Facebook has been battling users who either don’t exist in real life or are using a pseudonym, but the company has met resistance in Germany. However, a judge ruled Wednesday in an appeal case that German privacy laws (which would allow users to have whatever name they want on the social network) do not apply to Facebook, as the company’s European base is in Ireland, where regulations are more lax.
Vine has added sound and motion to the popular microblogging website, Twitter. Learn how to bring your information to life in our Vine webcast on Wednesday, June 19 from 4-5 pm ET. In this one-hour webcast, Gemma Craven (left), EVP, New York group director at Social@Ogilvy will discuss best practices for using the visual social platform and share some of her team's successful vine videos. Register here. 
Promotions can be a great way to build your Facebook community and increase engagement with your fans. They offer incentives for new users to not only interact with your page, but to revisit it. It’s also a great way for new audiences to discover your brand. The reality is, contests and sweepstakes can easily be gamed so that the winner isn’t a brand advocate, but rather, someone who cheated their way to the top. It’s a scary reality that a lot of brands and agencies fall victim to, most of which don’t even know it.
While some companies really know how to do Facebook marketing right, there are many others that are clueless. PostRocket wants to help the latter group. The company’s co-founder, Mike Maghsoudi, recently posted about five mistakes that he’s seen brands make on Facebook.
As Facebook mentioned in its 10-K filing, the site still has a serious problem with fake profiles, used to bolster shady pages’ fan metrics. It appears that the social network did some cleaning up in January, as several countries (notably the U.S. and Indonesia) lost a great number of users last month, according to Quintly. All around the world, more than 4 million users’ profiles were deleted in January.
There were more than 50 million Facebook pages with at least 10 likes as of Dec. 31, 2012, and some 10 million applications were using the social network’s platform, according to its annual form 10-K filed with the Securities and Exchange Commission following the release of its fourth-quarter earnings report last week.
If you’re running behind on your bills and suddenly find a friend request on Facebook from an attractive woman in a bikini whom you’ve never met before, think twice before accepting the add. As Bloomberg reported Thursday, debt collectors are taking on fake personas on Facebook to reach users who owe money.
In an effort to get a leg up on Facebook marketing, many like-obsessed pages resort to buying fans — fake profiles which only exist to boost pages’ numbers. Now that Facebook has broken down fans by country, VentureBeat notes that it’s easier to see which pages have acquired fans honestly, and which ones flat-out paid for them.
Despite initiatives by Facebook aimed at stamping out fake profiles and pages, the process has been slow, and the issues still remain. Vice President of Global Marketing Solutions Carolyn Everson spoke with Business Insider about what the social network is doing about the problem.
Over the past year, Facebook has been on a rampage against users who either don’t exist or are using fake names. After all, advertisers want real people with real information behind those likes. The New York Times examined this issue, showing how pseudonyms can be used for good and for evil.
Despite statistics showing that more college admissions officers, as well as hiring managers, check applicants’ Facebook pages, many teenagers are still lax about social media security, continuing to post content that is detrimental to their online reputation. Michael P. Grace, president and CEO of Virallock, spoke with AllFacebook about the mistakes that high school and college students are making on Facebook and how they can clean up their acts for a better future.
