Facebook has an upgraded page insights application programming interface that includes a nifty metric called “people talking about this.”

Read the rest of this entry »

If you’re selling anything on Facebook, you need to be worried about protecting your customer’s data.

And there’s plenty to worry about here: A recent ShopVisible survey found that two out of every five online retailers have been hacked.

Learning of a data breach can kill a shopper’s trust in a retailer, but taking extra security can mitigate that.

This process requires significant investment in time, personnel and infrastructure.

Here are five critical steps toward providing a secure database for your company and your customers.

1. Patch

Merchants can find it difficult to keep up with security patches, but this is a critical piece in defending your customers and fans from breeches.

2. Scan Everything

It is important to identify your vulnerabilities and know where your weak points are.

3. Hack Yourself First

There are companies that specialize in hacking exercises. These specialists are able to enter your system, simulating a breach in order to show your weaknesses.

4. Communicate With Fans

Although customers might feel burdened by the extra precautions they have to take to prove their identity online, good communication can help them understand that it is in their best interests.

5. Prepare Your Personnel

Make sure your employees, contractors or anyone else with access to your data recognize and practice the highest level of security standards. Ensure that your everyone understands that storing too much data is risky.

Perhaps the most critical advice of all is to not let your guard down. It is a mistake to assume that you are secure.

Be certain that you are dealing with tech companies that are providing technology that maintains security standards.

Even the new F-tailers need to hire professionals that will innovate with the changing pace of technology, as new mobile devices appear on the scene and as social media commerce transforms the way customers browse and buy.

Guest writer Shannon Johnston is senior vice president of operations for ShopVisible.

Image courtesy of Ilin Sergey/Shutterstock.

Baseball season is finally upon us once again, and the data team at Facebook has come up with patterns shown among fans of the sport on Facebook. Here are eight trends.
Read the rest of this entry »

This afternoon Facebook announced a new product called Memology which tracks the most popular status trends of the year. Rather than aggregating the most popular keywords alone, as Google does in their annual Zeitgeist, Facebook has decided to group status updates into various topics. All of the most popular topics are listed in the Memology chart below.
Read the rest of this entry »

According to new Hitwise data released today, Facebook has experienced tremendous U.S. based growth over the past year. It’s not surprising, but it has come at the expense of the previous leader of U.S. social networking, MySpace, who’s traffic is down over 50 percent over the past year. Also experiencing tremendous growth is Twitter, who has grown by 1,170 percent over the past 12 months.
Read the rest of this entry »

Facebook has been working on a number of side projects over the past couple years which involve measuring the sentiment of users on the site. The company’s latest project, first announced yesterday afternoon, is the United States Gross National Happiness index. The newly launched tool polls users’ status updates within the United States and then measures their sentiment to determine the collective happiness. While I’m still a little bit cynical of sentiment analysis, there are some definite correlations between holidays and positive updates on Facebook.
Read the rest of this entry »