Sorry, I need to have a bit of a rant! I love Facebook and I have made lots of connections on the site beyond my immediate family, friends and business contacts.

Here is the reason for my rant, I had a friend request from someone who will remain nameless. I should have known better when the profile picture was of an e-book and the attached message was about ‘a new amazing system that will NOT fail to make me money’.

I gave them the benefit of the doubt and added them to my contacts. I get a few contact requests every day and I generally add everyone because I am happy to network and make connections with new people. You can connect with me on Facebook here. Some people don’t share this view and limit who they make new connections with but this really is a personal choice.

Now, as soon as the person had been added to my contacts they popped up with the same message and a link for ‘a new amazing system that will NOT fail to make me money’.

Okay, I was bored, so I visited the link, looked in the source code which revealed what I had expected; he was using a domain to mask his clickbank affiliate link (you can find out how to do that here).

I mentioned this to him and suggested Facebook is better used as a way of making connections and not for this type of marketing (well, it’s actually spamming as no right-minded marketer would market in such a way). What made me laugh was when he replied ‘just purchase through my link’.

I tried a bit more to educate the individual but to no avail. He then went from having a discussion with me to sending me an inbox message on Facebook with the link again.

I have now removed this person from my contacts, sorry but they had to go.

I have to question whether this guy would go up to random people in the street and say ‘go here, buy this and make money’. He just wouldn’t (I’d like to think!) so why do it on Facebook.

The best way to use Facebook is the same way you would make connections in the real world, your new connections will thank you for it and so will your reputation!

I would love to write an amazing article about ‘Facebook Etiquette‘ and how best to make lasting connections but I was beaten to the post by the following article and I recommend you give it a good read.

Etiquette pitfalls in the social web of wannabe friends

Rant over! Tomorrow I’ll provide you with the usual on topic information you’ve grown accustomed to receiving from me…

To your success,

Karl Foxley

But how?

The web is such a big place how can you possibly track every mention of your name, website, products and / or services and with the rise of social media sites such as Twitter, a negative tweet could be bounded across the Twitter-sphere without you even knowing.

This is how I monitor mentions of me and my company across the many Social Media sites, and it’s so easy!

Visit SocialMention and type in the various names of your products, services, website, etc and watch the results that SocialMention returns for each one.

After you have typed in your particular search phrase, in this case ‘Karl Foxley’ you will be able to subscribe to alerts via email or RSS found to the right of the page.

To use the email alert option simply choose what level of notification you want. I always choose ‘all’.

You’ll want to configure this to meet your specific needs. You’ll now be alerted to any futher mentions of the words / phrases you choose to monitor. You can also see from the screenshot above that a whole range of social media sites are monitored.

Below you will see a screenshot where you can see ‘positive’, ‘neutral’ and ‘negative’ mentions of your chosen search term.

In the case above, the one negative mention was picked up from one of my own posts whereby I had written something using negative words.

To increase your online brand and reputation you could track down those that praise you and your company and give thanks, be that via blog commenting, Twitter, Facebook etc.

You should also aim to respond to negative comments about you and your company in a constructive way. Offer to resolve issues, ask for feedback but never slam someone for their opinion, this will just lose you respect in the social media world.

I hope you have found this post helpful.

To your success,

Karl Foxley

P.s. SocialMention can also be used as a social media search tool.

Make sure you grab your URL for your name by logging into your account and heading to the following URL: http://www.facebook.com/username/.

If you want to connect on either Twitter or Facebook, or even both, then just use my links above and send me a message.

To your success,

Karl Foxley

P.s. The URL’s are lovingly called ‘vanity URLs’.