We’ve learned a lot about social media over the past couple of years and while you may think you’ve figured out the PERFECT social media program, there’s always more to be learned.  Below are five social media secrets from an agency that, occasionally, has had to learn the hard way.

Social Media Secrets:

• Facebook has secret groups – Whether it be because your forum users have run a muck on your public space or email conversations between 100+ people isn’t working, one social media secret you may not know is that Facebook offers what could be your most successful crisis communication tool yet: secret groups.  Admins must invite Facebook users to even see the content.  And these groups are unsearchable so they offer a safe, secure means to open discussions for companies.

• Twitter doesn’t save tweets forever (at least not for public viewing) – For many of us, part of our responsibility when running a social media campaign is measurement.  And while that does mean different things to different companies, most can agree that recording follower interaction is part of any measurement document.  However, according to this article from ReadWriteWeb, Twitter co-founder, Biz Stone explains that Twitter “does save all tweets, but search focuses more on newer content.”  Because of this, you should always be aware that those awesome @replies and RTs from Twitter power users a month ago, may have disappeared into the abyss.  It’s always good practice to try to count or document those interactions on a weekly/biweekly basis.

• Facebook fan page creators will ALWAYS be admins – When an individual creates a fan page for a brand from within their personal account, she cannot remove herself as an admin.  Why is this a problem? 1) Admins can’t ever write a post on the fan page without the post coming from the brand. 2) If that creator is an employee of a company and loses the position/account, he will always have access to the page – that even means they could remove every other admin of that given brand’s page.  Not Good!

• Facebook status updates with links, photos or videos are NOT updates, rather wall posts – We’ve had a few clients question why their “status updates” aren’t updating at the top of the fan page.  The answer: an “update” with a link, photo, video, or other embeddable character isn’t recognized as a simple update by Facebook.  Remember that anything posted by a fan page is added to a fan’s feed, no matter if it’s a post or a status update.

• Internet browsers can sometimes be the culprit to painfully sluggish activity – We’ve had the luxury of dealing with images that don’t seem to want to upload to our albums.  After trying the refresh button, cursing the social media gods and pounding our hands and fists in frustration, we finally discovered that a simple transition from Firefox to Safari (for Macs) was all it took.  Don’t pretend this hasn’t happened to you…you all know you’re relieved that you’re not the only one to deal with browser issues.

This just skims the surface of the secrets of social media. We’d love to hear your additions!