Facebook Users Beware – Part II

Since my enlightenment concerning the terms of service for Facebook in regards to images, blog posts and other media, I’ve been looking for ways to minimize my exposure, but still use their website as a means to not only connect with friends and family more often, but continue developing the marketing and branding aspect of A Pretty Rock as well. (Whoo – that was a mouth full of a sentence, huh?)

By now you’re probably wondering where is Part I of this blog post. I guess there actually is no continuation for this post, but to get you caught up, this is what’s going on…

Tuesday I ran across a post on Michelle’s Complete Fragments blog titled Social Network Copyright Information. The post was about Facebook and their policy in regard to your media or that of anyone else’s that you post on your profile.

In short, Facebook takes a free use copyright on anything you post in the profile. This means that if they want to create a magazine with your images or your blog posts or anything else they find on your profile, they can do just that, without your explicit permission, because you already agreed to it when you agreed to the terms of service. Kinda sucks, doesn’t?

(Btw, that’s exactly what happened last December, as several people walked into their local bookstores to find an issue of Facebook Magazine on the shelves.) Once I read the terms myself and decided I didn’t like them, I chose to pull all of my imported blog posts and my link to my Flickr account through the MyFlickr app.

And with that, you’re caught up to this post. Having had time to think about the terms, I also had time to think about the various comments my friends made. One of them in particular, is what I think will be my approach to Facebook marketing from here on out: posting of lower resolution images.

Thanks to Facebook themselves, we are given the tool we need as a business to post information about our products without leaving ourselves open to abuse: the “Share on Facebook” bookmarklet.

With the bookmarklet, you can post a link on your Facebook profile from any page you are currently viewing. The bookmarklet then pulls all the images from the page, allowing you to select an image to post with your link…or if you prefer, no image at all.

Using the bookmarklet in conjuction with Etsy product pages (that contain the thumbnail photos) or your own pages with scaled down images, you can control how much you expose yourself to the Facebook ToS. If you look at my Facebook profile, you can see that I’ve put the bookmarklet’s “post a link” feature to use several times already, purposefully using the lower resolution images in my link posts.

Where do you get this fantastic bookmarklet? You can find it on your posted items page on Facebook. In the right hand column, you’ll see the information box for Share on Facebook.

So, lesson learned: Make sure you read the Facebook Terms of Service or any terms of service for social networking sites you frequent. Better to take the time and read, than to not read and get burned later.