Businesses — including bands, nonprofits, and other organizations — make all sorts of poor choices in their use of Facebook, but probably the worst are related to the use of friend/personal accounts instead of business pages.

The situation might be getting a little better these days as more users become savvier in their use of social media, but it’s still a pervasive problem.

And the longer businesses take in making the transition, the deeper the hole they will have for themselves.

As the manager of the Facebook page for this blog (please “like” Savannah Unplugged on Facebook), I’ve long had the ability to know just how many people have seen individual posts. That feature is obviously not available to personal users.

Yesterday, my account also began giving me all sorts of interesting data — the kind of information that could be absolutely critical if my blog were one of my key income sources.

I’m going to include a few screencaps here of what this new information looks like.

Be warned: if you’re paranoid about privacy because it never occurred to you that companies are tracking things like this, you might be in for a shock. I suspect most of my readers are aware, however, that there is all sorts of identifying information out there in cyberspace. Nothing that Facebook is now providing betrays the privacy of any individual user.

That said, I’ll share a few of the new features that page managers can see under “insights”. Click for larger versions.

I can now see what time of day the followers of Savannah Unplugged are online:

I was somewhat astonished by this. Savannah Unplugged has 1,421 likes at this moment. Between 9 a.m. and 10 p.m., over 500 of those fans are on Facebook for at least a moment in every single hour. I know that I frequently leave a Facebook window open anytime I’m at my desk at home or at Armstrong, but I am surprised by just how pervasive the use of the service is.

I can now see how many fans see and interact with various types of posts. Obviously, photo posts are the most interacted with:

And look at this next screencap. I can even see not only how many fans saw individual posts but how many clicked on them. Since I’m hoping readers will go from Facebook to my blog, this data provides considerable information. The one post here with 0 reach was a comment on an existing blog post — obviously that comment appeared in no one’s news feeds. You’ll see that relatively few Facebook users clicked on any of these posts, but the percentage varies widely, from less than 5 percent to more than 10 percent.

All this info is in addition to the types of information I’ve been getting already, like the age and gender of those who follow Savannah Unplugged:

As you can see, women make up 46 percent of all Facebook users, but 53 percent of Savannah Unplugged followers are women. I have virtually the same number of followers in three age demographics: 25-34, 35-44, and 45-54. But my blog is dramatically underperforming among young people relative to their presence on Facebook. The opposite is true among older users.

I don’t know what — if anything — I’ll end up doing with this additional information. But, as I noted above, my livelihood doesn’t rely on the number of hits I get on Savannah Unplugged on Facebook or here on the site itself.

And let me end with a bit of a pitch. If there are blogs like mine that you enjoy, you should “like” them on Facebook and try to interact with them there occasionally. Interacting in any way with individual posts can dramatically increase their reach.

And if there are businesses or other entities that you’d like to support, you should take similar steps.

I have over 3,100 contacts on my personal page, many of whom friended me because I write public columns in the newspaper. But only 900 of those contacts have liked my blog, which is also a public forum where I post information and opinions like those found in my columns.

It’s fascinating stuff.

Teens are continuing to use Facebook in extremely large numbers. About 81 percent of all teens use at least one social media platform; 94 percent of all teen social media users have Facebook accounts.

But teens are less satisfied than they were with Facebook — for reasons noted in this post title — and they are increasingly compartmentalizing their social media choices.

The report gives no data for the prevalence of Snapchat use, but notes that it is growing fast with a high degree of user satisfaction. Note in the chart at the bottom the relative weakness of Pinterest and Google Plus. Given my own positive experiences with Instagram, I suspect the use of it will continue to rise, especially since it seems likely that more and more teens will have high-quality smart phones in the future.

Fewer teens are using Tumblr than I expected, which makes Yahoo’s recent $1.1 billion purchase of the site more problematic on the one hand, but on the other hand there’s ample room for revenue growth. I wrote about some of those issues in a recent post.

The data and details are so sprawling and interesting that I’m just going to use a series of block quotes for the rest of this post:

• Teens are sharing more information about themselves on social media sites than they did in the past. For the five different types of personal information that we measured in both 2006 and 2012, each is significantly more likely to be shared by teen social media users in our most recent survey.
• Teen Twitter use has grown significantly: 24% of online teens use Twitter, up from 16% in 2011.
• The typical (median) teen Facebook user has 300 friends, while the typical teen Twitter user has 79 followers.
• Focus group discussions with teens show that they have waning enthusiasm for Facebook, disliking the increasing adult presence, people sharing excessively, and stressful “drama,” but they keep using it because participation is an important part of overall teenage socializing.
• 60% of teen Facebook users keep their profiles private, and most report high levels of confidence in their ability to manage their settings.
• Teens take other steps to shape their reputation, manage their networks, and mask information they donâ€t want others to know; 74% of teen social media users have deleted people from their network or friends list.
• Teen social media users do not express a high level of concern about third-party access to their data; just 9% say they are “very” concerned.
• On Facebook, increasing network size goes hand in hand with network variety, information sharing, and personal information management.
• In broad measures of online experience, teens are considerably more likely to report positive experiences than negative ones. For instance, 52% of online teens say they have had an experience online that made them feel good about themselves.

Teens donâ€t think of their Facebook use in terms of information sharing, friending or privacy: for them, what is most important about Facebook is how it is a major center of teenage social interactions, both with the positives of friendship and social support and the negatives of drama and social expectations. Thinking about social media use in terms of reputation management is closer to the teen experience.

Twitter draws a far smaller crowd than Facebook for teens, but its use is rising. One in four online teens uses Twitter in some way. While overall use of social networking sites among teens has hovered around 80%, Twitter grew in popularity; 24% of online teens use Twitter, up from 16% in 2011 and 8% the first time we asked this question in late 2009.

African-American teens are substantially more likely to report using Twitter when compared with white youth.

Those teens who used sites like Twitter and Instagram reported feeling like they could better express themselves on these platforms, where they felt freed from the social expectations and constraints of Facebook. Some teens may migrate their activity and attention to other sites to escape the drama and pressures they find on Facebook, although most still remain active on Facebook as well.

Most teens express a high level of confidence in managing their Facebook privacy settings. […] only 5% of teen Facebook users say they limit what their parents can see.

Teen social media users do not express a high level of concern about third-party access to their data; just 9% say they are “very” concerned.

Female (age 16): “And so now I am basically dividing things up. Instagram is mostly for pictures. Twitter is mostly for just saying what you are thinking. Facebook is both of them combined so you have to give a little bit of each. But yes, so Instagram, I posted more pictures on Instagram than on Facebook. Twitter is more natural.”
Female (age 15): “I have a Facebook, a Tumblr, and Twitter. I donâ€t use Facebook or Twitter much. I rather use Tumblr to look for interesting stories. I like Tumblr because I donâ€t have to present a specific or false image of myself and I donâ€t have to interact with people I donâ€t necessarily want to talk to.”

I wasn’t even sure what he was talking about.

But since I started blogging just over two years ago and since I’m a teacher of journalism classes at Armstrong Atlantic State University, I’ve spent some time figuring out what Tumblr is all about. More of my opinion on that in a minute.

Tumblr had about $14 million in revenue in 2012. Yahoo is now apparently purchasing the business for $1.1 billion. Huh?

From Forbes’ The Intolerable Revenue Lightness Of Tumblr:

So Yahoo paid $1.1 billion for a company that made $14 million in revenue last year. It took Tumblr five years to generate as much annual revenue as a moderately well-managed New York deli. You know – the sort that offers more than six cheese varieties.

But before we jump on the bandwagon bashing Yahoo and CEO Marissa Mayer, consider this piece from Business Insider in January: Here’s Tumblr’s Total Revenue For 2012 — And How It Will Make A Profit In 2013. From that piece about the recent moves of Tumblr CEO David Karp:

But so far Tumblr has been very careful. It has restricted paid media to its “radar” and “spotlight” features, which take up a tiny proportion of each user’s dashboard. Most of those paid ad exposures can’t be seen unless you have an account and are logged in.

Tumblr hasn’t even begun to sell most of its real estate to advertisers.

Yet Karp has moved closer and closer to the ad biz all through 2012. Consider:

• He signed up a traffic analytics company, Union Metrics, to give marketers real performance data.
• He named 12 agencies to a hot list of companies tapped to work with Tumblr.
• He poached Groupon sales chief Lee brown to be Tumblr’s ad sales chief.
• He set a minimum buy-in price of $25,000.
• He hired Rick Webb of The Barbarian Group to build sales and marketing.

And he did all this after spending years insisting he was not interested in advertising, a position he maintained even in early 2012.

Given its traffic, if Tumblr were to install even the most basic web ad operations — by selling a native ad format on a private exchange, for instance, like Facebook does — it would instantly become fantastically profitable.

Even if it alienates some users, advertising on Tumblr will have an instant, dramatic reach since it’s a wide open field.

Still, it’s an interesting — and big — gamble, one that has brought Tumblr co-founder and CEO Karp personal wealth of $275 million.

From the BBC’s Tumblr and Yahoo: Why sex, jokes and gifs are worth $1.1bn:

Yahoo is desperate to be cool again.

And, like that kid at school who always got the newest gadgets and video games to impress his “friends”, there’s seemingly no shortage of money available to get what it wants.

Now, just two months after splashing out millions on a UK teenager’s app Summly, Yahoo is set to buy one of the hottest properties in social media: Tumblr.

It will reportedly cost $1.1bn (£723m), a smidgen more than Facebook paid for photo-sharing service Instagram last year.

Yet with users already threatening to leave Tumblr en masse, will simply owning something trendy actually boost Yahoo’s internet cred?

“It’s very hard to just buy something cool from somebody else and for it to remain cool,” says Robin Klein, a partner at technology investors Index Ventures.

I started a Tumblr a little less than a year ago as another place for showcasing some of my photography while at the same time attempting to drive a little more traffic to this blog. All these months later, I rarely update bill dawers photography and the site gets just a couple of unique visitors per day.

Still, the sheer visual ease of Tumblr and the ability to customize pages with various themes are natural draws, especially for younger people trying to assert their individuality (even if thousands of others are using the identical theme).

I routinely look at a number of different Tumblr pages, all of which are visually stimulating and satisfying in ways that ordinary blogs, websites, and Facebook pages are not. I periodically check in with performers like Triathalon, Heyrocco, and Astronautalis. But such Tumblrs aren’t very effective at guiding new listeners — they’re really for fans who already feel they’re on the inside.

I love seeing what’s on Michael Stipe’s mind these days and occasionally visiting more esoteric sites like The Paris Review, which asks a great question tonight:

If William Faulkner were with us and knocked on your door tomorrow, where in your neighbourhood would you direct him for a whiskey?

In spite of such obvious positives, I have some major reservations about Tumblr.

First and foremost: is the “reblogging” of images on sites like Tumblr and Pinterest tantamount to copyright violation?

And what about all the disturbing stuff on Tumblr that seems to be far more worrisome than what can be found on Facebook or on other social media sites? Just one example: the steady stream of posts by young women and girls advocating anorexia.

Then of course there’s all the porn, which tends toward the quick publication of viral imagery, often of “amateurs”, “selfies”, and the like. There seems to be a wide range of opinions on how much the site relies on porn for its traffic. From the HuffPo’s Tumblr’s Porn Can Stay, Suggests Yahoo CEO Marissa Mayer:

Tumblr pornographers, take heart: Yahoo comes in peace.

During an investor call Monday morning announcing Yahoo’s $1.1 billion acquisition of media network Tumblr, Yahoo chief executive Marissa Mayer emphasized that Yahoo wants to “let Tumblr be Tumblr,” which she suggested would include allowing its numerous X-rated accounts to continue pumping out pornography undisturbed. […]

“I think the richness and breadth of content available on Tumblr — even though it may not be as brand safe as what’s on our site — is what’s really exciting and allows us to reach even more users,” said Mayer, who did not mention pornography as such, but referred obliquely to content that was not “brand safe.”

But it might not be that easy. From a 2011 Gawker post The Porn and Spam Behind Tumblr’s Meteoric Rise:

But the obvious prevalence of Tumblr smut, combined with the company’s public ambivalence about it, means Tumblr’s traffic is not as sustainable as, say, Wikipedia’s. It’s not hard to imagine Tumblr cracking down on adult content to appease advertisers; it would hardly be the startup’s first controversial or heavy handed content intervention.

And is any company worth $1.1 billion if Google search trends have such a short history — no matter how impressive that history might be?

So many interesting issues here that are worth watching.

Like so many other Americans, I followed the news online — my minimal cable package doesn’t even include the news channels.

But I wasn’t following very closely, at least not until the name of the alleged murderer began appearing in my Twitter feed and on a variety of newspaper sites. The killer was NOT Ryan Lanza, but that’s what was first reported. The shooter was Adam Lanza, apparently, Ryan’s brother. Adam might have had some of Ryan’s identification on him, or a law enforcement official giving confirmation off the record might have simply transposed the names.

But, armed with my incorrect information, I did what many others did: I looked up Ryan Lanza on Facebook. And there he was — and, surprisingly, still is today. There’s nothing to see there beyond a couple of profile photos, plus his hometown and current city.

In part because of the dearth of information, it was hard to ignore the fact that Lanza “likes” the game Mass Effect.

And then confusion began to set in, as a widely circulated photo (which I’ve decided is OK to post here) suggested that Ryan Lanza was alive and well. He was even posting denials of involvement to his Facebook page. (Imagine his horror, as he realized the scale of the tragedy in both his own family and his hometown.)

The Atlantic Wire has a pithy summary of how all this went down: How the Internet Got the Wrong Lanza.

But was the internet to blame as much as the official or officials who apparently confirmed the wrong name for members of the media? Or were the media sources themselves to blame for reporting what others were reporting without independent verification or an official statement? They could have held off. NPR’s All Things Considered on Friday afternoon never mentioned the alleged shooter’s name, for example.

Anyway, Ryan Lanza’s Facebook profile pic has been shared almost 10,000 times directly from his page, and no telling how often it was downloaded and reposted. (I think that the number of shares is down by several thousand from its peak, so maybe some realized their error and took down their posts. I’ll try to find out and edit the info right here if I can.)

And then the snowballs started rolling. If Ryan Lanza is on Facebook, surely he’s on Twitter. So my Twitter feed filled up with links to this kid — a BMX fan with a couple of dozen followers. A few of that Ryan Lanza’s tweets are angsty, one welcomes the end of the world, a couple sound lonely — so of course the armchair psychologists (I was one of them but didn’t make a fool out of myself by publicly posting my analysis) saw a deeply troubled young man about to snap. It was obvious.

And then at exactly 3 p.m. that Ryan Lanza realizes that he has picked up a few thousand followers and tweets the following, which has been retweeted over 10,000 times:

so aperently im getting spammed bc someone with the same name as me killed some ppl… wtf?

— Ryan Lanza (@Ryan__Lanza) December 14, 2012

So unspeakable tragedy is transformed into rank absurdity. I hope the kid figures out a way to make those 5,000+ followers benefit him somehow.

A few lessons seem pretty obvious. Credible news outlets should wait for official confirmation of names. The internet-sleuthing public should be less trusting and more cynical about the information they are given. While there are sometimes mental health warning signs in some users’ online postings, it’s really easy to give too much weight to many of those.

At the same time, law enforcement needs to understand that public — and media — behavior like this is to be expected. If an incorrect suspect has been named, some sort of official statement should be made as soon as possible.

Ironically, Adam Lanza — the apparent shooter — seems to have had almost no social media footprint.