Opinions In Social Media

Mar 09

14 Tips To Help You, Your Brand Or Your Business Get Started In Social Media

Are you looking for a few tips to help kick start your social media/networking experience? Here are 7 Do’s and 7 Don’ts of social networks that can hopefully help guide your social media journey in the right direction and because I couldn’t stop writing there is a bonus tip at the end.

Do go and join at least one social network right now and after creating your account sit back, monitor and discover how that social network works before posting or sharing any content. As author Ray LeBlond once said “You learn something every day if you pay attention.” So before you jump in and do something you may regret later you must first learn how the community interacts with each other and you must learn how to use the different features contained within that particular social network.
Do make sure to accurately and truthfully fill out your user profile including a real picture (or at least something that represents you) of yourself. This allows others in that social network to get to know the real you and will help them to trust you in the future.
Do spend plenty of time actively communicating and interacting with your community. Not only will you learn a lot from your community but you can also help your community by answering questions, sharing content and if applicable pointing them in the direction of your services/website/blog. A quote I enjoy that applies here is:
“A single conversation with a wise man is better than ten years of study.”
-Chinese Proverb
In other words you can learn by watching but at some point you will have to interact, engage and participate in order to truly learn how to make the most out of social media.
Do spend time using the search features at whichever social network you are currently on to actively seek out and discover new and interesting individuals who you should friend or follow. You can’t have a sane conversation with yourself and in order to participate in meaningful conversation and begin to build a community you are going to have to go out and find those you wish to communicate with.
Do take the time to remove and block any spammers that may have latched on to you like the parasites they are. By taking the time and effort to block and report spammers you are helping the social networking sites become a safer and cleaner environment for all users. If spammers find a social network increasingly aggressive towards their tactics eventually they will leave to find an easier place to spam their wares.
Do make sure you share quality links and content from others with your community. Sharing useful and relevant content with your followers and friends shows the community that you are there for more than just self promotion.
Do realize that the internet and social networks are increasingly transparent and it is very easy to be found out as a fake or imposter. The best advice I can give to those wishing to use social networks effectively is to always be yourself and to pretend to be someone you aren’t. If you like hockey, show that you do, don’t try and fake your knowledge of football because you will fail. If you are a heavy user of curse words (maybe tone that down a bit) don’t censor yourself simply to gain a larger audience.

Do Not’s

Do not be afraid to try new social networks. They may only currently have a couple of hundred members but they could quickly turn in to the next Facebook or Twitter. When it comes to social media and social networks it is almost always more beneficial to be an early adopter rather than a late follower. At minimum by being an early adopter you will be able to secure your chosen username to help further your branding efforts.
Do not be offended if you follow or friend someone and they do not reciprocate. You should only be following or friending those individuals who you find interesting and relevant anyways and those who enhance or add to the quality of the conversation. If they don’t reciprocate the follow at least you are still getting something out of the relationship because they were someone you found interesting to begin with.
Do not fall into the spammy cycle of follow/unfollow or friend/unfriend simply to get a notification to them in hopes they will follow you back. This can be considered a form of spam and is highly annoying to the individual who you are trying to entice to follow you. Why not engage in relevant conversation with this individual instead? Chances are they will friend or follow you a lot quicker if they know you are adding to the conversation and not just trying to inflate your numbers.
Do not use a fake profile picture (such as that of a scantily clad blonde) to try and entice more friends/followers into following or friending you. This is a common tactic among spammers (especially on Twitter) and after being found out as a fraud you will almost certainly be blocked and/or reported as a spammer.
Do not solely use the social networks to promote your own blog/product/service etc… Self-promotion is a good thing but excessive self promotion will get you unfollowed or unfriended rather quickly. Instead of only self promotion try engaging with your followers in a real conversation, try helping by answering questions, ask a few questions yourself and yes even promote your products/services or site.
Do not stress out over your follower/friend count. Inflated numbers matter very little, instead what really matters is the quality of users and the quality of conversation that is taking place within your community. Strive for quality and not quantity.
Do not expect overnight success using social media. It is very difficult and rare to see a company, individual or brand jump into social media and instantly garner hundreds or thousands of fans. Instead work daily at growing your community and increasing your brand’s online presence.

Bonus

Try not to limit yourself to using only the web interface for whichever social networking platform you are currently using. There are plenty of high quality and free third party tools available for Windows, Mac’s and mobile devices that integrate many great features, combine many different social networks into one centralized place and can greatly increase your productivity and efficiency when using the social networks.

Are there any tips or guidelines I am missing that you could offer up in the comments to others who may be reading this post? If you liked this post or found it useful in any way, please leave a comment below or share it with your own community using the Retweet or Facebook icons below.

Mar 08

Control Who Sees Your Facebook Content With Precision

Recently I was asked by someone how they could share an image to their Facebook profile but limit the access on who could view it. This individual wasn’t a new Facebook user asking the question either,it was a daily user who had quite a lot of experience using Facebook and was familiar with most of the settings.

Within Facebook you actually have the ability to precisely control who sees which content you share and they have made it relatively easy to do so. After showing this experienced Facebook individual on how to properly limit access to those they determined could view their posted content I figured it may be a good idea to share this information with others who may not know about this valuable feature.

This guide will be broken into two separate parts: List creation and Content sharing and privacy controls.

List Creation

Depending on the amount of Friends you have on Facebook you may find creating the lists of people to be a time consuming chore but a necessary one if you wish to precisely control who you want to view your shared content. Do you really want your boss to see the pics from your Saturday night drinking binge? Chances are you don’t and that is why the creating the lists of people is a critical step. After the initial creation of lists and the adding of friends to lists is completed any friends you make after can then be added to your created lists.

After signing in to Facebook click on the Account tab on the right hand side of the screen. You will be presented with a drop down menu that looks like this:

Click on the “Edit Friends” link
You will now be in the Friends screen of Facebook. In the mid-left panel of the Facebook friends screen you will see this:

Click on the Friends link. This will take you to a screen where you are presented with a list of all of your Facebook friends.
On the right hand side of your friends you will see a drop down arrow labeled “Add To List” that when clicked will look like this:

This is the screen where you will create your new lists that will be used to group your friends into or where you will add your friends into Lists you already have created. As you can see I have Lists created for Family, Friends, Other and Social Media. SMS Subscriptions is a Facebook created group.
Since you will probably not have any Lists created place your cursor in the Create new list field and give a name to a new list that you would like this friend to appear in. One point to remember is that Friends can appear in multiple lists.
You can now go through your entire Friends list and either create new lists or add friends to existing lists. This is an important step that must be completed if you want to control who sees what you share on Facebook. Something to remember is that Friends can exist in multiple lists. For example you may work with your brother so he could theoretically be placed into a Co-Workers List as well as a Family List.

Content Sharing And Privacy Controls

Now that you have divided your friends into appropriate lists you will now be able to precisely control who is able to see the content you share on Facebook.

If you click on the What’s on your mind status update field or click on one of the many Facebook share icons you will see a lock icon and two buttons that look like this:
Click the lock icon and you will be presented with the following view:

From here you will want to click on the Customize link. This is where we begin to configure our privacy sharing options.
A new window will pop up and from here you will click on the field beside where it says “These People:”

Choose the link that is highlighted here called Specific people…
After selecting the link Specific people… the pop-up on your screen should look like this:

In the text field labelled Enter a name or list you can start typing the name of specific friends or Lists that you wish to share this content with. Like the rest of Facebook this field is auto-complete so don’t worry if you can only remember the first letter of a friend or list you wish to share this with. Alternatively from this screen you could choose to hide this content from specific individiuals or lists.

For example you may wish to share your birthday pictures with friends in your Family List so you would choose that list to share those pictures with. Perhaps you went out for your birthday and had a little to much fun but still want to share your pictures with all your friends except your co-workers. In that example you would choose to enter the List Co-Workers into the Hide this from field.

A critical point to remember here is that individuals can belong to multiple lists. So you may have a friend on your Co-workers and Family list so that individual could still see the pictures posted to family.

Now that you know the steps it takes to create lists and how to share content with only those you choose you should be able to precisely control who sees what content and avoid some of those embarrassing stories we’ve all heard about.

If you would like to learn even more about Facebook privacy features the fantastic blog All Facebook has an extensive guide on the subject: http://www.allfacebook.com/2009/12/facebook-privacy-new/

If you liked this small guide to Facebook privacy please leave a comment below or feel free to Tweet or Share this post with those in your Twitter or Facebook networks by clicking one of the icons below.

Mar 04

The How, What And Why's Of Twitter Lists

In November of 2009 Twitter rolled out one of its newest features to the general public…Lists. Since the initial launch Lists have seem to be mostly forgotten. In case you are new to Twitter or unaware of what Lists are, they are nothing more than a self managed group of individuals focused around a central topic and placed into an appropriately name List.

In order to understand how Lists could be beneficial for your use we should first look at we go about creating lists from within the Twitter website.

Login to your twitter account
On the right hand side of the Twitter site below the search you will see your lists. Click on “New list” to create a new list.
After clicking on new list you will be presented with the following screen.

Enter a name for your list (something related to the users you will be adding to it) a description of what this list is about, the access level whether private or public and finally click create list.
To add users to your newly created list go the profile page of another Twitter user who you would like to add to the list. Click on the “Lists” button and you will see this:

Select the list you would like this user to be on and they will automatically be added to the list.
** You do not have to follow a user to add them to a List.
Repeat step 4 for each additional Twitter user you would like to add to your list.

Now that you know how to create your own Twitter lists let’s take a look at a five reasons to use lists and five types of lists you could create.

Reason To Use Lists

Tracking The Competition – If you are in an industry where many of your competitors are on Twitter you can create a new, private list (remember the choice given when creating a List from step 3) that only you will be able to see and access and because you can add them to a List without following them your competition won’t know you are tracking what they do.
Easy One Click Following – If you search the Twitter List directory Listorious you will be able to find a list in a niche that interests you created by someone you may or may not follow. After finding a list you want to follow you can then click on the Follow button and you will be subscribed and will be following that list of users without having to go to each one of them and clicking follow.
Trust – If you are unsure if you should be following a particular person because of spam or other concerns check there Twitter profile and look for the “Listed” below their profile name. Chances are if they are Listed on several different lists you can trust them.
Gaining More Followers – As you gain in popularity you will eventually be added to Lists yourself and as these Lists become followed you may gain followers from users who decide to follow the individuals who are on the Lists they themselves are currently following.
Easier To Unsubscribe Than To Unfollow – If you use lists to track and monitor a niche or an event the use of Lists make it is very easy to unsubscribe from the list once you are done tracking the niche or when the event is over by simply going back to the list and clicking unfollow. If you weren’t using lists and had went to each profile and followed them manually you will now have to go into your followers list and unfollow each user you had previously added to remove them. This of course could take quite a long time depending on how many users you had followed for that particular event or niche. Lists can save you time.

Types Of Lists

Location Related Lists – You can create a list of users from your City/Town/Province/State etc…and can keep up on local news and happenings usually before it hits traditional media outlets.
Connect With Fans Of Your Favorite Sports Team – You can create a list of those who are fans of your favorite sports teams. Use search.twitter.com to easily find those who are talking about your team and add those who are fans to your list. I currently run an Edmonton Oilers List where I keep track of fans of my favorite hockey team the Edmonton Oilers.
Official Employee List – Create a list of all official employee Twitter accounts and then share and promote this list so others are aware of who is officially communicating from within the company.
VIP Lists – If you are attending an upcoming event or are hosting an event create a list that contains the Twitter names of all those who will be in attendance. Share this list with all those that will be in attendance as it will help put a face to the tweet.
Peers And Experts – Create a list of peers and experts in your industry. Share this list with those in your industry to make it easier for everyone to find peers without having to go through the process of creating their own list.

Of course there are far more than five ways to use Twitter lists but hopefully these five give you a place to start.

Please leave a comment below letting me know how you are using Twitter lists and if you find this at all useful; consider clicking the Facebook icon to share it on Facebook with your friends or click the Retweet button to share it on Twitter with your followers.

Mar 03

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Mar 02

Avoiding The Initial Social Media Mistakes

One of the mistakes that I’ve witnessed many new brands and individuals make when first entering into social media is their attempt to bring their old media way of thinking along with them. This traditional way of thinking and attempt to squeeze into a different medium will eventually lead to failure.

Instead of joining a social network, listening to the community and determining how that particular community works, quite often instead they will instead join and begin quickly aggressively pursuing the members of this social network with their look at me and buy this now message. The community whether it be Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn or some other community will eventually turn its collective back on the brand as abuse will only be tolerated for so long.

What brands and businesses new to social networks should instead be doing is:

Join the social network using a real name or the business name
Upload a real picture of yourself or your product
Use the search tools to discover individuals who are already talking about you or your brand and friend or follow them
Listen to the conversations that are currently taking place and learn what is and what isn’t appropriate conduct on that particular social network
After gaining followers and have learned the rules begin to socialize with those in your network. It is after all called “social” networking.
Answer questions, ask questions and offer genuine help to those people who may be interested in your product/brand/business
Repeat

To put the above into perspective I present you with two very different scenarios:

You’re at a party and there is someone there who’s had far too much fun already and is harassing everyone he/she encounters with loud drunken talk and push behavior. Eventually he/she is dancing on the table and puking in the planter.
You’re at a party and there is an individual there who is walking around making small talk with all those in the room. He/she is asking questions, telling jokes, sharing stories and listening to what others around him are saying. This is an articulate individual who is facilitating conversation among the group and everyone seems to be drawn to him/her.

How do you want your brand/business to be remembered amongst the social networks? Do you want your reputation to be that of the loud drunk or that of the articulate well spoken individual?