20 tips, tricks, and tools to make your Facebook experience even better

This photo provided by Facebook shows a screenshot from its newest mobile application …
Facebook is by far the largest social network on the web, and while Mark Zuckerberg has made plenty of great calls in its design, the site — and the way people use it — isn't as streamlined as it could be. These 20 tips, tricks, and tools will give help take your Facebook experience to the next level. From simple settings options you may have overlooked, to browser plug-ins dedicated to making the social network even better, you're sure to find something on this list that will make your Facebook time even more addicting than it already is.

Tweak your Facebook settings

1. Appear offline to certain friends
By opening your Facebook chat window, clicking the settings icon in the upper right corner, and then navigating to "Advanced Settings," you can customize your chat experience by appearing offline to certain people on your friends list. This tweak will be especially helpful for those of you with chatty acquaintances who like to talk your ear off when you're online.

25 Facebook tips every social media manager needs

For a small team that doesn't have a great deal of time to devote to social media, staying on top of Facebook's constant changes can be tricky.

To help these social media teams, we compiled 25 important tips for the people who run their brand's Facebook page.

1. How to schedule posts in advance

Often, small businesses don't have time to send regular Facebook updates during the work day. Luckily, Facebook has launched a tool that enables page administrators to schedule updates.

When you post a photo, video, offer, or status update, you will see a little clock symbol below the update that lets you choose the exact time that your post will go live.

This is the perfect tool to schedule all your posts in advance for the day or week. The one word of caution is that interaction is also important, so it would be wise to jump back in to answer queries from your fans and customers in your spare time. What this tool will do is allow you to get back to work and possibly even enjoy a day off, or the whole weekend.

Social Media Career Tips

Social media efforts in the world have changed the way we communicate and often times are accessed before we even or ever meet.  We are often asked what employers look at with respect to searching a candidate and seeking the “best fit” for a given role.  Two of the hottest social media exchanges today and utilized for career searches are LinkedIn and Facebook.

The first, LinkedIn, is a professional networking where those interested in connecting, communicating and sharing ideas and thoughts come together to engage, exchange and communicate skills, career networks and a variety of other possibilities.

Beyond the Basics: 30 Fresh Social Media Tips for 2012

In the ever changing landscape of social networking, you might be wondering if you are getting the most out of your business’s social media campaign. A few weeks ago, Sujan Patel published a great list of 75 Tips to Manage Social Media in 2012 on Quick Sprout. 

Today, I want to expand upon that list and cover some significant changes in social networks, as well as provide some additional tips that you can apply to your social media strategy on the top social networks, including Facebook, Twitter, Google+, LinkedIn, and Pinterest.

10 Great Social Networking Tips and Tricks

These 10 social networking tips and tricks will help you build a stronger network and take your online presence to the next level. All are designed to make you think strategically and take advantage of timesaving tools to boost your effectiveness. 

Here are 10 ways to boost your social standing online.
  1. Listen to Your Audience

    The three most important factors in social networking are audience, audience, audience. Identify what kind of people you're trying to reach and pay attention to what they're saying. Build RSS feeds and monitor conversations using listening tools like TweetDeck, Social Mention and Seesmic. (Take this 10-step tutorial on how to use Social Mention to monitor many social networks at once.) Learn the basics of social metrics, or what to measure and why.

Top 25 Social Media Tips

It’s only been less than a decade, but Social Media has changed the way we do marketing. In our fast-paced industry ideas are thought of, tried out, and either vetted or discarded, all within a matter of days. With all the flurry that’s happening, it sometimes gets a little bit hard to actually figure out what works, and what fails. Here are the top 25 tips you should definitely learn should you decide to venture with social media.
  1. Be objective. Start a campaign by asking yourself questions like: how do I measure success? Upon meeting the metrics, does the campaign stop or would it have further goals? Setting your goals beforehand avoids unnecessary guessing later on when you’re faced with two opposing decisions.

The Secret to Building and Keeping an Engaged Audience

Just ran across this great infographic created by the content marketing agency Blue Grass, and thought it was worth a share. There are some great ideas here that should be applied to your Facebook marketing efforts.

How Often Should a business post updates and events on their fan page?

How often should a business post updates and events on their fan page?

A Facebook Fan page can represent a business, author, musician, organization, or other specialty group. The goal is to interact with your fans, attract more fans, supply information about your group or business, offer a call to action, and of course—to keep the fans you have.

At times, you may post an update, note, or other event and find you lose fans. If you notice a handful of ‘un-like’ stats and have hundreds or thousands of fans, it could just be that momentary attention those who un-liked your page took to read your post and decide it wasn’t worth having appear in their news stream. If you lose fans in tens or even a hundred, then it’s important to take stop all postings until you understand why they left.

How to use facebook as a Customer Service Portal

For any business, customer service is about conversation and resolving conflict, disappointments, handling returns, diffusing customer frustration and anger, and facilitating a satisfactory conclusion for both the customer and your business. Your customer service reputation can be as important to company growth as the actual product or services you provide. And any business owner understands what satisfied customers translate to: return business, excellent referrals, and new customers.

But employee time and efforts utilized for customer service can also detract from profits when excessive hours go into finding resolutions for customers. The expense of this diverted employee time that can be effective in revenue and sales may compound when customer service calls increase.

How to use Facebook as a Customer Service Portal

How to train an employee to mediate and monitor your Facebook fan page

Effective Facebook marketing for any business will require at the least, one person who can maintain and manage your Facebook page. Hiring an outside firm can be more expensive than the actual marketing reach you obtain. And with Facebook ads increasing 28% over the past year, it’s a viable tool for advertising your company to people worldwide. (Statistic taken from NASDAQ at http://community.nasdaq.com/ posted 7/27/201)

Assess the social networking skills of your employees—a nontraditional job skill, and find out who has the skills you need in place to maintain, develop, and move your Facebook advertising reach forward. Not all of your employees will have the same relationship with social media such as Facebook. Mindflash, an online training site that provides quiz integration, video, and report tracking for employee training, provides an infographic that explains the categories of employee candidates for social media management: the Digital Native, the Savvy Technologist, the Reluctant User, the Digital Contrarian and the Digital Newbie. (click to enlarge)

How to train an employee to mediate and monitor your Facebook fan page