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)

I started writing this in response to a magnificent blog post:

BlogHer Study Shows the Continued Slide of Twitter Influence, Facebook Makes Gains

From the post:

All of the talk around Klout Twitter influence is missing the point…

…, if you ask a question, it is likely to get ReTweeted, but less likely to get answered. It has increasingly become a broadcast channel vs. a relational one. A Pew study late last year underscored this problem. It showed that just under 1/2 of users were not checking the Twitter status of other people.

Now, I ask you – if everyone is shouting into the wind, and no one is listening, how long does it take a social media tool to die?

Not that I’ve lost all hope in Twitter, far from it. I use Twitter, I just don’t LIVE there. I don’t live at Facebook either, it just looks like I do.

If you want the fact that you’re socially present to shoulder some of that marketing load for you, you’ve got to leverage the technology to make you LOOK like you live online and are always on, just like your website is.

And then back them up with some kind of offline availability.

See, the “influencers” that survive will be the people who survived the business blogging decline, and the ones who are making smart use of video. Who are these folks? The people who listen, engage and respond – on and offline.

Because if most of the talking people are also neglecting to listening, the man with even one ear to the street will be king.

I won’t spoil the article for you – if you’re smart enough to be still reading blogs, I’m sure you understand why – but just in case you’re new, the reason: the information is that important, that impactful IF you get the implications.

And if you don’t, well that’s where I come in. It’s simple. Don’t use Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, any of this stuff just to shout what you’re doing, what you’re up to and how great your company is. Answer other people’s cries for help, then whisper your usefulness into the conversation.

Anyone who truly cares will lean in when you whisper and respond. Leads on the internet are plentiful if you know where to look and you can cherry pick if you get good at bringing them to you, rather than going out and finding them.

To continue, let’s use me as a case study for why broadcast marketing is an utter failure in this century.

The question I was answering is at the end of the post I’ve been quoting, and we’ll talk about that next time.

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.

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!)

I’ve been building some wonderful new relationships as a result of my affliation with Network Solutions and Women Grow Business. One of them was with a lovely new client of mine who helps other companies grow. Most of her marketing occurs offline, so she sought out my help in penetrating new markets using online resources.

She was especially interested in social media, but she didn’t get how blogs increase revenues. So I told her the analogy in the audio below.

Of course, your blog is not a store. It’s more like the lounge of a store, the area between commerce and window-shopping. But for the sake of the analogy, it works for the syndication idea.

Anyone else have more ideas about how we explain where blogging fits in to pre-selling and pre-marketing to offline-oriented business people? Do share (if you have a blog post about it, I’ll update with a link to it.)

This is part two of a series I’m doing to fulfill my promise to the attendees of the Grow Smart Business conference who attended the session I was a panelist on: “Stories, Content, & the Search Engine Sword Over Your Head.”

You can watch the re-broadcast of the Grow Smart Business 2010 Conference tomorrow.

Let me start off by saying that the whiny baby in the picture is not to imply that YOU are a whiny baby if your social media actions, strategy and/or plans don’t appear to be working.

I’m flat out saying it. Because I love you.

I’m not, like, IN LOVE with you or anything like that. I mean more like a human being, who shares in your dreams, and occasionally, your misery. And if you love someone, in situations like this one, you tell them the truth.

(In situations like, “did you finish the potato chips?” you lie. But I totally didn’t finish them. There’s another bag in the pantry. I saw it.)

So back to our topic.

Social media – which really isn’t called social media anymore – works. You can dispute it if you’d like, but I am hereby officially positing the theory that if your social media efforts aren’t working, it’s not because the technology sucks, or your dog ate it, or Facebook is for losers, or Twitter is for techies, or YouTube is for people with no life.

No, homie, the problem is what you’re doing.

It would be the height of jerkiness for me to call you a whiner whose mama dresses you funny if I didn’t pose some solutions to the issue you’re facing.

(I’m still kind of a jerk for doing that. But I haven’t had my coffee yet. It gets better.)

So here are some of my thoughts. Not that I’m a doctor or anything like that. But my social media IS working. By that I mean it brings me traffic, publicity or other types of attention that I then turn into money.

The Top 5 Reasons You Think (Correctly or Not) That Your Social Media Efforts Aren’t Working.

1. You don’t understand what it’s supposed to do.

It doesn’t make your hair shinier.

It can’t buy you a new dog.

And it doesn’t make money jump up into your pocket.

Social media, to put it simplistically, makes information easier to move around, share and engage with. Yes, you can make money through your business efforts in social media. No, you can’t do it by applying old world marketing to the new media paradigm.

But you CAN connect the principles of marketing to the back end of social media.

You can have a blog that engages, and blog posts that aren’t sales pages. Then you can have a subscription box on every page, which leads to the first part of your sales funnel. And you can do it without pissing people off, too.

2. You aren’t measuring the right thing.

I have a friend who insists on doing things like putting a bit.ly link in his profile, putting obvious affiliate links on his profile and leaving signature links on his intrusive posts to other people’s walls in Facebook.

He looks like a fool.

I’ve told him as much.

But he insists that he’d rather get .01% of people he can track to click on his links now and buy today, than 30% of people he can’t track to do business with him in the next 90 days.

If that is your approach to social media, you are Insane.

As in, you need medication, not like an insult. Literally have someone examine your head.

It’s this approach that kills most social media efforts. Why not put some Google Analytics code (or some other way to track the origin of clicks) on your OWN site. No, it won’t track people who get an email or hear about your link because of a Facebook friend and save it to their bookmarks.

But it will get more people clicking. Folks like to know where a link is going to take them. And not everyone knows how to use tools that circumvent bit.ly and other URL shorteners.

3. You aren’t doing things that get people’s attention, and keeps it.

Bland content saved to delicious.com is still bland content. I know because I have written ten times the bland content as I have original, engaging pieces that people find useful.

You’ve got to find a different way to say it, or say something different that is closer to what your audience, your future customers, want to hear. Then you’ve got to do it in a way that makes them tell someone, and want to come back for more themselves.

If you can’t figure out how to do it, hire someone.

But try first. Honestly it’s not that hard.

4. You’ve got great content, but you’re not distributing it.

Great content that’s sitting on your site without being noticed is just as useless as bland content. Are you syndicating it via RSS? Are you emailing your subscribers when you have a worthwhile post? Have you turned the popular posts into podcasts?

Get your content out where it can be followed back to your site.

5. You’ve got great content, you’re distributing it, but your audience isn’t engaged enough to care.

Okay, you’re awesome. I know it. But you only tell me once a month. And when you tell me and then I comment back how super you are, you ignore me. So then I figure, why retweet it? So and so is a super-douche who doesn’t care anyway, why should I?

That’s not to say that you have to spend your life answering every single piece of communication in real time. We’re not all the Old Spice Guy.

But you can do your best to get in contact with your former, present and future customers, on multiple channels, in a way they’ll appreciate. You can update on a regular basis. You can say thank you for the retweets you get. You can find content at their sites to retweet too, or comment on.

My overall theory is this.

If I give you a toolbox, and there’s a hammer in it, if you use that tool to do anything but bang a nail into place, its effectiveness is going to go way down.

But you’d be crazy to say the hammer isn’t working if you’re using it to put on eyeliner. And if I’m going to call myself your friend – nay, a decent human being – I have to strongly advise you to stop doing that, any way I can.

This post is part of our 68 Traffic Tips day. To find the complete list when we’re done, see the original post. Be sure to subscribe to get a weekly round-up of our daily traffic tips.

1. If in a crunch, you can’t get your social media activities done in an hour a week, you’re doing it wrong, if you’re doing it for business. There’s no reason you have to be on Twitter for hours to see results. There is a much better way.
2. While you can pick two to five major channels to concentrate on and echo content into the lesser channels of that type, it’s not the best strategy to do that with all of them. In other words, if you like Twitter the best of all the status update type sites, and you want to echo posts into identi.ca, it may not be Best, but it’s… okay. However, it’s not smart to implement a status update strategy on a site like LinkedIn. Professional networking is a lot more than status updates, and if that’s all you’re going to do on LinkedIn, why are you using it?
3. Numbers matter. They shouldn’t but they do. That doesn’t mean pursuing higher numbers at all costs will help you though. 5000 followers looks better than 100, but it’s not helping your steak restaurant if they’re all vegetarians.
4. Quality matters. It should. That doesn’t mean you should stop at 10 painters for your gallery’s account. You need to develop relationships with people who love art, people who talk or write about art, people who hang out with artists, and the people who sponsor them. Get a good mix.
5. Facebook now drives more traffic than Google in many instances, and is a top source of traffic even in the exceptions. Even if you don’t want to use your Facebook profile for networking, get serious about your Facebook page. You don’t have to love Facebook to use it for business.
6. Don’t be afraid to use social media as part of marketing – just don’t confuse social media participation as  marketing activity by default. Although social media itself is not a campaign, there IS such a thing as a social media campaign – case in point, if you organize bloggers to talk about your event at the same time, that’s a social media campaign. It has a beginning a middle and an end.
7. All media is social. Keep that in mind when you create web content. I can tweet, blog, podcast about anything I want. Social media as terminology is defunct, and only still used as a frame of differentiation between the old way and the new way.
8. Remember why you’re using social media. If you can’t leverage ANY of the social media relationships you’re forming to help you in your business, in some way, you have to ask yourself what the purpose of your participation is.
9. Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Digg and Delicious aren’t the only social media sites in the world. There are other top sites like BusinessWeek’s Business Exchange, StumbleUpon, PlugIM, Sphinn, and Ecademy that can help you just as much or more than the current favorites. Test the ones in your niche, and get promoted there, too.