Monday, October 5, 2009

10 Facebook status update suggestions

Greg Pincus, our featured October speaker, has some great suggestions for those of us getting started on Facebook. Successful status messages get people engaged--they start little discussions:

- Share your good news
- Share a friend's good news
- Ask a question

For the rest, visit his blog post: http://www.thehappyaccident.net/10-facebook-status-update-ideas/

3 comments:

Richard Lorig said...

These are great ideas but I've suddenly encountered a new and unwelcome scenario with Facebook - EXILE.

For the last couple of days my account is defaulting to the "Account Unavailable - Site Maintenance" message. Through this experience I have discovered 2 things:
1. It is dizzying (and a bit frightening) how quickly I have come to rely on it as a primary point of contact with others.
2. Facebook is incredibly cagey about customer support. I realize they have an insane number of users to service but I have no actual sense that the automated request I filed has been received or that there is a timeline for a solution.

Has anyone else had a similar experience with FB and, if so, can you share any advice for working with them?

Martha Brockenbrough said...

Good questions, Richard. I haven't had this problem, but have heard of other people experiencing it. In every case I've heard of, the problem has resolved in a couple of days--but yikes. What a pain.

Greg Pincus said...

Facebook was recently hacked (Oct 3rd, I believe) and some accounts are still "recovering." Although the truth is this situation comes up from time to time anyway. You can go to

http://www.facebook.com/help/contact.php?show_form=site_maintenance

and file a report. They might ask for a screen capture. It might do nothing, but it could alert them to the problem. This has been a sporadic problem at Facebook for at least a year, and probably longer. Their customer service is not always satisfying, either. I have heard of 72 hour outages, and I"m sure it's been longer in cases. File a report, though, as it won't hurt.

I will be talking about the need to have more than one place you are connected for this exact reason. Technology issues are largely out of our control, and that can lead to mighty annoying situations just like this. We've all been there... and it's no fun!

Greg (from his other blog)