© by Marion Doss

… Yeah. Not Bottlenose like a dolphin.

Bottlenose is a social media curation tool. It helps you zero in on just the content you want in the daily deluge of information from social media. You can even set it up to push content to you from accounts you’re not following.

I don’t much care to say there’s a wrong or a right way to use Twitter. I like to focus on what’s effective for a particular business. And if you’re following more than 25 people, especially for business purposes, it’s hard to keep that information organized.

Bottlenose has come closest to doing just that. It’s almost a substitute for some of the other Twitter clients out there, including the new web version of Twitter.

Have a peek at the video, and I’ll tell you some more of my likes and dislikes.

Pros and Cons of Bottlenose (The Short List)

In my pros column:

• As of today I’m able to post to Twitter using it.
• You can use it to spot trends at a glance
• You can use it to zero in on just the part of your stream you want to see at the moment – very useful if you want to see just breaking news, or are drilling down to find intelligence on a specific topic.
• It can push silos of content to you by type as well as topic from ALL of Twitter, not just your stream
• You can also see how popular certain content is with one quick look
• SONAR. I forgot to include a better example in the video. But it’s like being able to see your relationship to the content you discuss in an animated word cloud format that you can zero in on.

In the con/dislike section:

• It’s still in Beta – even after 5 takes, there was one thing in each take of the video that wasn’t working or was buggy.
• Little features of most Twitter clients that you may love aren’t all live (like the option to reply to everyone in a conversation or just one person)
• It’s overkill for people using Twitter to do just one thing
• You can’t untie Klout – it’s not a plugin, it’s part of the system
• Though the Mashable announcement mentioned Facebook, and the sign up page , the tie to Twitter is more prominent – not a huge con but Facebook drives more overall traffic.
• To get in, you either need a high Klout score or an invitation.
• There’s a few too many automated options for my tastes, like the ability to auto-like a post on Facebook using a custom filter. But that’s just because I think the whole like thing is too three-years-ago already.

Of course, many of those cons could get cleared up as the tool moves out of Beta or gains request for the addition or removal of certain features.

In Venture Beat, Nova Spivack, one of the creators of Bottlenose is quoted as saying:

“The stream is the next big problem after the cloud…”

You’d better believe it. As social media gains more user numbers, some of those folks are going to fall into your network. You may want to connect to more people, businesses and sources of information than before. And the problem with the stream of information we’re constantly having thrust toward us is how to manage it – how do we extract just the information we want that day without having to change who we’re monitoring so often?

Bottlenose may just be the answer.

Right now, you may not be able to gain access if you don’t have an invite or a high Klout score. No, I don’t have any, and I don’t know what constitutes a high enough Klout score. But try Mashable for invites, or tweeting  – people using Bottlenose to monitor for requests on Twitter  are sure to find you now.

If you can’t see the video playlist, you can click here to make the magic happen.

I spent about half an hour this weekend updating my privacy settings in Facebook this past weekend.

I’m not a complete freak about keeping my data private – mostly because, due to snafu or acquisition by a less than sympathetic company, I assume that all of what I say online will be public one day no matter what one company or another may say, or sincerely intend.

However, there are some things I do on Facebook that I feel contribute too much noise to the stream or that I am happier keeping to myself. Examples: a game on Facebook that I play as a guilty pleasure – not Farmville. In fact, I’m so ashamed of this secret, you can only find out by watching the videos closely.

Another example: I love Spotify. And putting Spotify in my Facebook is the best idea since putting peanut butter in my chocolate. The only problem is that it broadcasts every single song I play on my playlist. Facebook touted this in their F8 announcement as a feature, rather than the bug I believe it to be.

When I was 19, sure, I wanted to share every waking moment and incident with my friends. Khadijah Ali-Coleman, who I am still friends with since we went to college together, can attest to the 20 page letters we would write back and forth despite the fact that we both lived on campus within walking distance.

But now that I’m about to skid around the corner to 40, I enjoy a bit more mystery. And whether it was Facebook’s intent or not, it’s clear from the update that they assume we all think like we’re in our late teens or early 20s, or they want us to adopt that thinking.

Thank you, no.

What might be fine when I’m listening to classical music is not so much when I’m in the mood for hardcore hip-hop, or some “make a baby” ballads.

Happily, during my time tweaking privacy options, I discovered that there are some settings you can tweak without removing the app. What I found out is on the playlist too.

However, there’s sadly no setting for deciding whether to publish on a case by case basis, or if I just want to broadcast the name of a playlist, manually.

Here’s a descriptive list of the videos in the playlist, so you can skip to the one that suits you:

1. How to Control Who Sees Your Public Updates in Facebook
2. How to Set Up Your Default Post Settings in the New Facebook
3. How to Set Your Profile Visibility and Privacy Settings on Facebook
4. How to Control Apps Posting Behavior And Protect Your Privacy from Apps on Facebook
5. How to Control Who Can Connect to You on Facebook and How
6. How to Stop People from Tagging You in Photos You’re not in
7. How to Keep Your Facebook Timeline from Being Completely Public
8. How to Block People or All Application Requests of a Specifc App on Facebook
9. How to Hide All of A Certain Type of Update (Like Tweets) From Your Facebook Stream, (or keep from broadcasting certain updates, like who you’ve friended)

Stop spreading this rumor.

Facebook is not charging. There are stories about it on the Huffington Post, about the last time this rumor went around, and this time.

Every time you repeat what you heard through the grapevine as news without Googling it first, a kitten meets a violent, senseless end. You can stop the wholesale massacre of precious tiny cute little kittens by either not spreading hoaxes, or simply telling your friends who do, to STFU.

And feel free to send the link to this post to your friends who tried to convince you otherwise./ Here’s a shortened one for Twitter’s sake: http://www.freetraffictip.com/?p=10028.

You’re also free to use the picture above in a blog post of your own – you’ll find my Facebook rumor killer picture here. For other internet rumor issues, feel free to use teh kitteh below, or go to ICHC and make your own.

Whatever you do, please don’t stand idly by while these poor kittens are suffering at the hands of incredibly dumb ALL CAPS messages on status updates.

Save a kitten. Stop a rumor.

I’m told the smart thing to do is to

make one of those squeeze page thingees

and get more people on my list by making them sign up to my newsletter,

THEN make the landing page my Fast Facebook Traffic guide or the one about getting more leads, fans and customers from your Facebook page, before

finally giving away the video for free.

And sometimes I do that. I use my free content to generate leads. Anyone who thinks that’s wrong is welcome to provide for my family or keep walking.

Free is known to have a price – time investment, and email address… but that’s not what I’m doing today.

Because I also believe something is to be said for being more open and accessible with your information and giving out as much value as you can beforehand.

I’ll let you watch the video, then I’ll come back to why I’m giving this away at the bottom of the page.

If you can’t see the video below, because you’re reading this via feed or syndication, you can take a look at today’s newsletter about the Basic Facebook Strategy video.

Hope you enjoy this and find it useful.

So where were we? I was saying how great it is to give things you could charge for away, right?

It’s not to destroy the competition that creates products that aren’t as good as the free tips you give away. Not everyone puts a value on free unless they trust you. So that’s not it.

And there’s more benefit than just the good feeling it gives you. When you invest the hours and hours it takes to produce a 40 minute video, edit it so it makes sense to people, then make the format digestible to a web browser, and give it away completely free, you provide assistance to the world.

I believe that comes back to you, especially in the days when you’re absolutely aching for a break, or help or… some form of good luck to come your way after almost 6 weeks of not being able to work at full speed because you were sick or unable. That’s the spot I’m in today, and it always comes back to – give until it hurts.

But it’s not the spiritual reward that makes this a valid tip. It’s not the belief that I have that any good you put into the world will come back to you ten-fold.

Yeah, I hope you buy my products. I believe $8.88 is reasonable for techniques that over the past four years have put over $100k in my pocket

Now, that could be taken as me making a testimony to my own greatness. And I’m pretty arrogant about the things I’m good at, so that’s probably true.

Or it could be taken as an extra free traffic tip – giving away valuable information that others would charge for, because you believe it’s the right thing to do for that situation. Also true.

Because the real tip here is that when you put valuable information into the world, when you do a service that you are in no way obliged or even expected to do, you can’t go wrong.

Your reputation will improve, no matter how high it already is. The information you share speaks to your expert status and functions as a free trial.

And if nothing else, you helped someone. People don’t easily forget that.

Back to belief systems though – I am certain this small deed will come back to me. It may not come from where I’d like or hope, but somehow, it always returns, greatly multiplied.

And according to the New York Daily News, so  does Mark Zuckerberg.

The popular social networking site is in talks with potential partners about how to enter the market in the Communist country, Bloomberg.com reported late Friday.

“We are currently studying and learning about China, as part of evaluating any possible approaches that could benefit our users, developers and advertisers,” the California company said in an emailed statement to the news service.

Facebook is currently banned in China.

So who cares?

What if Facebook DOES figure out how to get all up in China? Well, if your business has global appeal (looking at you, information marketers/entertainment bloggers/consulting), that could open a whole new market for you. A report from about a year ago said there were over 384 million people online in China, the world’s largest online community. And according to the latest data on world cell phone use by population, 17 out of 100 Chinese people have cell phones.

Could be big – watch that story.

The video above, also found on YouTube, is based on the article, “Facebook for Business: A Simple Spam-Free Way to Get People on Facebook to Visit Your Site“, which is free for republishing.

If you’re an affiliate of Fast Facebook Pages Traffic , then you can replace the link in this article with your affiliate link when you publish it to your site or newsletter. This video is one of those that will soon be available in the affiliate section, if you want to embed the link in the video, and publish it to your site, as well.

This free presentation, called One Very Simple Way to Use Facebook for Business goes over one simple 7 step process for finding out whether Facebook for Business will work for you. You can find out in 15 minutes a day for a week. I also have a free video and an article about this process coming up for anyone who is a free member of this site.

As always premium Free Traffic Tip & Traffic Reality members will get it first, as well as a few extras.

This morning, as a result of jolted into a state of hyper-alertness by a way-too-early but important phone call, the following headline, which I ironically found on Twitter, came my way:

“Is Facebook for Business Overrated“?

And after a brief glance at it, I realized that I would absolutely LOVE it if more people even took the time to think about this question.

The reason is found in this brief clip:

As a business owner I favor results over hype, which means; Are we selling more stuff based on our marketing effort? If we aren’t selling more stuff, we typically make changes and tweaks until we see sustainable improvement. As is the case with most small business, our marketing budget is constrained, so we need to employ things that work. Things that work in business are much more simple to determine than folks want to admit.

Return on investment does not need to be complicated. So, if you were advertising in a certain magazine, with no measurable leads or sales, wouldn’t you change something up, like deploy your marketing resources elsewhere? Of course you would, except when it comes to Facebook, most of us continue to drudge on, trying new things to engage prospects.

Now, I’m not going to go into my usual spiel about how Facebook marketing isn’t for everyone or that whole thing. Or the fact that the vast majority of people who are on Facebook for business reasons are doing the absolute most completely backwards things to get anything out of Facebook.

The very simple secret to Facebook is that it’s really not a marketing vehicle.

Square peg. Round hole.

Other than employing the proper advertising techniques for Facebook in the area where ads are sold, I’ve been saying since 2007 that using Facebook for business is a completely different animal.

(And it’s partly for this reason that I’m still not all that crazy about Facebook’s Social Ads, but that’s for another day.)

Can you use Facebook to get measurable improvements in sales? Yes. Can you do it with the traditional marketing processes you’ve been taught. Absolutely not.

I’ve written three very practical how-to guides on Facebook, none of which I’m going to link to here.

(They’re linked from the sidebar and the Massive Traffic page if you’re that interested. I welcome your business, but as always, I want you to try something simple and free first to test before you ever buy something from me.)

Instead, I’m going to give you a quick daily routine to try on Facebook in the next post.

If this helps in a way that impacts your website traffic, then continue to move on to the more refined techniques.

This assumes that your site, particularly if it’s a blog, is set up to properly capture leads and convert them into sales. If it’s not, ANY marketing, networking or promotional activity you’re doing is far less effective, so fix that first, and then come back to this.

Hint: If you can’t wait for the next post, there are more on Facebook – no need to log in to see them.

Thank you so much for reading this. It isn’t the normal blog post that comes out of this site, not by far.

Here’s the gist.

I put together a new package featuring new way to find your most targeted audience on Facebook worth $200, on sale for $7.77 at this writing.

I priced it at less than $9 until I go to Africa this coming week for two reasons.

1- I want you to buy it now not later, because
2- I want to stay longer and not have to work during my first real vacation in 12 years, therefore,
3- Rather than beg for money, as always I’d like to trade value for value. And I like to overdo it on my end.

You probably already have a Facebook Profile, and if you’re a part of my audience, you’ve probably already picked up my guide Fast Facebook Traffic.

(A guide to getting more traffic and leads with your Facebook Profile without violating Facebook’s rules. Or acting in a way that lead people to think you’re a jerk.

Also less than $10 if you don’t have it!)

There are many effective ways to grow your audience through Facebook without doing that used salesman kind of pitch – which we all know doesn’t work anymore.

But you know all that, so why wouldn’t you have a Facebook Profile? Of course you do.

Facebook is an incredible resource for connecting to people who become customers. They drive more traffic than Google now, and with 600 million people using it, not being on Facebook isn’t the best idea a person has ever had.

It’s a shame that, with a personal profile, there are so many extra steps to get people to engage with you. I believe in engagement before lead capture, but Facebook is really making it harder than it has to be.

And yes, my new guide overcomes that, so you can get access to more new people in a way that has them to connect to your page And your newsletter within minutes of first encountering you. But let’s talk about how involved the Facebook profile engagement process is.

First you have to set up your profile so that people know where to go to learn more about you, and hopefully, one day, visit your site and sign up for your products and services.

The solution to that used to be easy – just use a Facebook plug in to put a sign up box in your sidebar. Of course, Facebook put an end to that.

But you can still push news and updates from your profile that will encourage people to get into your sales funnel. If you know how to set up an engaging blog that converts visitors to newsletter sign ups, the cycle will be longer, but there’s still a chance that you’ll get it done.

If only the work were over then. And granted, the process isn’t dull. It’s fun even. But parts of it are inefficient.

For example, let’s say you’ve set up your profile to talk about business to fellow business people, and have a filter for stuff that is directed to family and friends.

Now, you have to go and find out where people are and draw them to you. One common place is a Facebook group. If you know which ones to go to and where to post to get the best results, and how to figure out which ones are active, again,  super.

Of course, Facebook went and changed Groups too. Except they didn’t change the old groups over to the new format. Not that you always want it to, but now you don’t have a choice. (The hell?)

So, okay, you’ve set up your profile properly, you’ve gone and found people to interact with, they click on your profile and join… great, some of the new people are coming. But what happened to the old people?

Aw, nuts! Facebook made yet Another change, and if you haven’t directly interacted with people lately, you aren’t showing up in their stream. Unless they do a series of funky adjustments that most people can’t and won’t be bothered with. So the people you worked so hard to recruit aren’t getting your updates any more, unless you knew the secret to getting in that group in the first page.

So what now?

Well, what if you could set up a page on Facebook with an irresistible feature that made people want to connect to you?

What if having them sign up with you let you contact them through their news feed, through their Facebook messages, and through your newsletter?

How would you like it if you were exempt from the rule that if you haven’t directly interacted with someone in the past few weeks, they couldn’t see you? What if your special status made you visible to them?

What if that didn’t even matter because they were on your email list?

Suppose that through this special page, you could contact people several times a day, or outsource the job to someone who could send out messages on your behalf several times a day?

And wouldn’t it be fantastic if you also got a whole new place to browse and connect to new people in order to find your audience?

I have great news for you.

Facebook just made an update that allows you to do all of the above.

The catch is, it only works this way under specific conditions, with a technique I’ve just put together. At this writing, I’ve only been using it a week.

In that week, on the days I do it, I get 10 new fans in 12 hours, or up to 20 in a day.

In the first five day period I had a spike of 100 new fans.

They aren’t the kind of passive fans that you can buy from various services (some of them spammy, none of them worth $200!) . They are people who are leaving more wall posts, sharing more links, and just overall interacting more than ever.

Even people who had already joined my group are coming back to talk!

My technique exploits a new Facebook feature, in combination with some existing tweaks that allow you to

- turn your Facebook Page into a landing page
- set it up so that people in your target audience have a reason to like/join your Page
- gives them an immediate reward for doing so
- can be set up so they follow up that action with joining your newsletter (Facebook can’t ever affect Those leads)
- bypasses the “you haven’t contacted me lately” filter
- allows you to publish frequent updates to their news feed, including notices of sales, blog posts, helpful tips, or questions
- lets you build a community, complete with discussion board, video, link and photo sharing, for free, and,
- gives you a whole new way to find new prospects and draw them to you.

That’s what my new resource “Fast Traffic from Facebook Pages” tells you about. In it I teach the technique that in 15 minutes of work brought me 20 new subscribers to my Facebook Page and newseltter over the next day.

It works best under certain circumstances, but a fellow entrepreneur just showed me how to make it work for Any type of page, though arguably not as well as my current preferred page.

It’s less than ten dollars, and you can pick it up here:

Here’s what Jim Zaccharia had to say about it:

“WT_? Ok, I Shouldn’t Tell Anyone, BUT, Tinu Abayomi-Paul has come up with a Facebook Traffic plan ‘offer’ for < $10 That’s Too Good To Pass up – IF you Want LOTS of Facebook Traffic, that is. You’ll be Blown Away by the Bonuses. Really.”

When I thanked him for the comment in Facebook, he said:

“I could hardly Believe my Eyes_when I Saw How Much You Provided ! Glad I took you up on your offer Before you came to your senses and raised the price! It’s Easily Worth 10X what you’re asking.”

The price has gone up a buck, but is still under $9 because I’m looking to raise cash for a trip to Africa in a few days. I just learned that I may not be able to work steadily while I’m there, and that I might be able to extend my trip.

(I was prepared for frequent power outages, with backup generators, but not for the potential shortage of the fuel that powers the generators.)

It won’t stay under $9 forever – I’m leaving in a few days. Get your copy now.

Just in case Facebook Pages, or Facebook marketing is new to you, I’ve set up the following bonuses, available until I leave for my trip:

1. FanPage Dollars
2. Fanpage Dollars 2
3. Facebook Profits
4. Facebook Fanpage Warchest
5. 27 Facebook Fan Page Templates
6. Viral Fan Page Script
7. Facebook Ad Explosion
8. Facebook Fanpage Blueprint
9. Facebook Ad Miracle
10. Facebook Social Ads Exposed
11. FB Profit Secrets
12. FB Viral Script Pro 2.0
13. Facebook Marketing Uncovered
14. Facebook Rockstar System

This is over $200 in additional help with Facebook, yours free for investing less than $10 in Fast Traffic from Facebook Traffic.

Get your copy of Fast Traffic from Facebook Pages today. And thanks as always for your support.

You want to know a quick secret?

I’ve hated Facebook Pages deeply until last Friday.

HATED.

Did Not Like.

Why? Because of how it was built. It’s like being a fisherman, knowing you’re a great fisherman, with perfect bait, but only being allowed to buy fish.

In other words, Facebook Pages were not as interactive as Facebook Profiles (they’re still not but there’s been a huge improvement that works like Crazy under certain conditions). The set up was great, and it was cool that you could have conversations right in your page.

Once you GOT the fans, Facebook Pages worked like gangbusters to get people to click, subscribe or buy, once you got the hang of it.

But getting the fans was not as simple as it was to get people to connect to you via your Facebook Profile.

However, it just got a whole lot better. And at noon tomorrow, you can get a copy of Fast Traffic from Facebook Pages.

But today, I just have one free tip for you. Because if you take a person to a Facebook Page that sucks, no one will sign up. And then you can’t post links to your wall, or create discussions, or post videos or send email updates– or any of the other things that translate to traffic.

So, to remedy that, here’s a link to get free access to the Highest Converting Facebook Fan Page brought to you completely free by a cool cat named Glen Allsopp, also known by his Twitter handle, ViperChill. I first encountered his work via people posting about him on Amplify, and he is a creative genius when it comes to putting a new twist on marketing through online connection.

Be sure to subscribe to his blog.

Okay, so now you’ve got an important piece of the Facebook Fan Page puzzle.

The puzzle, if you don’t know it:

1- How Do You Get New Audiences to Your Fan Page?

2- How Do You Get “Liked” By Fans Outside Your Current Circle?

3- How Do You Retain Those Fans and Keep them Returning & Active?

ViperChill has very generously given us the answer to #2. I’ll give you some free tips on #3 tomorrow.

Tip #1 is the Big Kahuna, and I’ll tell you all about it tomorrow.

Now, tomorrow, I’ll share my secrets about a new, little known technique for getting people to come to your page in the newsletter at about noon. Lots of people are trying it, but few known the little secret that makes this work insanely well.

20 new fans in a the first day, well.

Over 100 new fans since last Friday, well.

To give you a point of comparison, when I was passively marketing my Facebook Page as a website promotion consultant, I got to 500 fans after about a year, using mostly Social Ads.

I could have put word out to my newsletter, Twitter or Facebook fans, but I was essentially just republishing news that could be found there, and sending them my newsletter. What’t the point of that?

The secret I’ll give you a link to tomorrow talks about building a whole NEW audience. I can’t wait to show it to you. It’s a super-cheap guide, less than ten bucks.

Yep, Facebook changed some of its features again. And one of the features it changed is one I had been championing since the inception of Pages: the ability to assume the identity of the page.

And Facebook has this ALMOST right. We’ll come back to that in a moment.

The “post as page” feature allows you to browse the Facebook Pages version of Facebook – you can’t friend humans, which is definitely a drag, but understandable. It’s likely a spam prevention measure. But here’s what I don’t get…

If you let people control what pages they friend, and whether or not those pages get incoming information, doesn’t it make more sense, from a standpoint of allowing two-way public and private connection, that Pages would be able to interact with People?

Anyway, there are other features that, while not necessarily pleasing from a personal standpoint, may be helpful from a business standpoint.

Quick list of the main features:

I believe there’s a great deal of potential in the ability to post as your Facebook Page. But I’m not going to discuss that here – for the time being I’ll keep it on the hush. If you’re subscribed to the ezine though, you”ll start hearing about my idea at around midnight.

Here’s a hint:

This could be the biggest free, non-intrusive marketing move for people who are, or want to be, recognized as industry leaders.

But that’s a secret to be divulged later. For now, come by my Tinu Abayomi-Paul Facebook Page today and share:

(It would also be awesome and appreciated if you would write a post and link to this discussion, share this blog post on Facebook or Tweet it out. I’m going to do a post later featuring thoughts from other Page owners and the conversations that ensue. Thanks!)