Facebook is pretty good at being smart about posting images to a page wall, it tries to scale them properly but in order to make sure your image gets posted properly you should probably stick to 400 x 400 pixels.
If you put the effort in up front to optimise your image for a Facebook wall you can maintain all the control and can be sure it will look decent when people find it.
If you don’t like the idea of square images I would suggest that the height is probably more flexible than the width.
Recently in work we hit an issue where we needed access to an historic customised Facebook page. We had access to the code but not access to admin section of the Facebook App.
I am sure we aren’t the only company this has happened to, so I figured I would write some thoughts on how I think this should best be handled. For the sake of brevity I will only discuss how developers should be managed, I will ignore testers or anyone else for now, I will also only be talking about looking after the Facebook App on Facebook, not the development work behind the scenes.
Facebook Apps carry with them the notion of roles, currently there are 5 of them, which you can read more about in the Application Security section of the Facebook Developer Documentation. For the purposes of what I am discussing today we are only really interested in the Administrator role and the Developer Role.
The difference between these roles is basically that Developers can’t add others to the App or reset / delete information about the App whilst administrators can.
The other thing that Facebook Apps carry with them is a (new) notion of Groups, this allows you to assign multiple users to a group and then assign the group to specific roles within the App.
Armed with these ideas my solution is very simple, first you need to set up two groups;
Unless you have a massive development team I would suggest keeping the Senior Developer group for one or two people who will be in charge of creating new Facebook Apps and administering them. They don’t even need to be technical people, but I think they should be someone who it is generally accepted has a long future with the company.
All other developers that need to look at Facebook Apps should go into the Developers group (including anyone listed as a Senior Developer).
Then for each App you should assign the Senior Developer group the role of Administrator, and the Developer group the role of Developer. Facebook requires that at least one actual person be kept as Administrator, I would suggest maybe a business manager role for this.
So long as both groups are kept up to date administering the access of individual Apps will be a breeze, just add new developers when they join and remove them when they leave. The Senior Developer role is slightly trickier only because if you have two and they both leave around the same time you will need someone outside of the ‘Facebook team’ to remind them to appoint new users to the group.
That is really all there is to it. Would love to hear your thoughts on how you manage it yourself.
Last edited 18/10/2011
Added in information about needing one actual user in the admin field.
This post was prompted by the fact I wanted to leave a status update and couldn’t immediately figure out where.
That is mental, I shouldn’t have to think about being social online and where I should be doing it, something needs sorted.
I think the reason I have issues with where to put stuff is because up until now I pretty much post to whichever networks I find the most convenient at that time. Which is messy to say the least and leaves my Facebook friends with a stream of tech articles when (most of them) aren’t techie types.
Some people link all three together, so you post to one place and it posts to them all. I used to do this but have grown to dislike it, a lot of people have profiles on all three places and if you see the exact same thing posted three times at the same time in three different places it starts to look like spam.
So, as from right now this is how I am going to break my usage down.
Twitter is going to be used mainly to find interesting links / snippets from people in my industry and people with similar interests to me and to post (hopefully) interesting links / snippets to my followers.
Google+ is going to be used for personal rants and to keep in touch with most of the people I know online, also for sharing interesting content I find from other people on Google+
Facebook is going to be used to keep in touch with friends who aren’t on Google+ and to maintain the Pages I administer on there. There are also a couple of groups I want to be more active in on there, so I will maybe start doing that.
I think that makes sense.
By the way, did you know you can follow me on Twitter, add me on Google+ and friend me on Facebook? You do now!
Has anyone else put thought into what they post to what social network? Would love to hear your thoughts.
Just leaving these here..
Google’s +1
Twitter’s Tweet
Facebook’s Like
All really easy to install, basically pick some options and copy and paste some code.
Job done!
Recently a couple of non-technical friends and family members have been asking me securing Facebook more than just locking down who can see what.
The best way I know of to achieve a more secure Facebook is to do the following:
That is it! 5 steps to a more secure Facebook.
The first thing you tick, use https:// basically means that information that goes from your computer to Facebook will be jumbled up so if any ‘hacker’ type person will have a hard time reading it. (Without it ticked it is surprising easily to get Facebook logins from a Wireless network!)
The second thing you tick, to email you when a new computer logs in essentially means that each time you log into your account from a new computer (one that Facebook hasn’t seen before) it will ask you to give your computer a name. I just use things like ‘TobyMac’ or ‘TobyLaptop’. Once you do this you get two pretty awesome things.
The first is an email. So if someone hacks into your account from their machine you will know about it immediately.
The second thing is you can access a list of who has been on your account (from the different computers), you can get this by going to your Account Security again.
Hopefully this makes sense, is easy to do and will keep you more secure!
If you found this useful please email or Facebook this link around -> http://bit.ly/h8rB8x