Follow Friday: More than just Shameless Promotion!

Are you growing the quality of your network with Follow Friday?

What is the point of Follow Friday? People ask this all the time. It so often seems like it’s just gratuitous plugging of people’s friends.  Well, you are not wrong; however, you are not right either.

What is Follow Friday?

Follow Friday is a hashtag event that happens every Friday.

People tag their posts with #FF and then list names of tweeps they want to give a shout out to.

Why should I bother?

What Follow Friday promotes is engagement.  People offer the coveted #FF to a list of people they engaged with that week.  It is tells everyone who reads your tweets, “these are people I talk to, and people who talk to me”.  These are individuals with whom I have real relationships – they are concerned with conversation rather than just promoting their message.

So when some gives you a #FF they are telling all of their followers that you are a quality tweep.

The FF Strategy

#FF is as simple as listing names.  However the way you group people matters.  You do not talk to them without thinking about what you say, so do not #FF without thinking about it first.  Put similar people in like groups.

  1. When you group people in a niche you can categorize your #FF by saying “My social media #FF” or “My adult super star #FF”. This allows for easier and more effective networking.
  2. People can be peculiar about who they are grouped with. I had a social media tweep comment about being grouped with a bunch of porn stars. Afterward I realized they did not necessarily want that association. They know that I am in social media for adult entertainment, but they weren’t.  So you might not want to have your business development tweeps in with your Titty Tuesday tweeps.  Its like a seating chart at a wedding. Just because they like you does not mean they like each other.

FF Tools

  • Follow Friday Helper is a good tool. It makes it easy to see who you have been engaging with and helps you put them all in one tweet.
  • Top Follow Friday will let you see who is endorsing whom.
  • The Twitter Tag Project will look at your last 200 tweets and identify who you have engaged with and will create your #FF post.

It is Monday. You have all week to collect your Follow Friday tweeps.

Will you #FF?

10 Tips for the best Twitter Bio

Tights with "Follow me" printed on the legsHaving a strong Twitter bio is important. This is your first impression – your first chance to get someone to like you. This is also how search engines find your profile, so you want to make sure it is SEO optimized.

Once a week I go through my new Twitter followers and I decide who I am going to follow back.  I consider a lot of factors in deciding why I follow or don’t follow someone.  One of the biggest reasons is their bio on Twitter.

Think of your bio as your 10 second elevator pitch. You have 160 characters to tell me why I should be interested in you.  If I like what I see, maybe I’ll click your profile and check out your most recent posts.  If those are interesting then I’ll follow you.  But the bio is your handshake.

5 Tips for a strong Twitter Bio:

  1. Tell me who you are. Are you a public figure? What do you do? Why are you here? I want to know who I am following
  2. Web Address: if you have a website, put the url in your bio.
  3. Don’t be crass or abrasive.  If you seem unfriendly and rude, then why would I want to follow you?
  4. Don’t try to sell me.  If your bio is trying to push a product, that tells me that you are about your sales and not about engaging with your followers.
  5. Be charming. Be nice. I want to think that if I follow you that you are approachable.

5 Tips to SEO optimize your Twitter Bio

  1. Web address in the bio. This is an easy way to have your Twitter associated with your business in the search engines.
  2. Business name in the bio. When people search for you, they often search for business names, so include it.
  3. Use industry key words in your bio. Do some keyword research and make sure to use some of the big keywords, that way when people search for those you have a chance of coming up in the search results.
  4. If your name is branded, use your name. This way when people search your name, they have an even better chance of finding you.
  5. Don’t shorten any words.  Search engines don’t search for abbreviations of words. So unless your key term is usually abbreviated, spell it out.

Kim Kardashian does it, do you?

Kim Kardashian in a big feathery dressLast week I was drinking my morning coffee when I saw a brief interview on the Today Show with Kim Kardashian. Matt Lauer was talking to her about her personal brand-based empire. Though they did not focus on it, Kim shared that she often crowdsurfed Twitter to make both personal and business decisions.

In case you are not sure who Kim Kardashian is, she is the star of the reality TV show “Keeping up with the Kardashians”. If that didn’t answer your question (I know it didn’t for me), she is the daughter of Kris and Robert Kardashian. Her father, Robert, is a prominent defense attorney. Her parents divorced and later her mom married Olympic Gold Medalist Bruce Jenner. She has 9 siblings; 3 from her mom, 4 from Bruce and 2 from Bruce and her mom. Her family dynamic contributed to getting the reality show. But Kim is a PR maven. Like Paris Hilton, she is another person who has managed to become famous just for being famous.

Though Kim did not rely on her fame as a basis of success, she has created a very successful business. Starting off as a fashion stylist, she and her sister opened up a clothing store called DAS. She has also launched that into a high end fashion line in conjunction with fashion house Bebe; an Armenian-inspired jewelry line; a shoe company (shoedazzle.com); a fitness DVD, and most recently her own brand of perfume.

In the interview, Kim mentioned that she is often indecisive and will ask her Twitter followers for their opinion, whether it be about what color nail polish she should use or design concepts for the bottle for her new perfume. She said that involving her followers made her more accessible. It allows them to relate to her more easily and feel like they are a part of what she is doing.

This is the key. Crowdsurfing is great for gathering opinions and thoughts, but it is also an excellent way to allow people to feel that they are playing a role in your decisions. It keeps your audience involved and turns them into active participants. However, if you ask your followers for their thoughts and opinions and then completely ignore them, you will have accomplished the opposite of what you set out to do. If you are not actually interested in people’s opinions, then don’t ask.

Below is the short video interview from the Today Show – enjoy.

Visit msnbc.com for breaking news, world news, and news about the economy


This post was originally posted on Blog Cubed

Video Tutorial: How to Send a Direct Message on Twitter

A big question I often get asked is how to send a Twitter direct message. Especially after the New Twitter came out, some people were not sure how messaging worked.  So I put together a video tutorial to walk you through how to send a DM on Twitter. Enjoy

Are you in her box? The new Facebook Email

woman wearing a sexy mailmans outfit

If I send you an email right now, I know that it goes to your inbox.  Worst case scenario, it might go to your junk mail box.   The new Facebook email might change that.  If I am not on your “preferred” list then I might not be getting into your box.

Are you sure you are getting in her box?

Here’s what is new and different, good and bad about the new Facebook email:

What will my email address be?

Anyone who wants it will get the @facebook.com email address. You can sign up for the email address here. Your email address will be your Facebook [email protected].  Not sure what your user name is? Not sure if you have one?  Go here to set up your user name.

Good: Easy branding.
Bad: Most people can guess your email address.

Who can email me?

Everyone.  You do not have to have facebook, or facebook email to email someone with an @facebook.com email address.  Now when you send an email you can reach any email address as opposed to only being able to message fellow facebookers.

Good: Everyone can email you.
Bad: Everyone can email you
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Social Inbox

The biggest change in email management is the social inbox.  This gives you 2 boxes inside your email. 1 is the preferred email and the other is, well, “other”. The preferred inbox is where emails from people you want to read will go.  Facebook decides this though social mapping. They base this on who you interact with on Facebook.  You can add or subtract people from this inbox. So, even with the social inbox you can still control who is in your “preferred” list.

The “other” box is literally a catch-all for everything else. It is meant to contain emails you still need to read but don’t want to prioritize, like bills and newsletters.  However, since there is no spam folder, this is also where all your spam will go.

The other interesting feature about organizing your emails by “preferred” and “other” is that you will receive notifications any time you receive an email in your preferred box.  Depending on how you have these set up, the notifications can go to your phone, SMS & Text, facebook notification, and even to your chat window if you are logged into Facebook.

Good: You can easily read the email you want to read before anything else.
Bad: You might miss important emails because they are not in your preferred box.

Will there be spam?  oh yes.

The new email address makes it easy to figure out email addresses.  They are crawlable by bots, so the spam bots will be able to collect them. So it is possible that you will be flooded with spam.  Since there is no junk mail box, all your spam will go into your “other” folder. The biggest problem with this is that you will have emails that you want to read in your “other” folder and they might get lost in all the spam.

Good: Got nothing for this one.
Bad: Lots of spam.

Social Media Best Practices (and some other good ones, too)

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Poster with a womans cleavage and a padlock holding her shirt closed and the caption says NSFW modeThe ASACP just released their Social Media Best Practices to help guide those of us in adult entertainment to make sure that children are not accessing unsuitable material. It is not just children we are protecting.  If someone accesses inappropriate material at work, they could get fired.

A friend of mine once bought a DVD boxed set of B movies from the 60’s and 70’s.  During holiday celebrations, he popped in the first disc to sit down and watch one with his entire family. His parents, brother and sister-in-law, nieces, nephews and daughter were all there.  When the movie came on, he realized that this was an old porn.  Whoops.

Social media is trying to help insure that you know what you are about to see, so you can make sure that you are in the right place at the right time, and not “accidentally” stumbling across anything inappropriate.

Listen to Joan Irvine talk about Social Media Best Practices in her blog radio interview on Sin 2.0.

Social Media Best Practices

  • Label all sexually explicit ‘social media content postings’, including but not limited to: text, video, audio, images or widgets enabling any software functionality.
  • All social media content postings should indicate “Age-Restricted” or “Sexually Explicit” based on the content.
  • When you direct people to age-restricted content or commerce on or from online social networks & mobile devices, ensure that all of your social media and mobile pages from blogs, ads and e-commerce tools to videos, fan pages, apps and widgets are labeled with the Restricted to Adults – RTA website label (http://rtalabel.org).

Additional Good Practices

  • label your tweets or posts with #nsfw (not safe for work)
  • Make sure that you have a landing page that is not explicit, that lets people know they are about to enter an explicit website.
  • Set an age limit of 18+ on your Facebook fan page
  • If you have a Facebook profile, create a group for your explicit postings and restrict all explicit talk and postings to the group. Make sure to make your group private.

Let us know if you have any other good practices to add to the list!

Sex and Facebook Ads

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scantily clad girl in a christian singles ad on facebookIf you thought having an adult Facebook page was hard to accomplish, try running an adult ad. It is almost impossible. Even running content that is considered family friendly can be really hard to maintain due to the strict rules set forth by Facebook.

To run a successful ad campaign on Facebook you have to start with the content of your page. Your content has to be deemed acceptable, and Facebook has some pretty strict guidelines. Many of these seem pretty simple and straightforward. But the reality is, when you are on the network and doing your thing, it can be pretty hard to color within the lines.

Facebook Rules for Advertising:

General Rules:

  1. Ads must directly relate to the content on the landing page.
  2. Ads must clearly represent the company, product or brand that is being advertised. Products or services promoted in the ad must be directly available on the landing page.
  3. Ads cannot insult, harass or threaten a user.

Translation:

  1. You cannot have an ad that is advertising something different than the page it is linked to.
  2. You cannot pretend you are a different company or a different person than you actually are.
  3. You cannot tease or taunt people in your ad to get them to click on the ad.

Landing Pages:

  1. Ads that contain a URL or domain in the body must link to that same URL or domain.
  2. Landing pages cannot generate a pop-up (including “pop-overs” and “pop-unders”) when a user enters or leaves the page.

Translation:

  1. If you show a web address in your ad, the ad must link to that web address. So you cannot have a web address but have the link go somewhere else.
  2. When you click on the ad it cannot take you to a page that has pop-up ads or pop-up pages.

Targeting:

  1. Any targeting of ads based on a user attribute, such as age, gender, location or interest must be directly relevant to the offer, and cannot be done by a method inconsistent with privacy and data policies.
  2. Ads with adult themes, including contraception, sex education and health conditions must be targeted to individuals at least 18 years old. Platform ads should do this via Demographic Restrictions, not by obtaining user data.

Translation:

  1. When you target an ad to your audience, it has to be directly related to the content you are advertising. So if you are advertising a dating site, it has to be directed to singles.
  2. Any ad with adult content can only be directed to people 18 and older.

Prohibited Content:

  1. Adult content, including nudity, sexual terms and/or images of people in positions or activities that are excessively suggestive or sexual, or provocative images in violation of community standards;
  2. Adult friend finders or dating sites with a sexual emphasis;
  3. Adult toys, videos or other adult products;
  4. Ads must not be false, misleading, fraudulent, or deceptive.
  5. Ads will not be permitted in cases where a business model or practice is deemed unacceptable or contrary to Facebook’s overall advertising philosophy.

Translation:

  1. Porn. Naked pictures. Sexual pictures. Naughty words. Violence…in a nut shell. Nope, probably no nut-shells either.
  2. Dildos, vibrators, strap-ons, lube, and pretty much anything you would find in a sex shop.
  3. You cannot lie in your ad.
  4. You can’t go against the code of ethics in the Facebook Terms of Service.

Most people in the adult industry will find advertising on Facebook pretty difficult. Some of you will be able to do it, depending on what your website or content is, some might not. Learning the rules are the only way to know if you can.

Stay tuned for the next post on porn stars advertising on Facebook and learn some tips and trick on how to run a Facebook ad if you are in porn.

Does Facebook own my photos?

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girl wearing a plaid skirt, with no top on and a banner going over her breasts that says "Facebook is hotter than me."Facebook owning the rights to our photos is something most of us never think about when we use it. But if your photos are part of your business or professional image, then this might be a big concern for you.
The Facebook Terms of Service state:

  1. For content that is covered by intellectual property rights, like photos and videos (“IP content”), you specifically give us the following permission, subject to your privacy and application settings: you grant us a non-exclusive, transferable, sub-licensable, royalty-free, worldwide license to use any IP content that you post on or in connection with Facebook (“IP License”). This IP License ends when you delete your IP content or your account unless your content has been shared with others, and they have not deleted it.

What this means is that when you post photos on Facebook you give permission to Facebook to use that content, however they only have the right to use your photos in connection with Facebook or Facebook promotions, like television or internet ads.

The exception to this is if you have your privacy settings to only show your photos to your friends list. Facebook will respect your privacy settings.

When you delete your account, Facebook no longer has rights to use your photos. But there is a catch. This is only true if you have all your photos set to be visible only to your friends. If they are visible to friends-of-friends, networks or the public, then Facebook has rights to use them whether you have an account or not. Also, if you post a picture on a friend’s wall, and they do not have their profile set to private, then Facebook has the rights to those pictures too.

The likelihood that Facebook is going to use your photo is pretty slim. And if they do use it, it will only be used on Facebook or for Facebook promotions.

If this is a concern for you, there are a few ways you can help prevent unwanted distribution of your photos.

  1. Put a watermark on your photo, or put a line of text on it that says “this photo is the property of…”

This will also help prevent people from snagging your images.

A watermark or line of text won’t technically prevent Facebook from using your photo, but it does greatly reduce the possibility.
  2. Change your privacy settings to “Friends Only”. 
This will only allow your friends to see your photos.  However, public figures like porn stars, dancers or prominent business people, most likely want their images available to everybody.
  3. As an adult star or dancer, you can use your publicity shots or teaser pictures exclusively in your profile, since you probably don’t mind if people share them.

Read about how not to get deleted from Facebook! More information on Facebook practices for Adult Entertainment.