 | Facebook Know-how |
Lara Solomon is the founder of Mocks, mobile phone socks , founder of Social Rabbit - your guide in the world of social media and author of 'Brand New Day – the Highs & Lows of Starting a Small Business'. Lara's business LaRoo was the winner of the NSW Telstra Micro-Business Award in 2008.
A couple of weeks ago I looked at what makes a good Facebook page welcome tab, so I thought I would follow that up by looking at the profile picture.
Your page profile picture is the image on the left side of your page and always stays there no matter which tab your visitors click on.
Facts on the profile picture:
- The space you have available is 540 pixels long by 180 pixels wide (of you aren’t sure what this is Facebook will automatically resize what you load up).
- You can change it as often as you like.
- The thumbnail for your page (that’s the little picture that appears next to your page posts in peoples’ newsfeeds and on the wall) is made from your profile picture.
- Every profile picture you upload automatically goes into a photo album called “profile pictures”.
Tips for a good picture:
- Make it eye-catching.
- Simple and clear is better than packing lots in – people shouldn’t need to squint to read things or see what it is in the image.
- Make it relevant, that means if your page is about a product include the product, if your page is about a service-based business show relevant happy customers or the service in action.
- Include your logo so that people know when they first visit that they have the right page – particularly relevant if you don’t have a welcome tab.
- If you include a phone number also include the area code, visitors might not realise you are in a different state to them.
- Make sure it matches the rest of your business’ branding, eg. if your business colours are red and pink, don’t use blue and green, etc.
- If you have a product-based business use it as a place to showcase your products and change it regularly so that people see the range you have. This worked really well on my Mocks page, and when we changed the picture people would ask, “Where do I buy that design?”
- If you have the photos tab showing on your page after you load up a new profile picture go and add a description – this is particularly relevant if you are promoting a product because you can add a link to where it can be bought.
- Get topical, eg. Christmas is around the corner, get a festive picture for the season.
I see some profile pictures that are really wasting what is prime real estate in the Facebook world, because your profile picture becomes your thumbnail and that’s what people see when they search – it’s all about first impressions and making it easy for people to find you. Have a really good look at yours; does it tell someone at a glance what you are all about or are they screwing their eyes up trying to read it?
Lara Solomon is the founder of Mocks, mobile phone socks , founder of Social Rabbit - your guide in the world of social media author of 'Brand New Day – the Highs & Lows of Starting a Small Business'. Lara's business LaRoo was the winner of the NSW Telstra Micro-Business Award in 2008.
Using Your Face to Dig Deeper
As Internet giants Facebook Inc. and Google Inc. race to expand their facial-recognition abilities, new research shows how powerful, and potentially detrimental to privacy, these tools have become.
Armed with nothing but a snapshot, researchers at Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh successfully identified about one-third of the people they tested, using a powerful facial-recognition technology recently acquired by Google.
Prof. Alessandro Acquisti, the study's author, also found that about 27% of the time, using data gleaned from Facebook profiles of the subjects he identified, he could correctly predict the first five digits of their Social Security numbers.
The research demonstrates the potentially intrusive power of a facial-recognition technology, when combined with publicly available personal data. The study was funded largely by a grant from the National Science Foundation, with smaller sums from Carnegie Mellon and the U.S. Army.
Paul Ohm, a law professor at University of Colorado Law School, who has read Prof. Acquisti's paper, said it shows how easy it is becoming to "re-identify" people from bits of supposedly anonymous information. "This paper really establishes that re-identification is much easier than experts think it's going to be," he said.
For his study, Prof. Acquisti used a webcam to take pictures of student volunteers, then used off-the-shelf facial-recognition software to match the students' faces with those in publicly available Facebook photos. "We call it the democratization of surveillance," he said.
The professor said the study also shows how Facebook, with its 750 million users, whose names and profile photos are automatically public, is becoming a de facto identity-verification service.
A Facebook spokesman said that Facebook profiles don't always contain pictures of people's faces. Users can choose whether "to upload a profile picture, what that picture is of, when to delete that picture," he said.
Google Chairman Eric Schmidt discussed his concerns about Facebook at the D: All Things Digital conference in June.
Facebook is "the first generally available way of disambiguating identity," he said. "Historically, on the Internet such a fundamental service wouldn't be owned by a single company. …I think the industry would benefit from an alternative to that."
Google has been racing to create a rival social-networking service. In June, it launched Google+ to compete with Facebook. In July, Google acquired Pittsburgh Pattern Recognition, or PittPatt, the facial-recognition technology that was used in the Carnegie Mellon study.
Facebook rolled out its facial-recognition service world-wide in June. The service lets people automatically identify photos of their friends. Facebook users who don't want to be automatically identified in photos must change their privacy settings.
A Google spokesman said the company won't introduce facial-recognition technology "to our apps or product features" without putting strong privacy protections in place. At the D conference, Mr. Schmidt said Google had withdrawn a facial-recognition service for mobile phones that it considered too intrusive.
The race to acquire facial-recognition technology reflects the technology's sharp improvement in recent years. The number of matching photos that were incorrectly rejected by state-of-the-art recognition technology declined to 0.29% in 2010 from 79% in 1993, according to a study by the National Institutes of Standards and Technology.
"It's certainly not science fiction anymore," said Peter N. Belhumeur, professor of computer science at Columbia University.
One big reason for the leap forward: the wide availability of photos that people have uploaded to the Internet through social-networking sites. Previously, publicly available pictures of individuals were mostly limited to driver's-license photos, school portraits or criminal mug shots, all of which were difficult to obtain.
In the Carnegie Mellon study, 93 students agreed to be photographed using a web camera attached to a laptop. The shots were immediately uploaded to a cloud computer and compared with a database of 261,262 publicly available photos downloaded from Carnegie Mellon students' Facebook profiles.
In less than three seconds, the system found 10 possible matching photos in the Facebook database. The students confirmed their face was among the top results more than 30% of the time.
Prof. Acquisti said the research "suggests that the identity of about one-third of subjects walking by the campus building may be inferred in a few seconds combining social-network data, cloud computing and an inexpensive webcam."
He then tried to discover whether he could predict sensitive information from the Facebook profile of individuals he had identified. He exploited the fact that, after 1987, the Social Security Administration started assigning Social Security numbers in a way that inadvertently made it easier to predict them based on the person's birthdate
Drawing from knowledge of the Social Security numbering system used in a previous experiment, Prof. Acquisti was able to predict the first five digits of the subject's nine-digit Social Security numbers 27% of the time, with just four attempts. "The chain of inferences comes from one single piece of anonymous information—somebody's face."
The last four digits of the number also are predictable: In a 2009 paper, Prof. Acquisti showed that he could predict an entire Social Security number with fewer than 1,000 attempts for close to 10% of people born after 1988.
In June, the Social Security agency launched a new "randomized" numbering system, which will make such predictions more difficult for future generations. An agency spokesman said that even under the old system "there is no foolproof method for predicting a person's Social Security number."
As a demonstration of his latest project, Prof. Acquisti also built a mobile-phone app that takes pictures of people and overlays on the picture a prediction of the subject's name and Social Security number. He said he won't release the app, but that he wanted to showcase the power of the data that can be generated from a single photo.
And then there’s the picture that isn’t actually you. People put them up because they really love the cartoon character, or because it reminds them of them. Also known as the “No, really, what do you look like?” picture.
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