1. Facebook Events

Head to your Facebook home page. Click on "Events," which you'll see in the left-hand menu.

Click here to view this gallery.

One of Facebook‘s most useful features is the way it alerts you to the birthdays of all your buddies. Did you know that you can export this valuable data to other calendar applications?

Apple iCal, Microsoft Outlook and Google Calendar will all happily accept your exported Facebook info. We’ve pulled together a quick how-to for transferring the data to Google Calendar.

Take a look at our gallery walk-through. Let us know in the comments below if you’ll be exporting your buddies’ birthday.

Thumbnail image courtesy of Flickr, Will Clayton

More About: Facebook, features, Google, Google Calendar, How-To

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1. Dunken K Bliths

As the current king of the animated G+ profile with his role as resident artist at profile pimping company JustBusiness, Dunken's own profile doesn't disappoint.

Click here to view this gallery.

We’ve seen some great Google+ profile hacks, but there’s a new breed of design in town — the animated Google+ profile.

Pioneered by Dunken K Bliths, whose creations dominate our gallery, the animations create a real splash when you first land on someone’s Google+ profile page.

Take a look through our gallery of awesome animations. Link us in the comments to any other good ones you’ve seen on the social service.

More About: features, gallery, Google, photography

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1. Dunken K Bliths

As the current king of the animated G+ profile with his role as resident artist at profile pimping company JustBusiness, Dunken's own profile doesn't disappoint.

Click here to view this gallery.

We’ve seen some great Google+ profile hacks, but there’s a new breed of design in town — the animated Google+ profile.

Pioneered by Dunken K Bliths, whose creations dominate our gallery, the animations create a real splash when you first land on someone’s Google+ profile page.

Take a look through our gallery of awesome animations. Link us in the comments to any other good ones you’ve seen on the social service.

More About: features, gallery, Google, photography

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1. Audrey Julienne

Pinterest user Julienne captured Philadelphia's famous city hall building. It looks like she applied some Instagram filter magic too!

Click here to view this gallery.

Earlier this week, we shared how to trick out your Pinterest Boards with a simple hack. Then, we asked you to share your own creations. And that’s exactly what you did!

Take a look through the gallery for our favorite submissions from you, the Mashable community. People sliced, diced and arranged all kinds of images onto their Pinterest Boards — inspiring art, vintage photographs, silly pets and even (gasp!) bad words.

As always, we’d love for you to continue sharing your creations in the comments below. And let us know which of the above is your favorite.

More About: community, features, hack, pinterest, trending

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Jeremy Lin fans can’t get enough of the NBA’s newest superstar on social media. Now they can get even more than before.

On Monday morning, Lin joined Facebook as a member with a Timeline-enabled profile. Check it out here.

The New York Knicks’ star point guard has garnered about 7,000 subscribers in 12 hours. He’s even filled in his Facebook Timeline with some pictures, university data and hometown info.

What took him so long? Well, Lin has been on Facebook for a few months already — just not with a public profile. His Facebook fan page — reportedly curated and updated by the man himself, according to the Daily Dot — has been there since August.

The Knicks star — who hails from the same campus as Mark Zuckerberg — has already dominated elsewhere in the social media realm. When his team won six straight games during a one-week span, Lin generated more Twitter traffic than any other NBA player in history.

Lin’s official Twitter handle, @JLin7, was mentioned 215,408 times. His full name was mentioned more than 2.5 million times, according to The Hollywood Reporter.

The Linsanity has also reached YouTube as fans watch winning assists and last-minute free throws caught on tape. Videos produced and uploaded by Lin before his new-found fame, such as a video dubbed “How to Get into Harvard,” have been seen millions of times over the past few weeks.

Traffic to NYKnicks.com has spiked 550% since Lin’s arrival.

How else is Lin sweeping the Internet? He’s inspired a Lincredible Online Word Generator. And teammate Landry Fields recently tweeted a picture of the couch Lin used to crash on, joking “Let the bidding begin.”

Will you subscribe to Jeremy Lin’s Facebook Page? What do you want to see on his Timeline? Let us know in the comments.

Image via Jeremy Lin’s Facebook Page.

1. Linsanity

The classic.

Click here to view this gallery.

More About: Facebook, Jeremy Lin, Social Media, trending, Twitter

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A 26-year-old software development student will spend eight months in jail for hacking Facebook, which his judge said could have been “utterly disastrous” for the company.

Glenn Mangham hacked a Facebook employee’s account last spring from his parents’ home in Britain. He gained access to valuable intellectual property, although he didn’t sell the information.

Mangham, who described himself to a London court as a computer nerd who didn’t mean any harm, told the jury he hacked Facebook to help the social media company find holes in its security. He also said he had helped Yahoo improve its security in a similar way.

The prosecution said the hack was a sophisticated threat to the social media site and was not the least bit helpful. British police and the FBI spent a lot of time investigating the case, and Facebook spent $200,000 dealing with Mangham’s hack.

Prosecutor Sandip Patel told the Telegraph that the incident “represents the most extensive and grave incident of social media hacking to be brought before the British courts.”

Facebook caught Mangham during an early June security sweep. The hacker had tried to delete his trail from the employee’s account, but Facebook noticed his account access. The FBI showed up at Mangham’s house and arrested him shortly after Facebook turned over the hacking evidence to authorities.

No personal user data was compromised, Alison Saunders, another prosecutor, told The Telegraph.

Do possible Facebook hacks make you nervous to use the service? Tell us in the comments below.

Image courtesy of iStockphoto, airportrait

More About: Facebook, hacking, Video, Yahoo

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With 845 million users, Facebook has become an increasingly useful tool for brands, and it’s important to have a strong presence on the social network.

Whether your brand is fully established or just starting out, launching a marketing campaign can seem overwhelming. But, it doesn’t have to be a timely or expensive process. There are several small and simple things you can do for your brand on Facebook. In fact, some of these marketing tactics are used by the biggest brands in the world.

Ready for your brand to get in front of the 845 million? Majestic Media, a global Facebook marketing agency, has come up with nine time-saving tips for marketing on Facebook.

1. See if Your Vanity URL Is Available

Before you launch your brand presence on Facebook, you need to make sure that your vanity URL is available — and that it’s simple and easy to remember.

Rather than going through the time consuming process of manually figuring out what’s available and what’s not, use a simple but powerful service called Name Vine. It checks domain names, Facebook and Twitter extensions in a matter of seconds to see if your desired vanity URL is available.

2. Use a Third-Party Platform to Distribute Social Content

Copying and pasting content, logging in from one social media network and logging out from another can be a time consuming task — but it doesn’t have to be. If you’re looking to push content to Facebook and other social networks, you can benefit from using a tool like HootSuite, which allows you to publish once and distribute everywhere. You can integrate your Facebook Page, Twitter account, Google+ page, LinkedIn profile and other social networks — all within one easy-to-use interface.

3. Use an Application Publishing Platform

For small and medium-sized businesses, social media budgets are nowhere close to those of global brands, which can afford multiple custom applications and promotions on Facebook. However, large budgets aren’t required to launch a lot of the basic applications seen on Facebook.

Services such as North Social and Pagemodo provide the kinds of applications that most businesses need. Also, most of these services provide a “freemium” model that offers some applications for free. Keep in mind that you won’t get a customized app, but you can manage the content and visuals within pre-developed apps that are available. This may be a good first step into the Facebook world if your budget is a main concern.

If you do decide to launch some of these applications, you should set up the following applications/tabs:

• A Welcome Page: This should be the default landing page that welcomes a user to an application. Typically, these pages are fan-gated, meaning the person is asked to “like” the page to unveil more content.
• A Contact Us Page: This is a great and useful tool for converting your fans into potential sales leads.

You should set up at least one or two tab applications on your Facebook Page, so users aren’t landing on your Facebook wall, but rather a page that’s informative, engaging and able to convert those users into fans.

4. Utilize Social Plugins Wherever Possible

The most underutilized (free) tools are Facebook social plugins. A new study from Gigya shows that users who visit third-party sites through Facebook Connect spend 50% more time on those sites. Furthermore, those users view twice as many pages. The numbers speak for themselves.

Aside from use on third-party sites, social plugins can also be utilized on Facebook apps to provide a deeper level of engagement, while driving traffic back to the application. Above, you’ll see the Facebook application Majestic Media built for Volkswagen, which invited users to participate in the next Volkswagen commercial. It was utilized to build meaningful conversations within the application, while driving new social traffic to the campaign.

It doesn’t matter how big or small your company is — leverage the social plugins on your blog, Facebook apps and on your website. They’re free to use and are a quick and easy way to market your brand or message through referral traffic.

5. Find Out When and What to Post on Facebook

If you’re looking to see what your fans engage with the most — and when to post it on Facebook — you can utilize a third-party service called Edgerank Checker.

This time-saving application grades your fan page and determines the following key factors:

• Most effective day of the week to post content
• Popular keywords that drive engagement
• What type of media is best for your audience
• How often to update

6. Use Facebook Insights

If you have to provide a report of Facebook metrics to your boss or a client — or maybe you just want to see for yourself — the best time-saving tip is to export the Facebook Insights data to an Excel spreadsheet. You can see which status updates performed best, whether your audience responds well to video and get a sense of what’s driving your Likes.

You can do this by clicking the “Export Data” button. In the pop-up that appears, select the data type and date range.

Once you’ve done this and downloaded the file, open it in Excel and apply a filter by going to the data tab and clicking on “Filter.” You have to make sure that your cursor is at the very top row. In the example, we’ve chosen the “Lifetime Post Total Reach” metric to filter by.

Once this filter is selected, you can quickly filter any key metrics in ascending or descending order, which is a very powerful trick when analyzing your Facebook marketing and engagement efforts.

7. Provide Local Content

Nobody wants to visit a Facebook Page with an enticing offer, only to learn that it’s not available in their region. Nor do they want to land on a brand page where all the content is in another language.

Here are some quick strategies for providing localized content:

• Give your fans an incentive to visit your business by providing them with a recent, active “walk-in” promotion in their area.
• Allow users to recognize that you are connected with their location by providing details and assets specific to where they are.
• Geotarget your posts even if you don’t have multiple locations — you wouldn’t want to offer a walk-in special to your fans in New York if your business is in Los Angeles

When you have to target languages, Facebook allows you to make status updates for users with certain language settings. So, Facebook users who have French or Spanish as their default language on the site will only see your content that’s in their native tongue.

• 1. Click on “Custom”

• 2. A pop-up will come up that will look like this:

• 3. Once you’ve entered your specific targeting information, you can hit “Okay” and proceed with your status update, geared for that specific audience. It’s local and relevant for those language settings selected.

8. Create a QR Code for Your Facebook Fan Page

Setting up a QR code for your Facebook Page is a quick, simple and effective strategy for small or large businesses to use. QR codes can be leveraged on napkins, menus, business cards, billboards, magazines, brochures and other forms of marketing materials.
Esponce is one of the most powerful QR code platforms on the market, and it offers a free tier that’s typically geared to small businesses.

The process takes no more than a few minutes to set up and allows you to:

• Create a custom QR code
• Embed your logo into the QR code
• Link your QR code to a dynamic URL — so you can customize and change the URL if you decide you want to later drive users to your website instead of your Facebook Page.

You’ll have the ability to view analytics so you can see how many people have scanned your code, their location and the type of smartphone that scanned the image.

9. Buy Facebook Ads

Buying Facebook ads is a wise, cost-effective solution that can help increase your brand’s visibility throughout the Facebook platform. Most people don’t realize how easy they are to set up or that you can buy in with a small ad spend. A budget of $50 per month would be sufficient for a small business to make some waves.

Facebook’s “Like” ads provide users the opportunity to “like” your fan page from any page they are on. If a user doesn’t click on the “Like” button, don’t interpret that as your campaign not working — these ads are relevant because they keep users engaged and informed with the latest in your marketing campaign. Think of them as a brand awareness play — just because they aren’t clicked, doesn’t mean they’re not acknowledged.

More recently, one of the best ways to invest in Facebook advertising is by leveraging Sponsored Stories. According to a study by TBG Digital, Facebook’s new Sponsored Stories ad units nabbed a 46% higher click-through rate, a 20% lower cost per click and an 18% lower cost per fan than Facebook’s standard ad units.

Do you have other tips for Facebook Marketing? Let us know in the comments.

More Small Business Resources From OPEN Forum:

- Pinterest for Brands: 5 Hot Tips
- Top 7 CES Gadgets for Your Small Business
- 8 Legal Steps for Starting Your Business

More About: Facebook, features, Marketing, open forum, Small Business

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Have you checked out LinkedIn‘s mobile site yet? No, not the mobile app — the in-browser mobile site. It’s very powerful and very useful for connecting with LinkedIn’s 135 million users. After all, mobile page views account for over 11% of total visits to the social network for the professionally-minded.

LinkedIn released the updated mobile site (along with iPhone and Android apps) last summer. Mobile usage of LinkedIn has been growing quickly.

“We are seeing mobile grow at a very rapid pace, as high as 400 percent a year,” Joff Redfern, mobile product director at LinkedIn told The New York Times in August of last year.

Want to know more? Check out these five tips for using the mobile site.

1. Share Useful Links and Information

Did you just read an interesting article on your mobile device and you think that it’s something your LinkedIn contacts should see right away? That’s easily done with LinkedIn’s mobile site. The upper right-hand corner of the site has a speech bubble. Tap that, and you’re redirected to the update screen.

You can share a text update or drop in a link to content you’d like your contacts to see. Then, you can toggle whether or not that update will be sent out as a Twitter message as well. Finally, you have control of which of your contacts can see the update. That’s good, because you might want to send an update to your co-workers and not your entire network.

2. Get Updates

When you open LinkedIn’s mobile site, you’re greeted with a scrollable list of your connections’ updates. The menu is easy to navigate. Upon clicking a shared article, you’re presented with a quick synopsis of that article instead of being launched to the article itself. You can also use the synopsis page to load the profile of the person who shared it.

That smart design saves precious mobile bandwidth (and money, for those not on an unlimited data plan). If you decide the article is worth loading, you can then decide to launch it in a new browser window. When you’re done enjoying the article, remember to share it!

3. Connect With a New Acquaintance

Swapping business cards is so passé. With LinkedIn’s mobile site, all you have to do is pop in a person’s name. If they’re on the service, there’s a profile chock-full of their employment and education information.

The mobile site takes users’ full-page profiles and compresses them into easy-to-read miniaturized versions. There’s no feeling of profiles being stuffed or crammed into place — it’s almost like profiles were designed with mobile browsers in mind.

4. Spend Time With Your Groups

Even your LinkedIn groups are easily accessible on the mobile site. Want to follow the discussion on your favorite groups while you’re on the go? That’s easy.

After clicking the LinkedIn logo on the top-left of the screen, then “more.” Boom, there’s your groups. Discussions are easily read, and adding your own comment is next to effortless. LinkedIn’s mobile site makes it easy to keep up with your professional organizations and societies.

5. Get Invited

Do you find yourself getting overloaded with invitations to connect every time you load LinkedIn? With LinkedIn’s mobile site, you can manage those invitations on the go.

The site’s interface makes it easy to see how many invitations you’ve got and learn more about who sent them to you. Just tap the LinkedIn logo, then the “inbox.” If you’ve got new invites, a notification will appear that lets you know how many new messages are in your queue.

Going Mobile

LinkedIn’s mobile site is found at http://touch.www.linkedin.com. Point your smartphone’s browser over there and dive right in. Do you think that LinkedIn’s mobile website helps with sharing? Let us know in the comments.

More Small Business Resources From OPEN Forum:

- Is it Finally Time to Ditch Your Paper Business Card?
- Social Learning Trends to Watch in 2012
- 6 Things to Know Before Starting a Business

More About: features, linkedin, mashable, Mobile, mobile networking, networking, open forum

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]]> http://mashable.com/2012/02/20/linkedin-mobile-site/feed/ 0 http://feeds.mashable.com/~r/Mashable/SocialMedia/~3/pYfXzGmT5vU/ http://feeds.mashable.com/~r/Mashable/SocialMedia/~3/pYfXzGmT5vU/#comments Mon, 20 Feb 2012 18:59:22 +0000 Joann Pan http://mashable.com/?p=946845 Pinterest may be an Internet hit — especially with U.S. women and Facebook CEOs. But not all companies want to ride the pinboard wave o…]]>

Pinterest may be an Internet hit — especially with U.S. women and Facebook CEOs. But not all companies want to ride the pinboard wave of referral traffic.

Now Pinterest has released code for companies that want to block the pinning of content from their sites to personal pinboards.

Pinterest recently released the code in their help section, which companies can copy and paste into their websites, prompting a message with each pin attempt that states: “This site doesn’t allow pinning to Pinterest. Please contact the owner with any questions. Thanks for visiting!”

SEE ALSO: 10 Most-Followed Users on Pinterest

Josh Davis of LLsocial.com points out that 99% of the pins on Pinterest are against the company’s own Terms of Service. Pinterest states that when users pin items, this indicates they are either the exclusive owners of the material or someone has granted them access to re-publish content.

One of the points of “Pinterest Etiquette” also stands to remind users to credit sources.

Though it is not enforced, Pinterest says, “finding the original source is always preferable to a secondary source such as Google Image Search or a blog entry.”

The copyright issues were exacerbated by the website’s huge growth over the past year, according to Davis. Pinterest, he says, won’t be the 2012 version Napster — shutdown for copyright infringement in 2001 — because “everyone loves Pinterest” and images. Even if the pins are not credited, Pinterest drives traffic back to the original source.

Pinterest is moving towards correcting these flaws. Pinterest is currently following the Digital Millenmium Copyright Act, and will remove any image that someone claims is violating copyright laws.

In addition, Pinterest is letting publishers embed a “Pin It” button directly on their website, which is a virtual permission slip for people to share content. To see an example of the pin button, look at T-shirt shop Threadless’s site. The Pin It button sits next to other sharing buttons like Facebook and Twitter.

In another effort to fight copyright infringement, Pinterest plans to limit pin captions to 500-characters to stop people from stealing blog posts, according to Pinterest CEO Ben Silbermann. For now, the character limits are still being tested. Mashable will continue with Pinterest updates as they roll out.

Tell us in the comments if you always credit sources when using Pinterest. When do you disregard crediting sources?

More About: pinterest, Social Media, social networking, startup, trending, Video

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]]> http://mashable.com/2012/02/20/websites-block-pinterest/feed/ 0 http://feeds.mashable.com/~r/Mashable/SocialMedia/~3/1_K69_6QHRY/ http://feeds.mashable.com/~r/Mashable/SocialMedia/~3/1_K69_6QHRY/#comments Mon, 20 Feb 2012 18:24:37 +0000 Sarah Kessler http://mashable.com/?p=946889 Google rarely clutters its minimalist home page with extra buttons or gizmos, but it made an exception for its social network Google+. The comp…]]>

Google rarely clutters its minimalist home page with extra buttons or gizmos, but it made an exception for its social network Google+.

The company has added a share button to the right-hand corner of its patented search page design. (Yes, a mostly blank space is patentable.) The update is rolling out to all users this week.

Clicking on the share button opens a box for adding updates to your Google+ account. It does not include your search results in the update.

The share box, first spotted by Marketing Land, is part of an update to the “Google bar“, an update the search giant announced earlier this month. Essentially, it migrates the share button from the bar to the Google homepage.

Previously, the Google Bar looked like this:

It may seem like a minor update, and in many ways it is. But this is the first time Google’s homepage itself (rather than the bar above it) has offered any function other than search.

If Google+’s close integration with search results through Search plus Your World weren’t enough to state Google’s commitment to its social network, you can add this to the evidence.

Google makes most of its money through advertisers who want to pinpoint the consumers who are most likely to buy their products. Google has a ton of search and browsing data that can help them do that, but it doesn’t have the valuable social graph that Facebook does.

Now the company is using search to help it build a social graph, via Google+ — and heavily advertise that network in the process.

In some ways the integration makes sense. Social data can be used to help determine the most relevant search results, and you might come across something in a search that’s convenient to share immediately. Some argue, however, that the integrations take away from the effectiveness of Google Search.

“Personally, if find it intrusive,” wrote Danny Sullivan, the editor-in-chief of Marketing Land and Search Engine Land. “I don’t get why I want to go to the Google home page to share content on Google+. I’ll go to Google+, if I want to do that.”

More About: Google, Search

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