Hi everyone

To whet your appetite ahead of the Don Tapscott presentation next week, here is some background that you may find interesting.

A recent article by Don challenging the banking industry: “Three principles for a new Wall Street”

Don’s recent 40 minute segment on NPR about rethinking the Universities

Do you agree or disagree with what he’s proposing? If you are a member of the Social Media Leadership Forum, come along on the 23rd and share your views. If you’ve not already registered to come to the event on Wednesday 23rd, there is still time  contact me now!

Don Tapscott, who is going to be talking with members of the Social Media Leadership Forum this Wednesday at an event kindly hosted by Deloitte, has been named one of the world’s most influential business thinkers.

It is interesting to see how many other Canadians there are on the Forbes list!

It has become something of a celebrity trend to bash Twitter (and usually celebrities that don’t use the social network). This time, it’s actor and director Ralph Fiennes, who blames Twitter for the downfall of the English language.

He said “We’re in a world of truncated sentences, soundbites and Twitter.”

”[Language] is being eroded — it’s changing. Our expressiveness and our ease with some words is being diluted so that the sentence with more than one clause is a problem for us, and the word of more than two syllables is a problem for us.”

“I hear it, too, from people at drama schools, who say the younger intake find the density of a Shakespeare text a challenge in a way that, perhaps, [students] a few generations ago maybe wouldn’t have.”

Now, I’m not sure who Ralph has viewed on Twitter (if anyone has at all), but it is full of editors, journalists, PRs, bloggers and entrepreneurs. People who have a fairly good, if not fanatical, grasp of the English language. The 140 character limit might pose a slight problem, but most of us manage to struggle on without resorting to text language.

I’d agree that social media is making text language more widespread, or at least more visible. The ease of sending a quick tweet can mean we suffer from the odd spelling mistake or missing apostrophe. Issues with language are possibly more rife on Facebook. Particularly with teenagers, but that’s what teenagers do.

What do you think? Is Twitter the reason the English language is on the demise?

Posting to Facebook isn’t just about posting the right content for your customers and fans. The time you post it is equally important. For example, post at 7am and you’re unlikely to get as many views as a post that goes up at 9am or lunchtime, purely because fewer people will be awake to view it.

Jeff Widman from PageLever recently wrote a piece for Mashable about how often you should post on Facebook, and when to post. Jeff actually places the emphasis on how long your post stays in a news feed. Like many Facebook fanatics, he advises against posting so much that your posts turn up several times in one news feed, as fans will turn off and unlike your page. But posting too little means you risk being missed by fans. The new Facebook pages mean that if fans aren’t interacting with your page, they’ll see your updates less often, so the quality of your content is a consideration too.

But trying to work out how often you should post based on news feed speed creates a problem: it’s pretty much guess-work. You can work out an average, but it really does depend on how many pages and people each fan already follows.

The key to finding out what time is best for your page is to pay attention to your page stats. Try posting at different times throughout each day. Then, check out the impressions and feedback for each post (you’ll find this data just above the like and comment buttons.) You’re aiming to get as many impressions and feedback activities (shares, likes and comments) as possible.

Additionally, you need to monitor the speed of impressions, and when the increase in impressions starts to slow down. If, for example, impressions steadily increase for 24 hours then stop, you know that most posts last a day in the average news feed. Therefore, posting daily is enough for your fans.

Do you have a specific method when it comes to posting on Facebook?