All posts by Andrew Robertson

About Andrew Robertson

I'm Andrew, I work as the Social Media & Marketing Assistant at SocialSafe. I've been writing blogs on here for over two years now, so you'll find pieces from me about anything social media and tech related, as well as the occasional post on some slightly off topics stories... just for the sake of variety!! Follow me on Twitter for non work-related cynical observations and fair to average banter: @adkrobertson

What Happens To My SocialSafe Content If I Delete The Online Originals?

Tips & Tricks, Using SocialSafe

We received a support query last night from one of our users and since their question has been asked quite frequently by other people, we thought it would be useful to post a short blog entry explaining this topic.

Here is an extract from their query:

“I see in the help section that if I delete data online, it is still stored in my hard drive.  Would it still be available after the next sync? or would my hard drive data also be deleted when syncing?”

In short – yes, absolutely, 100%.

This particular user was wanting to trim back their online presence while still keeping a copy of all their content. The good news for them – and many others who ask us the same question – is that yes, everything you back up with SocialSafe will still be stored on your own hard drive, even if the originals on the networks are deleted. If you then go to sync with your online accounts, SocialSafe won’t delete anything from your hard drive if the source data is no longer available online.

However, you will find that friends, contacts, followers etc will move to the another part of your SocialSafe journal if you disconnect with them. For example, anyone you decided to de-friend on Facebook or stop following on Twitter will subsequently appear in the ‘Lost Friends’ or ‘No Longer Following’ sections once SocialSafe syncs your account and realises that you are no longer connected.

So to come back to the original question, whenever back up your data, it is safely stored on your own PC or Mac forever. This is really the whole reason why we created SocialSafe in the first place – as a backup for your photos if anything happened to your Facebook account. Obviously we’ve come a very long way since then, as SocialSafe now boasts extensive support for a comprehensive range of content from a variety of networks including Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, LinkedIn and more.

To bring together all the various parts of your online story safely in one place, download SocialSafe now.

Death Of Baroness Thatcher Also Kills An American Icon… By Hashtag

Discussion

As the fictional quadriplegic detective Lincoln Rhyme would say, “It’s only a question of where you put the decimal point.” Or perhaps in the case of Twitter hashtags, it’s a question of where you interpret the spaces to be.

Once in a while, joining several words together to create a hashtag can create something completely different than the intended message. Yesterday the UK learned of the death of Baroness Margaret Thatcher – the first female Prime Minister of Great Britain.

Soon after the news broke a hashtag started trending, derived from the phrase “now Thatcher’s dead”. However, spaces and apostrophes don’t work within hashtags, so the truncated version doing the rounds was #nowthatchersdead.

Remembering Lincoln Rhyme’s tid-bit of analytical advice, how you break up the words that make up the hashtag gives us a very different story all together. We’re no longer discussing the death of a former UK Prime Minister… But rather mourning the loss of an American singer and actress:

now / thatcher’s / dead

becomes…

now / that / cher’s / dead

The exact same string of letters, but two very different messages. It’s only a question of where you put the decimal point. As often happens with all things internet, common sense is the first thing to go out of the window, so many people began tweeting to say that Cher had died.

This isn’t the first time that a hashtag has been interpreted differently than intended. Last November there were guffaws all round after singer Susan Boyle’s PR team made a hash (sorry, couldn’t resist it!) of promoting her new release on Twitter. The hashtag #susanalbumparty – meant to be Susan album party – also turned out to be a rather naughty double entendre when read as Su’s anal bum party.

Which then begs the question, was this a simple PR gaff or in fact some very clever marketing? As they say, there is no such thing as bad publicity, and the extent of the coverage was far greater as a result of the risqué hashtag.

Have you ever misinterpreted a hashtag? Without proper punctuation it’s easy for the meaning of something to be changed radically. Let us know the hashtags that have left you scratching your head!

SocialSafe v6.5 Now Released – Insights, Updated Account View & More…

Announcements, Tips & Tricks, Using SocialSafe

We’ve finally done it! SocialSafe v6.5 was released yesterday and Insights is finally able to strut its stuff out in the wild! It’s been a very challenging week for our team of developers who have been putting in the hard hours to make sure SocialSafe was steered safely away from a Facebook API change shaped iceberg, as well as implementing all of the new and improved features. Let’s take a look at what’s in SocialSafe v6.5:

  • Insights – it’s still at beta, so please forgive us if you find the odd bug.  You can now easily see which is your most popular content or find out who you interact with most and you can even filter results by account or using different time periods.  You can also see on which days of the week you are most active.
  • Improvements to Search so that Search History is now displayed and Searches can now be saved
  • Updates to ‘Accounts’ view for easier navigation when adding a network & viewing your data
  • Backing up and display of Twitter Tweet/Mention/Favourite images
  • Improved Cancel Sync functionality so that syncs can now be cancelled safely and without any delay
  • Download improvements to reduce the Twitter enforced rate limit impact
  • Scheduled backup enhancement to help where a backup is missed

  • Fixes for a number of customer reported bugs & UI improvements

Here are a couple of screen shots showing you how the latest version looks:

SocialSafe v6.5 - new look 'Add Account' screen

As we’ve been saying for a while, this first round of Insights is just the start, and we’ve got plenty more planned for the future. While we’ve got our own ideas about what to include in subsequent releases, our development plan has always been user-driven to a certain extent, so if you have a light-bulb moment, then please by all means submit your suggestion to the team via the Feedback Forum.

On behalf of the other ‘non-techies’ here at SocialSafe, I think it’s appropriate to give a public pat on the back to our team of developers and testers, in particular Ben, Oli and George, who have all made this release possible in the face of some particularly challenging external factors - great work guys.

We’re already plotting for the next big thing, so stay tuned! If you have any questions or feed back from SocialSafe v6.5 then please get in touch via our Facebook page, on Twitter or send an email through the SocialSafe website.

From everyone here at SocialSafe, have great weekend!

LinkedIn Adds Facebook-style Mentions To Connect Users And Companies More Easily

Discussion, Tips & Tricks

LinkedIn has taken another step in the direction of Facebook and Twitter, by allowing its users to create content that is much more… well, much more linked.

The new update that started rolling out today to English-speaking users sees the addition of a tag- or mention-like feature that will give the ability to link to other users. The feature is intended to make engagement with users and companies easier for the members of LinkedIn’s community.

TheNextWeb highlighted the update earlier today, while a blog post from LinkedIn later explained what the network hopes to achieve:

“…we want to make it even easier for you to start those conversations, share knowledge with one another and ultimately become even better at what you do. We’re excited to introduce a new way for you to engage with your network through the ability to mention your connections and companies in conversations on LinkedIn.”

As you’d expect, the mechanics of LinkedIn Mentions are strikingly similar to the way that you would tag someone in a Facebook post or mention a Twitter user in a tweet. Given that people should by now be accustomed to this method of including other people in conversations or topics, it makes sense for LinkedIn to adopt a homogeneous approach when implementing a feature that seeks to accomplish the same end result – connecting people and driving user engagement higher.

Do you use tags in Facebook updates and mentions in tweets to actively include people in the conversation? Will you be doing the same on LinkedIn? Let us know what you think of this update in the comments below.

New Facebook News Feed – How To See Absolutely Everything

Tips & Tricks

It seems that the new Facebook News Feed that is slowly but surely hitting accounts will give people the power to reclaim one of the most fiercely requested functions that has gradually been diluted over recent updates – the ability to see everything in your News Feed as it happens.

First announced in March, the new Facebook News Feed groups content together into categories, so you can view a feed that only contains music news for instance, or perhaps one solely devoted to photos. However, as clever as all of this is, it doesn’t stop people from getting pissed at the fact that Facebook repeatedly second guesses what it thinks people will want to see, and then hides things that they’ve made a conscious decision to add to their lives – for example adding someone as a friend or liking a page.

But fear not. One Mashable writer has been getting to grips with the new setup and she’s written about how while the new iteration allows for even finer granular filtering of content, it also allows you to zoom out and see everything in your News Feed. Absolutely everything.

Think of the right hand news ticker, but having the expanded version of that as your News Feed. It’ll essentially be the unadulterated News Feed of early Facebook, but with everyone’s public actions reported in real-time, so if a friend comments on a photo you posted a week ago, it will appear in your feed again.

There are a number of different ways that you can configure your News Feed if you have the update, but I don’t have it yet, so it would be wrong to try to educate from ignorance. Instead, you can read Amy-Mae Elliott‘s article on Mashable that details what you need to do.

How To Rank Your Twitter Followers

Tips & Tricks, Using SocialSafe

We’ve just put together a very simple video that shows how you can use SocialSafe to create a full list of your Twitter followers, and rank them by how many followers they have.

As you can see, if you already use SocialSafe the whole thing can be done within a minute. If you’re not a user yet, then download the free trial of SocialSafe, and then all you need to do is back up your Twitter account and apply the basic filters as shown in the video.

You could also do this for the people who you follow, or you could change the query to search your followers‘ descriptions for a certain keyword or phrase. We’ll be producing more of these in due course, so if there is anything about SocialSafe you’d like to see demonstrated in a video then please let us know.

We hope you find this mini-tutorial useful, and if there is anyone who you think would benefit from hearing about this functionality, then please share this video with them!

SocialSafe Facebook & LinkedIn Login Issues Resolved – Update Required

Announcements, Tips & Tricks, Using SocialSafe

Dear SocialSafe users,

We’re aware that some of you have been experiencing issues when attempting to login to Facebook and LinkedIn through SocialSafe. As soon as we realised that this was causing difficulties for our users we looked into the problem to see how we could fix it.

The symptoms were such that when users attempted to add a Facebook account, the login screen was blank, meaning that they could not enter their login credentials to authorise SocialSafe to download their account content. The LinkedIn problem was slightly more complex, in that this login box was not appearing at all, meaning that users were not able to reauthorise their accounts when attempting to sync.

Our investigation revealed that the issues were caused by some subtle API changes made by the networks, and we are pleased to report that we have now updated SocialSafe to work correctly with these new API settings. All you need to do is open SocialSafe and install the update (v6.4.6) when prompted, and everything should be run smoothly once again.

We’d like to say a public ‘thank you’ to everyone who reported these problems – it certainly makes life easier for us when you tell us what works and what doesn’t!

For those of you reading this and wondering why you need to enter a password and what happens to it, allow us a brief moment to explain this privacy point:

When backing up any content from your social networks to your own PC/Mac, the respective network needs to know that you (the data owner) are the one requesting it, hence why password authorisation is required. SocialSafe as a company never actually sees nor stores your login details, and furthermore, any content that you back up using our app is only stored on your own machine – we never see nor store any of your data.

And finally we’re sure that there are many of you wondering what’s going on with SocialSafe v6.5 and the new Insights feature that we’ve been promising you. Well, we had originally planned to release v6.5 before Easter, but as we hope you’ll understand, addressing the Facebook and LinkedIn login issues had to take priority. However, we’re pleased to say that we will be issuing a full release next week, which will include Insights and more!

Thank you all for your patience up to this point – we hope today’s update fixes everything for you, and that you all enjoy the Easter break. Next stop – SocialSafe v6.5!!

Have a great weekend.

- the SocialSafe team

Facebook Adding Direct Replies And Threaded Comments For Pages

Announcements, Discussion, Tips & Tricks

Facebook has started rolling out a new feature to Pages for businesses and brands, and for public Profiles with more than 10,000 followers. While not necessarily new to the web as a whole, replies and threaded comments are gradually being added as an opt-in feature, before becoming the norm for all Pages and 10,000 + follower Profiles in July.

Direct replies should make things an awful lot easier for businesses when it comes to managing interactions with users. When several users add comments to an update posted on a page it can quickly become a bit of a mess when someone else adds a comment or replies to a reply before the page admins have replied to the original comment. Before you know it you’re having to explain who the last comment was aimed at, and then it can easily spiral out of control… See, even trying to explain the problem was a bit of a hassle!

We’ve enabled this functionality on the SocialSafe Facebook page, so here’s how it looks:

Facebook Replies and threaded comments

By indenting replies to specific comments and creating threads, page admins and users are able to carry on a conversation that may still be read by and be of benefit to other users, but it’s just easier for all concerned to keep track of their own interactions. The other side to this is that the most commented-on or liked replies begin to climb to the top, making it easier to find the responses that garner the most social interaction.

What do you make of the new Facebook Pages features? Will you be enabling them on your Pages, or are you dreading the mandatory changeover in July? Leave a comment with your thoughts.

Excuse Me, Facebook… What Have You Done With My Photos?

Discussion, Tips & Tricks, Using SocialSafe

[UPDATE 26/03/2013: My missing photos seems to have reappeared over the weekend, but users on the Facebook Forum are still complaining of individual photos, and even entire albums being AWOL for months]

Well, it was about time it happened. All too often I blog about the misfortunes of others when it comes to losing online content, and now I’ve just noticed that Facebook has done a number on my Mobile Uploads album. It’s still there on my profile, Facebook knows how many photos should be in it, but I can only view less than half of the 72 it tells me are in it.

If you look at the screen shot below of the album as presented by Facebook, nothing seems wrong (apart from the dubious Movember effort from 2011, my shocking haircut when I was 18 and playing in a band, and the sheepish look on my face as my cousin took me riding on her horse when I was knee-high to a… well, knee-high to a horse in actual fact):

Missing Facebook photos

This is what Facebook is showing me…

However, if you cross-reference that to what I have backed up in my SocialSafe library, you’ll see that there’s a shed-load of photos missing from the same album on Facebook. I’ve used a red box to highlight two pictures from the screen shot, and again highlighted them within SocialSafe. As you can see, there are lots of photos in my SocialSafe library that simply aren’t there (at least right now) on Facebook:

missing facebook photos

…and this is what should be in there.

Okay, I can get over losing a picture of the odd meal here and there or a screen-grab from my iPhone about the weather, but losing the picture of me with my grandmother taken the last time I saw her before she died? No, I can’t deal with that I’m afraid.

The missing photos may well reappear on Facebook, but this is an issue that has been persistently affecting users for some months now, so I’m not 100% confident that this will happen. Thankfully however, I back up all my Facebook photos with SocialSafe, so if Zuckerberg and co screw the pooch when it comes to looking after my pictures, it won’t be the end of the world.

As Twitter Turns 7 Years Old, How Do You Look Back On Your History?

Fun, Tips & Tricks, Using SocialSafe

Today is Twitter’s 7th birthday, an anniversary that has prompted many users, bloggers and publications to look back and post about some of the most memorable and famous 140-character updates from the last seven years. Twitter itself has put together a neat video summarising its journey thus far, including events such as the Arab Spring revolution and the London 2012 Olympic games, as well as some of the most retweeted updates.

We thought this was as good an opportunity as any to talk about how you can use SocialSafe to look back over all your social network content, including old tweets, mentions, DMs and more, as well as jumping straight back to any given date – such as a birthday.

By backing up photos, updates, friends, connections and more into a searchable offline library, you can easily browse your online social history and quickly find a tweet made about a certain topic or on a particular date for example.

So whether you’re a business wanting to see how often you receive tweets about an individual product, or a private user wanting to view all of your exchanges with a certain user, SocialSafe affords you this functionality – and so much more – all within the privacy of your own PC or Mac. To try it for yourself download the free trial from our website.