In your ears and hold not cotton swabs, delete Facebook

In your ears and hold not cotton swabs, delete Facebook!

Sometimes during your life, someone will give you good advice. You have choices, you can hear the advice or investigate the situation, or you can take the advice. This article is about some opinions, some facts, and some advice. You read in the title about cotton swabs but the article has not much to do with the swabs. This article is about Facebook and about the control that Facebook has over your free account.

What do cotton swabs and Facebook have in common? Control. The key is control. Facebook gives you hardly any control over your profile and the rest of your account. And when you stick cotton swabs in your ears, you lose control of your common sense. Every since the beginning of time, moms have been telling kids to keep away from the cotton swabs. Now this mom is telling you to stay away from Facebook unless you are going to alter your pages on Facebook.

Just recently I was reading about Facebook, their privacy report and how hard it is to delete your account. Being a skeptic, I tried to delete my own account also. It is harder to crochet a full size quilt. Facebook does not want yor account deleted. And one has to ask oneself why one single website needs that much control over a person's account First, a little background, you open a Facebook account and you believe that it is a social networking account, a place where you and your friends can get together, share stories, share book reviews and view each others' pictures while meeting other friends and business workers. It appears that way when you first open your account. Then, BOOM! Then you get to know what Facebook is really all about.

You receive messages from your friends that seem like friendly gestures and these messages say join or sign up with a different application. There are warnings all over the account (red flag number one) that these applications have nothing to do with facebook. Then there are warnings that you can block these applications. If you opt to join the application to your Facebook account, you are then told you need to send the same application to about twenty (Yes twenty!) of your friends or networkers). Seems that almost everyone on Facebook is sending out these applications and almost every send demands that you send that to twenty friends. Can you imagine the email list that this corporation is forming with all fo these lists of friends? You do not have to be a rocket scientist to figure out that Facebook and their affiliates are collecting emails for some reason or other.


Friends: This article is not about the friends. The friends that I had on Facebook are wonderful. This article is about privacy policy at Facebook, and it is about the nonsensical way that the applications insist that they obtain all of your friends email addresses to add a small application. This article is about the myths of Facebook and the truths that are really happening all over Facebook.


Tricks: Then you get the smart application that one of your friends send to you. This application boasts that you do NOT have to send this to twenty friends! Wow! You think, what a relief. So you press the button to check out this application and you ad to have it added, thinking that you do not have to send this to twenty friends. Then you hear the catch. You do not have to send this to twenty friends ONLY if you choose to participate in the endlist list of surveys that they send you. So there is the catch, participate in the surveys or send the application to twenty of your friends. (Does that sound like you are right back where you started from?).


Delete the Account: Ah, so you think that you can just delete your account when you want to? Better start now, and you will have your account deleted in a few years, maybe. Yes, I said years, and I said maybe. Under the pretext of making things easier for you in case you want to join Facebook again, Facebook insists that you delete each and every thing in your account FIRST and MANUALLY before they consider deleting your account. I have tried to do that in the past. It is like this, you delete something and you think it is deleted, yet in small print, Facebook tells you that somewhere else on Facebook that must be deleted again. Can you imagine going through this process if you have years of entries?

To finish their process, you might have to click tens of hundreds of thousands of times to finally clear out one Facebook account. Look at your friends list, look at your applications list, the wall, the other itmes connected to facebook! If you are the average Facebook member, you will take weeks or months to manually delete it all . And then Facebook can begin to delete your account.

Where is the Delete Button? It is not there. There is no listing in any of their sections to just delete the account. Finally after days of searching, you find the questions, How do I delete my account. The Facebook form letters give you more form answers, telling you you to manually delete all of your items, that means news sources, mini-feeds, news, messages, wall , and more. (If you have already delete these, you go back and send another message to Facebook stating that you have deleted all these. You wait, and you wait and wait some more.

Here is something from the tornado of privacy information that Facebook offers: They offer you the information that they are not responsible for ANYTHING at all that happens to you from your Facebook pages. Their privacy and contract instructions and information state that you are totally responsible for everything and anything that happens to you so they are not liable for ANY damages at all ever to anyone. (That is my wording but that is exactly what Facebook wants. They want out of any responsibility. In other words they have so protected themselves if you have any losses through Facebook, so much that they even put a dollar amount on it stating that you can't claim any more losses than $1,000. (This figure is as of this date of writing. Friday, March 14, 2008

More Tricks: When you try to delete some items, Facebook tells you that you can HIDE the items, but not delete them. Who ever heard of such a thing in any website? You go to delete and it tells you to HIDE it? Last time we looked, delete means to completely delete it and hide means something totally different. Hide means that these applications might be visible to facebook employees and others . (And probaly Facebook has hundreds of employees if not thousands. Do you really want all your personal information hidden rather than deleted? So, unwillingly , you hide all your personal information or whatever is not allowed to be deleted. And then you go back and email them again to say you ant you account permanently deleted. Still with me? The point I am making is that Facebook makes it almost impossible to permanently delete your account. They want you as a permanent customer. They figure at least one or two or more of your friends will convince you to stay with Facebook. If you have gone through this process, you have probably figured out by now that nothing will convince you to go back to Facebook.


Compare Other Websites: If you stop and compare other networking sites (there are plenty of them), you will see that other sites offer you more privacy and they offer a way to delete information and a way to easily delete your account. That is the way that it should be. There are many other sites that permit you to have more control over content.


Facebook is safe? Lots of the people we know, like Facebook because they think (That is THINK) Facebook is safer than other sites. And that could not be further than the truth. Facebook is a website and it is just as unsafe as any other ordinary webiste. They give it the impression, the look as if it is more busines-like (compare it to myspace.com) But what members do not realize is that Facebooks' business is collecting information and denying they have any responsibility to protect you or your friends. No one can or has proven that Facebook is any safer than any other site. So, be cautious on Facebook. Do not believe or think that this site is any safer than any other website. Any information that you type into that site can be obtained by any number of people, including by hackers.

Do You Want to Delete Your Facebook Account? If you want to do this, begin today by manually deleting each and every post,, picture, fun wall applications and any other thing connected to the Facebook account. Do not plan to delete it all in one day if you have hundreds of messages, but begin today.


Tricks for You: Here is a suggestion that you might or might not want to take. Have you thought of deleting all the messages and then posting a message on your fun wall, stating , I am deleting my account due to privacy policies of Facebook and due to the fact that Facebook makes it very difficult to delete items permanently. I am deleting my account on Facebook because I do not like an account that gives me little or no control over my privacy). You can write whatever anti-Fcebook statemnts that you like in your facebook account -as long as it is legal. , to express your opinion of Facebook. Now that might even help you get your account deleted, who knows? I can not imagine that Facebook would want all your negative publicity on your site. Remember type in there only what is legal. If you do this remember not to add any friends and not to add any other applications , gifts, or pictures.

Write and tell me if you are successful in deleting your Facebook - if that is what you want.

The author of this article has had many works published in the USA. She has traveled extensively throughout the East Coast and through the South while observing people and writing about life and everything that is in it. She writes about various topics that interest readers across the nation and all over the world.

How to Success With Facebook Marketing

How to Success With Facebook Marketing

Facebook Marketing is becoming increasingly popular due to the huge growth that Facebook has undertaken in the last few years. Just by looking at its Alexa rank, #2, it is easy to understand the kind of potential that an effective Facebook Marketing campaign can have in any business.

There is so much more to Facebook Marketing than pitching a sales speech. As a matter of fact, aggressively promoting your product or service may be detrimental to your business. Facebook is a social media site and therefore, 99% of the members are there to connect with other people, to make friends, to talk to family, to be part of a group, not to be sold anything.

Now, in Facebook Marketing the only way to attract leads, costumers, prospects... call them whatever you want to call them, is by using Attraction Marketing. This technique is based on portraying yourself as a leader, as an expert, or someone who is important in a certain niche so that other people actually look for you, or what you have to offer and want to follow you.

Here are the basic steps to get you started:

* First of all you are going to need a Facebook account. This should be self-explanatory and certainly essential when it comes to Facebook Marketing, duh.
* Once you are signed up, you need to create a Personal Page, a Fan Page, and a Group Page. There are excellent instructions on Facebook about the creation of each page. There is not much SEO involved.
* Then you need to set up your pages properly. And here is where Facebook Marketing actually begins. Each page needs to have an attractive, interesting, energetic picture of YOU. Remember that this is a social media site, people want to connect to people not to organizations or companies. Then you need to fill out the bio information, do not leave it blank, tell people something about you as a person, give them something to connect to, whether it is your children, your love for pets, your hobbies, anything, just show them that you are human.
* Add lots of high value content. High value content is something relevant to your niche, something that will help people on you field. It is NOT about telling them how great your product is. 99% of the time this content should be free. It is the bait for them to start knowing and trusting you. This is how you show others that you are there for them and not just to make money. This is one of the principles of Facebook Marketing.
* After that you need to connect with others who are in your same niche, preferably those who are leaders. Facebook Marketing is about creating strong personal relationships with people with the same interests. Facebook makes this really easy. There are a couple of way to do this, the most common one is searching groups related to your business and joining them. Then you search for at least 25 people per day and send friend requests to them, preferably you are going to choose those who are leaders or active contributors of the group.
* Lastly, you need to maintain your pages. Like anywhere else, you are going to find that you are going to get a lot of spam or content from people who have nothing better to do than trashing your pages. Check your pages frequently and clean whatever doesn't need to be there. Also, be interactive, respond to messages, clarify topics, expand on comments. If the head of the group is not actively supporting the members the group itself will quickly die.

As of today there are over 600 million active members on Facebook. Facebook Marketing is one of the newest, yet most effective strategies to market your business or products, done correctly it may become you primary marketing strategy.