Twitter Gallery Has No Boobies

When Twitter released their photo gallery it was a feast of boobies! All the photos from third party apps like twitgoo and yfrog were streaming in with naked bodies galore. Of course we wondered how long this was going to last. Posting naked photos is against the Twitter terms of service. But since Twitter was simply aggregating the pictures, we asked if they would put pressure on the apps to crack down on nudity.

On the down-low, I think they did. I ran a test photo on twitgoo of a blowjob and it was deleted in less than 30 seconds.

Officially I have not seen anything that says that, but there has been a change in the Twitter gallery. It is not longer a feast of boobies. It is more like a feast of clothed people in sexy poses. The only two photo apps that I have really seen being aggregated are yfrog and twitgoo. Both of these apps are notorious for deleting adult photos very quickly.  Moby, an app that was previously aggregating in the gallery, is not anymore. When running test photos for them, they remained active.

So we had a few glorious weeks of hundreds of boobie pictures to feast upon in the gallery, but it was just a matter of time before they figured out a way to make the gallery compliant with their terms of service. I guess we will have to go back to consuming boobies one tweeted link at a time.

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New Branding for Fan Pages?

Facebook has been rolling out the “timeline” update on the newsfeed and on profiles. Will fan pages be the next update? It is the logical progression. Since the fan page update at the beginning of 2011, Facebook has been updating the layout of the fan page in conjunction with the profiles. The main goal being consistency in the user experience.

The latest update for the profiles was not only a dramatic visual change but also a UI (user interface) change. It is changing how users are using Facebook. In fact, the new timeline profile is deepening the emotional connection between Facebook and its user. If Facebook updates fan pages as well, it has the potential to have a similar emotional effect.

The cover image will be a great opportunity for branding, with the profile image being the “face” of your engagement. The more graphic display will really encourage fan pages to post more dynamically using significantly more photos. Beyond using more photos, it will encourage businesses to use a more cohesive and truly graphic based brand strategy. The page itself will be like an interactive page from a magazine. It has the potentially to be incredible.

No profiles have gone public yet. Below is a mock up by the New York Agency Skinny of a potential fan page. The branding opportunity is incredible! Of course this means that people will need to strategically implement their fan page design, which means that marketing firms need to embrace social media design. The game is changing…and getting more aesthetically pleasing!

In adult this could be a good thing or a bad thing. It might make your fan page look more porno than the old fan layout. Will this cause more flags on your page? Will adult be more likely to be deleted? Possibly. However it gives a huge opportunity for improved branding. Your page will be an amazing representation of your brand and that will do a lot for growing your network and pushing people to your site.

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Facebook is Giving Away Money!

Facebook moneyIf Facebook gives you money will you place an ad? Despite ads under performing as a whole, most people in the adult entertainment industry have not been able to take advantage of ads due to Facebook restrictions. But some of us can. In fact more of us can than think we can.

The assumption we make is that an ad has to go to a website. Adult websites are not allowed on Facebook, so you cannot link and therefore you cannot ad right? wrong. You don’t have to link your ad to a website. Link your ad back to your fan page. Use the ad as a way to build fans, and then use your page as a way to promote your brand and push people to your site. But do you consider putting an ad for your fan page a worthwhile investment? What if someone gave you a free $50 in ad money?

Early in 2012 Facebook Marketing Solution which includes a partnership with the National Federation of Independent Business and the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, will be launching a $10 million dollar grant program. The purpose is to give every qualified small business on Facebook $50 towards advertising on the site. This is an effort to promote commerce, help small businesses get an advertising boost and help familiarize small business with Facebook Ads. The primary desired result is awareness, additionally they are looking for more fans for the pages, more revenue for the small business and an increase usage of Facebook ads by small business.

This is a huge opportunity for small business to get acquainted with the ad program and get some free marketing money. Because details have not been released we do not know what counts as a qualified business. But if you do not yet have a fan page for your business, now is the time to build it so you if you do qualify for it, can get you money!

 

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Facebook Throwing Us a Bone

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Facebook Recomendation 7 VeilsThough Facebook has been hard on the adult industry, holding us to standards that other pages don’t seem to have to abide by. Many people in the adult industry still want to have access to the 800+ million members on Facebook.  One of the big challenges for pages have been reaching their audience. The best way to reach your target audience is to find, and network with, similar pages. But this has not been easy. Fan pages have finally been given a tool that will help us network with each other.

Recommendations

It use to be that you could suggest your page to your friends. It was a button at the bottom of your left nav menu. You clicked “suggest page” and you could send suggestions to all your friends. At one point this was a great way to spread the word very quickly about your page. If you were able to get someone who was influential on Twitter to suggest your page you could get literally hundreds of new fans over night! But then Facebook changed their notification system. So instead of seeing your page suggestions, they were buried in the Facebook matrix. This essentially left page suggestions completely impotent.

From that point the only way you could suggest a page was to post on your fan page and ask your friends to spread the word about you. Does this work? Yes, well sometimes. A lot of people don’t know how to “share” a post, or they are just not interested in doing PR for your fan page. Though the suggest a page is not being brought back, Facebook mainframe is now going to actually help fan pages network with each other.

When you use facebook as your page you will now see 2 rows of recommended pages. The first row are generally recommended pages, based off of other pages you like. Then below that is another set of recommendations. These show pages that your fans like. Giving you the opportunity for your page to like pages that your fans like.

This is a big boost for adult. The best way to find your fans is to engage with the pages they like.  The recommendations will help us to find the pages our fans like as well as suggesting other similar pages.

 

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Facebook Removing a Feature You Never Knew About

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Facebook TattooThe use of Facebook in adult entertainment is always a big question. But many people persist in using Facebook for branding purposes. So for those of you us who persist, there are some updates happening that might affect the way you use your fan page.

Facebook is removing yet another feature from Fan Pages. As of Sept 30th, you will no longer have the ability to update your fans via email. I am sure many of you didn’t even know that you could update your fans via email, well if you are just learning about this now you have about 2 more days before it is being removed.

So why is it being removed? For the exact reason why you are wondering why you have never received a page update. Well, it is likely that you have and did not know it. When Facebook updated their email service, they created their version of a spam box. It is a file on your email called “Other” this is where Facebook puts any email that it thinks is likely spam or unwanted. Of course this means any email from a fan page. They only way around emails not being filtered into this other box was to go into your email, open up a message and then move it to your “messages” box. Of course non of us ever did that. In fact, most of us never even go into the other box.

Since all fan page emails get shoved into other as soon as it is sent, Facebook has decided to remove the option entirely. Often times when a big update goes through, like Facebook email, certain things don’t function the way they were anticipated. Though Facebook wants people to use their network as a primary email address, most people are not. Very few people look at Facebook as a way to communicate with people not on the social network, and they definitely do not view it as a replacement for their primary email address. So the spam filter is under utilized and generally ignored.

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No One Cares How Many Twitter Followers You Have

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Twitter follower treeI see people posting all the time about how many followers they have.  They usually say something like “20 more followers and I will post a naked pic!” or “I am almost at 1000 followers, help me get the last 10!”. From a social media management point of view, the number of followers you have matters. You want to keep track of that. From a social media follower point of view, no one cares.

If you follow someone, you don’t care how many followers they have. You don’t care about getting them to the next thousand. The only reason people will encourage more people to follow you is because they want what you are promising. They want to see the sexy picture or video that you will post.

Though promising something your fans want is a good way to reach your goal, it is not a good social marketing strategy. You are not building relationships. You are not building quality. You are barely building interest.

Instead of going out and asking people to follow you, try going out and following other people. Follow some of the basic rules of engagement…start engaging. Go talk to people. If you start joining some conversations and start following people, they will follow you back. You will make your next milestone and you will be building your relationships. In the end you get it all!

So don’t be a soap box preacher. Don’t just ask from your followers and think that your big contribution is showing them more of you. Remember, social media is about being social.

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Track your Twitter Tracks: New Analytics Tool for Twitter

Sexy Twitter Bird Woman

Can you track your Twitter tracks?

The biggest questions people who are doing business on Twitter have is how much traffic are they getting from Twitter and what is the ROI? When it comes to marketing, tracking your ROI is always a challenge, unless you are following a simple chain like link – click- sale. But lets face it, most sales are not that simple, because most of us don’t just buy something the first time we see it. We all like to browse and look around, read reviews, and get to know the product or brand. So if you can’t always track link – click – sale then the next step of tracking ROI is tracking the amount of traffic you are pushing to your site.

The great thing about Twitter traffic is that it is qualified. This means that the traffic coming from your Twitter clicks are people who are interested in what you have to offer. They are clicking because they are interested and therefore far more likely to buy what you are selling. Great! So how much Twitter traffic are you generating?

That is an excellent question and until this week, that was not a question easily answered.

Twitter is coming out with their own web analytics. This will let you track your Twitter traffic, see how well your website Twitter integration is working, and see how your website links are being spread across Twitter. The new tool will help give you a much clearer picture of your true Twitter traffic and how well your marketing efforts are working.

Currently the tool is only available to a select few, but it is expected to start rolling out to the rest of us over the next few weeks.

Will this replace tools like bit.ly and google analytics? Not likely. But it will be another tool in the analytics arsenal that will help you get the most from your social marketing.

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Twitter Photo Upload: No Nude

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Twitter Bird with CameraTwitter has finally launched the new API that will allow you to upload pictures directly onto twitter from the mainframe. This new service is being powered by Photobucket. If it has been a while since you heard that site name, you are not the only one. But this new pairing will likely make Photobucket competitive again. Along with the launch, it looks like Photobucket.com  gave itself a nice little redesign to make themselves more fresh and relevant.

But despite the website facelift, Photobucket is still not adult friendly. This is from their terms of service:

  • 8.4  contains nudity, excessive violence, or offensive subject matter or contains a link to an adult website;

Though it is not like most of the photo sharing third party apps are adult friendly and plenty of adult stars and sites use them for posting. Sure yFrog or TwitPic will occasionally delete a photo, but that doesn’t seem to stop anyone. I am sure that Photobuckets attitude towards adult will likely be ignored as well. Of course, how diligent will they be with deleting the pics and because of their association with Twitter, will it affect your account standing if you violate their TOS?

The big deal with the Twitter integration of photo uploading is that they are now directly competing with yFrog, Twitpic, Twitgoo, Lockerz and other third party apps.  Since the purchase of Tweetdeck in May, and now the integration of photo uploading, Twitter seems to be trying to corner the market on Twitter based applications. But no worries to the adult market here, SexyPeek and MyPornProfile are not even on the Twitter Birds radar.

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Is Porn Popular or Influential?

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Cheerleader Beach Party

Does your popularity convert to influence? Do your friends actually read your tweets? Converting popularity to influence is integral to your social media strategy.

There is always a battle between influence and popularity.  Popularity is sexier, but influence is a lot more powerful. Porn plays in both worlds. So which is more significant?,

How often do we get caught up in the desire for popularity instead of recognizing the importance of influence? Honestly, fairly often. But these two levels of social relationships can, and do, intersect. In the world of porn, popularity can also be influential.

At what point might you be sacrificing your influence for popularity?

Social media mirrors everyday life, where the popular kids seem to have it all.  The trendy people in social media have the big numbers. We go to their profiles and see 30,000 Twitter followers or 10,000  Facebook fans. They have lots of tweets, everyone wants to follow them, and they seem to be the admired role models.

Twitter, in particular, supports the notion of popularity. When you decide whether to follow someone, you base that in part on how many followers and how many tweets they have racked up.

Social proof is the idea that your popularity proves your influence. Although in a sense this is true, the equation is not that simple. Social proof is not just popularity, it is actually based around influence. Say that you have 20,000 followers and tweet a call to action like “Visit my new website.  If on in ten people respond, and even fewer retweet, your level of influence is low. So what value do your other 19,900 followers have? Very little. However, if you have 200 followers, tweet a call to action and 150 of them retweet and respond, your level of influence and the value of your followers are high.

The biggest mistake people make in social media is that they see people with 30,000 followers and decide that to be successful they need to mimic them. They may get numbers, but they may not be implementing the engagement strategy that creates real impact.

It is easy to get numbers. Anyone can buy followers. I can have 10,000 overnight if I choose, but not one of them will read anything I tweet.

The magic combination is being both well-known and influential. There are tweeters who have achieved this magic combo and create strong and powerful social media campaigns.

If you want to be successful you need influence, built on a solid reputation, more than popularity. That’s the real proof in social proof. Over time, with networking and a good strategy, recognition and status will come. But without influence you are just the lonely head cheerleader who has no real friends.

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