will include one-to-one business advice, online training, networking opportunities and access to superfast broadband.
Entrepreneurs will have new work space to start up their companies and jobs will be created as local businesses get the support they need to grow.
The Blencathra centre is just one of the Rural Growth Network’s ‘enterprise hubs’ planned for rural areas across Cumbria.
They aim to deliver business support to a range of sectors, including food and drink, adventure sports and digital and creative enterprises.
Dozens of new work premises are planned for the county. They include:
• Eight new work premises at Blencathra Business Centre;
• Eight new work premises at Clawthorpe Hall;
• Twenty new work premises at Marl, Ulverston;
• Fourteen new work premises at Alston;
• Eight new work premises at Millom;
• Ten new work premises at University of Cumbria, Ambleside;
The enterprise hubs will be networked with one another, acting as centres for knowledge transfer, provide mentoring, training and skills development.
Mr Paice said: “There are particular challenges to running a business in a remote area.
“Too often, business people are held back by not being able to find work premises, having no access to superfast broadband, or being unable to expand their skills without travelling into a city.
“The Rural Growth Network will take down these barriers to growth and enable local businesses to turn their ambitions into reality.
The network is part of a £165m programme of measures that the government is delivering to grow business and create new job prospects in rural areas.
As well as meeting local councils and local enterprise partnerships, Mr Paice held meetings with the region’s two Rural and Farming Networks.
The networks aim to give community and business leaders the chance to shape rural policy by sharing advice and insights through a “hotline” to government.
The five areas have been chosen to deliver Rural Growth Networks are Wiltshire, Cumbria, Somerset and Devon, Durham and Northumberland, and Warwickshire.

http://www.rsnonline.org.uk/business/%C2%A335m-boost-for-rural-growth-network

What Facebook Integration In The ITunes App Store Means For App Developers

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We all heard the Apple Worldwide Developers Conference (WWDC) keynote in June announcing all of the exciting new features of iOS 6. In addition to Siri’s new powers, the deep Facebook integration has developers and iPhone users drooling. However, very little was discussed regarding the Facebook like functionality in the iTunes App Store. Although this feature isn’t as sexy, I believe that this integration is a game-changer.

For the past two years, application discovery has been a major issue that developers face. With more than 600,000 apps currently on the iTunes App Store, even the best apps get lost in the shuffle. If your app is not appearing in the “Top 25” list, it is tough to attract the attention needed to make it successful. Moreover, as more established firms are getting into the game with ample marketing budgets, they are essentially able to “buy” their way to the top.

However, if you look at how most consumers find apps, it is typically through their friends and word-of-mouth. This is precisely where both the iTunes App store and Facebook fail.

If you like an app on your iPhone, you can post a comment about it on Facebook, and some of your friends may download it. However, there isn’t an intuitive way for your friends to click a link and download something.

Many of us will look at Facebook on the Web and then open up the iTunes App Store on the iPhone and search for the recommended app. This is quite cumbersome. More recently, with iCloud, you can actually click a link in a Web browser and download the app directly in iTunes on your laptop. It then automatically adds it to all of your iOS devices. This feature, however, is not widely known or used.

With the new Facebook like feature in the App Store, I have the ability to click on the like button inside of iTunes on my laptop, or even in the App Store on my iPhone. This action will trigger a wall post on Facebook, and hopefully give a link so that your friends can download the app directly by clicking on that link. Also, as more Facebook users are shifting to mobile, clicking on that link from a friend’s wall should directly open up the App Store on your iPhone.

Although very little was shared regarding the workflow, I think this functionality is a game-changer for many app developers, because it could finally make the iTunes App Store more social, which was the original intent of the now-defunct Ping.

Apple also bought App Store discovery tool Chomp. We have yet to learn how that integration will affect the search and discovery algorithm of the iTunes App Store.

The moral of this story: App developers should continue adding social features into their apps and carefully study how the Facebook like button is going to affect rankings in the iTunes App Store going forward. Entire new business models can emerge because of this integration, and this year is going to be very interesting for app developers.

Ahmed Siddiqui is the founder of game company Go Go Mongo!, which inspires kids to eat healthier, and he also coordinates Startup Weekend events in the San Francisco Bay area.

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Britain’s annual bill for being in EU hits record £19.2 BILLION

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European Union

European Union (Photo credit: erjkprunczýk)

by  on AUGUST 1, 2012

Classic reactionary stuff on our relationship with the EU from the Mail in this article. It does however make me reflect on what rural and farming policy might have looked like should it have had a share of our net contribution of over £80 billion over the last 33 years. Or is that far too short sighted?

And after taking into account what the country gets back in subsidies for forming and regional development projects, Britain paid £8.4billion more than it received last year compared to £7.3 billion in 2010 – an increase of £1.1 billion.

In total since 1979, Britain has paid in about £228 billion and has received back in benefits just £143 billion.

After Angela Merkel’s Germany, Britain is the second highest contributor of the 27 EU members

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