Photography, a profession, a passion or a hobby for some. But it always takes a great deal of art to click a good photograph. It is like capturing a moment, forever.

"Photography is the only language that can be understood anywhere in the world."

To make a photograph successful or to get recognized its real worth, it needs to reach more and more people. The art of photography requires and deserves to be seen by the mass. Nowadays, with all the social networking sites with their increasing popularity are offering a great solution to that. All a photographer needs to do is make an account and upload the photographs. The rest will be taken care of.

A stalker or not, Facebook is definitely leaving no stone un-turned in providing the best and the most unique experience to its users and in doing so Facebook keeps on coming with new and improved features and last Thursday, Facebook added another feature to that list. Called the "Nearby Friends", this feature allows the users to share their current location with friends in the area and in case you find a friend with whom you want to catch-up in the same area as you, you can tap on the button and share your exact location with them.

A good thing about this feature is that it's optional and you can choose the friends you want to share your location with.

Well, this feature is no replacement for any GPS location service or Facebook's very own 'Check In'. It only allows you to see if your friends are in the same area as you and hopefully, catch-up with them.

Facebook surprised us all earlier this month when they acquired WhatsApp for a whopping $19 billion—Americans were especially shocked since most of us hadn't previously heard of WhatsApp. Even though the app isn't popular in the US, it has 90 million users worldwide, mostly in India, Brazil, and Mexico. But you wouldn't be alone in thinking that $19 billion still seems like an awfully hefty price to pay for an app.

Social networking is one of the top ways that people, small businesses, and even large corporations and institutions are using to promote and advertise themselves in our technology driven world. If you already have your website but aren't seeing a great deal of traffic, starting a website page on Facebook can direct traffic back to your website or just give you the business you need through Facebook itself.

Facebook is probably the biggest name in social networking, and not having a part in that is a mistake!

Facebook's latest acquisition of Whatsapp may be the biggest acquisition so far but for some of us this acquisition is still a shocker and is surrounded by some unanswered questions like WHY Whatsapp? and NOW WHAT?

Well, we still don't know what's the road ahead for the Facebook-Whatsapp duo but no matter what's in store, Facebook and Whatsapp would never go off our favorites list.

Though Facebook is used by millions of people all over the world, we shouldn't forget that so many people are using it.

Have you ever hosted events where you are supposed to take entry fees or some registration amount from the attendees? If you have, then I'm sure you must have promoted them across all your social media networks and would have definitely done heavy Facebook promotion by way of creating an event but did you know that you can take payments from the attendees on Facebook?

I know I got you scratching your head over this but there is a way of doing so, you can integrate Facebook events directly with payments.

Meet FBPay!

FBPay is a platform which allows event organizers to enable their Facebook events with payments quickly and easily.

For those of you who have been waiting for the Facebook news reader here is a good news for you, Facebook has finally announced its launch. I know the wait was long but it seems like it was worth waiting for.

This is no regular reader app but is a standalone app called Paper that takes content from the Facebook network and turns it into a newspaper-style platform.

The app would be first available to the iPhone users in the US on February 3rd.

This app is the hard work of a group of fifteen people at Facebook known as Facebook Creative Labs.

Facebook has acquired another start-up called Branch and its sister service, Potluck.

Branch is start-up based in New York that offers multiple social discussion tools. Branch's co-founder Josh Miller broke the news on Facebook through a post.

"We will be forming Facebook's Conversations group, based in New York City, with the goal of helping people connect with others around their interests. Their pitch to us was: 'Build Branch at Facebook scale!"

If the sources are to believed Facebook acquired Branch and Potluck at $15 million.

Facebook has purchased its first India-based company called Little Eye Labs.

Little Eye Labs is a India-based mobile analytic company for Android developers that was launched about a year ago by a group of program analysis geeks who wanted to build better tools for mobile developers.

Little Eye Labs provides developers with insights which helps them in optimizing their app's resource consumption; this includes memory issues, battery drainage, crashes and excessive data usage.

If the rumors are to be believed, Facebook has has been eyeing the Little Eye Labs for some time now.

It has been more than a year since Facebook first launched its Facebook Poke app and honestly speaking, this app is already in the app graveyard of all forgotten apps.

Call it one-of-its-kind but Facebook Poke app is very similar to the photo-messaging app, Snapchat.

For those who have used both the apps they would find resemblance between the two, one major resemblance that both the apps let the users send and view pictures and videos that self destruct within a few seconds; Facebook Poke - you can set a limit of 1, 3, 5 or 10 seconds and Snapchat - you can set any limit between 1 and 10 seconds.

For the past three years the social media giant, Facebook has been organizing the Facebook Studio Awards that honors the brands and agencies that are helping people and businesses connect.

For those who have been waiting for these awards the good news is that the submissions are finally OPEN!

According to Shareaholic's recently released annual report Facebook is on the top spot when it comes to driving traffic to one's website or blog, following the suite is Pinterest and Twitter. The results are based on data collected from the company's 200,000 publishers who reached more than 250 million unique monthly visitors in 13 months.

This report clearly suggested that in 13-month time period Facebook's average 8.11% of all referral. This clearly shows that Facebook has not lost its charm and it still is one very important player of your social media strategy. And I guess that's one reason why Facebook always comes first in any business' social media strategy. But when it comes to using Facebook on the business front then its not no piece of cake.

Yet again Facebook has modified its privacy setting. It all happened yesterday and from now onwards you won't be able to hide yourself completely from being searched on Facebook by others.

Prior to this modification users could actually hide themselves from being shown in the search results of others with the option "Who can look up your Timeline by name?" Wondering why did Facebook took this step. Because most users weren't opting for this option.

I always found this one option funny because at the end of the day Facebook is a social network so why make it impossible for others to search you there.

Source

This July Facebook announced a new feature that allows users to embed Facebook posts out of the social network to other websites or blogs. Users can embed all sort of posts - everything from images, text and videos. Users can interact with embedded posts by liking and sharing them.

Embedded posts also allows users to directly 'Like' your Facebook page, in case they haven't,  from your website or blog.

The "Embed Post" option appears when you click on the drop-down arrow in the top-right corner of the any post. The moment you click on it, you get the embedded code to copy and past into your website or blog.

Facebook surely knows how to surprise its over 1.2 billion user community. With user-friendly new features being added like every other day, helping its users in growing their businesses and doing everything to offer the best and the most unique experience to its users.

Recently, Facebook did something all the more unique, shocking its over 1.2 billion user community thanks to its The Faces of Facebook project.

Wondering what 'The Faces of Facebook' project is all about?

This project puts the over 1.2 billion users profile pictures in one place.

Facebook has everything. It allows you to share your mind, post pictures, make notes, share document, lets you search, connect with friends and what not but the only thing missing is the edit option in the posts. We desperately need that! Typos in posts are a bummer. But finally, Facebook has decided to introduce this feature. Yay!

Facebook is going to allow the users to edit posts after they are published. The latest update of the Facebook app for Android allows users to do so. This feature currently has been rolled out for both web and Android devices. The iOS users would have to wait until the next app update.

While most of us struggle with getting started with social media marketing when it comes to promoting our business/brands, there are a few of us that master this one tough form of marketing.

If you ask the experts how they do it, they'll come up with all sorts of explanations and tips but not their actual strategy and why would they, if they'll go around telling every other man how they do it then they obviously won't be the experts anymore. Moreover, to become so they have struggled day and night, planning and working and it's their hard work that got has them there. However, if you want to learn from experts there is still a way and that is following them on various social media networks. Trust me it helps! You get to learn a lot of things, you stay up-to-date with all the latest trends, you get to see how are they doing what they do the best and the best thing you get a chance to connect with them personally.

When it comes to promoting one's business, looking up to social media is what every business owner does and why not, this is the sure shot way of getting noticed and reaching your target audience. While there are oodles of social networking platforms out there to use, somehow Facebook is always our number one choice. Reason pretty obvious - it's active user count that is 1.5 billion active users, this means that almost everyone who has internet access is using it.

When it comes to using Facebook for promotional purpose it can be very tricky, reaching out your people, posting, getting likes is not as easy as it seems but a planned social media strategy would make it easy, trust me. So while everyone is latching on to the Facebook wagon, we should not forget the fact that there are other options in the social networking list as well.

Whether you are working at home or in office, finishing of some pending work or working on your college assignment, one tab that's always open on your browser is of Facebook. Most of us are Facebook addicts, believe it or not, we have this urge of going online on Facebook every now and then. And its's not just about going online but using it actively - stalking others, commenting on their updates, liking and sharing stuff.

The folks at Optify that delivers simple digital marketing software for agencies have created an infographic that clearly points out the different types of Facebook users you'll come across.