The following is a blog post written by Christine Rondeau of Bluelime Media. With her permission, we’ve reprinted it on our blog. If you’d like to see the original, click here.
Almost every week, I’m asked questions on the merit of social media. People are curious about why one would need to use facebook or twitter. My usual response is that social media works, but it only works if you make it work for you.
Of course it takes time and effort and you will need to moderate your social media accounts. Could you hire someone to do that for you? Sure, but you could also hire someone to look after your kids and raise them. Is that what you want?
In order to clearly explain what I mean by “making it work for you” I thought I would share what my process is and how I make it work for me.
Fortunately, I started early. I’ve been blogging since 2004, so blogging is part of my social media strategy. This strategy is no more than a word though. I don’t have a blogging schedule and I’m not very discipline. I write blog posts when I have something to say but I always write on topic.
If you choose to start a blog, think about what you want to blog about. Check out other blogs and see what they are doing. Would you be simply repeating what others are already saying? Do you feel like you have something important to add? Will you be gaining clients or positioning yourself as a market leader if you do?
More importantly think about your love or writing. If you dislike writing, blogging may not be for you.
I think I joined LinkedIn as early as 2002. LinkedIn was quiet for a long time but recently gained a lot of traction and criticism. I was happy enough with LinkedIn, I never paid attention to it and connected with people I knew when requested, but about 8 months ago, I started receiving many more requests from total strangers. For some reason LinkedIn became more about how many connections one has than who your connections are. I examined my LinkedIn profile and decided that it really wasn’t serving, so simply killed it. Since then, no more requests to connect with strangers.
Since then created I’ve created an about.me profile and posted my resume on Zerply. Why? They were both free and fun to put together. If either one of them follows in LinkedIn’s footsteps and becomes a nuisance, I’ll just delete them.
I joined Facebook 3 years ago (I think). You can look for me if you want but I won’t friend you, sorry. I only use facebook for family and yoga. I use it as a tool to keep informed of upcoming yoga events and look at my sister’s picture. That’s it. I don’t have a fan page and I’ve never ‘Liked’ a page. I personally am not a fan of facebook, because I find it too cluttered and messy. Some folks love it and it works for them, great, but it’s just not for me.
I was a bit late to join twitter and took a while to get it, but twitter is by far my favourite social media tool. I like it because it works for me.
Again, like facebook, I’m very particular about who I follow. 99% of the people I follow are either WordPress developers or work in the web industry. I keep the number of people I follow to about 200 and unfollow anyone who posts too many drunken tweets, sexist ones or only talks about hockey.
Because most of the people I follow are WordPress devs, I tweet a lot about WordPress and use it when I have questions. Just yesterday, I had issues with github. I tweeted my dismay and sure enough, a few minutes later, I had answers to my problem. How brilliant is that?
Sure I could have done the same on facebook, Google + or LinkedIn, but twitter is the medium I prefer.
I don’t think that there’s a definite guide on how to use social media. We all have different needs, different likes and dislikes. If you are curious about social media, I would encourage you to just sign up and open account. Any of them will do. Just try it out. Accounts can always be closed if they are not for you.
There are many dos and don’t when it comes to social media. I won’t go into all of the details here as I am no social media expert. If you’re interested in reading more about Social Media and learning a few tips and tricks, I would recommend that you subscribe to Boxcar Marketing’s Newsletter: Underwire. It’s very well written always packed full of interesting tidbits.
Ever stumbled upon brilliance? It comes when you least expect it, in the most surprising of ways, and at the most useful of times. Such is the brilliance of StumbleUpon. Social media discovery tool StumbleUpon has developed into the internet’s version of PVR, essentially selecting sites and references most applicable to the viewer and recording them in one strongly organized and easy to use location. Recently reaching the 25 billion click mark, StumbleUpon users have grown to appreciate the site’s keen sense of finding what is new, what is interesting, and what is most relevant to them.
Why bother stumbling?
With the amount of material available on the internet, getting access to information that has already been pre-scanned by people of similar interests greatly reduces time wasted on websites of little to no relevance on topics of interest. After all, who can complain when a free internet service is similar to having 20 million personal secretaries pre-select articles based upon your profile?
By employing essentially an open call, or crowdsourcing strategy, in which an undefined set of people are able to contribute information and opinions regarding web searches allows the compilation of more valuable and fresh concepts, ideas, and links. To illustrate, stumblers help one another find hidden gems, pieces of information not easily found using any average search engine. As well, collaborative ratings from fellow stumblers and stumbler friends establish the worth and value of the website in reference to its content, clarity, and helpfulness. When one voice makes a comment, it can only be heard so far, and only be taken so far into consideration. However, when millions of voices combine together, they can be heard around the world, and their collective perspective is then able to demand greater respect and attention. After all, one may not hear an individual’s footsteps, but it is hard to not acknowledge the presence of a stampede. Finally, both new and old companies alike can benefit using StumbleUpon’s services as new traffic can be generated and directed towards their websites, the only downfall being a higher bounce rate. Yet, all traffic can be seen as good traffic as exposure for a website is key to gaining attention and broadening an audience.
In today’s people-driven world, the ability of a website to combine in perfect harmony social behaviour and interaction as well as time effectiveness is a formula which ultimately sets it apart as a website catering to the real needs of the user. Next time you are looking for a little inspiration, don’t be afraid to explore what you just may have stumbled upon.
Tumblr is a microblogging platform that allows users to share just about anything via their personal Tumblelog. You can quickly and easily post whatever you want – text, photos, videos, music, quotes, and links, from wherever you want – your web browser, phone, desktop computer, or email. The service prides itself on its ease of use, as well as the ability to customize everything including the colors of your Tumblelog and the HTML code of your Tumblr theme.
As of last month, Tumblr has surpassed WordPress in total number of blogs with more than 20 million. In fact, Tumblr has almost 22 million blogs, more than 7 billion individual blog posts, and averages more than 30 million posts each day. The service also boasts a retention rate of 85% versus Twitter’s 40% – once users sign up for Tumblr they are very likely to continue using it. When you compare Tumblr’s retention rate with traditional blogging you can see that they must be doing something right!
Benefits of Tumblr
Tumblr is poised to do to blogging what texting did to email, ie. not rendering it obsolete, but certainly giving it a run for its money.
With Tumblr, you spend less time writing content, and yet readers of your Tumblelog tend to get a better picture of who/what you are as a person or company. As founder David Karp said, “Tumblelogs don’t need all the context of written post. The context is the blog itself, or the person writing it.” Reading one post in someone’s Tumblelog doesn’t tell you much, but browsing through their posts gives you a remarkably accurate picture of who/what they are, without all the reading associated with a traditional blog. Also, Tumbelogs are likely to appeal to a wider audience, as some will prefer the assortment of photos, video files, and links that a traditional blog may be lacking.
Tumblr’s API allows Tumblelogs to be extensively modified; users can delete all the basic formatting and start from scratch. If you can imagine it, chances are you can do it with Tumblr. The outcome for brands and businesses is huge; connect more deeply with your readers, in less time, and on your customized, easy to use microblog. No wonder Tumblr is exploding in popularity!
To find out more about why everyone loves Tumblr, click here to see the many features available to you via your Tumblelog.
It’s been a couple weeks since giant Google launched their latest effort in social, Google+. The search giant has had a couple false starts in their attempt to go social with both Google Wave and Google Buzz failing to catch users’ attention. However, from the buzz around the web, Google+ might just have the potential to rival the leader of social, Facebook.
What is Google+?
In short, Google+ is Google’s latest attempt at a social network. The official Google blog stated that,
“Today, the connections between people increasingly happen online. Yet the subtlety and substance of real-world interactions are lost in the rigidness of our online tools. In this basic, human way, online sharing is awkward. Even broken. And we aim to fix it.”
To facilitate ease of sharing, Google is integrating many of their current features and products into Google+ in the form of Circles, Sparks, Hangouts, and Mobile. They’ve also included a ‘Stream’, analogous to Facebook’s newsfeed or the Twitter stream – something social savvy users will find familiar. The constantly updating stream will aggregate updates and postings from all your friends in one place.
Circles
Circles are similar to Facebook lists, but easier and more intuitive. The premise behind circles is that people don’t want to share everything with everyone. For example, you most likely share different things with your friends than you do with you family, and you probably want to keep your weekend escapades separate from the information you share with your work contacts. You can easily do this by separating your contacts into different circles, such as ‘friends’, ‘family’, ‘work’ or a customized circle. To do this, simply click on a contact and drag them into the appropriate circle where they will only see the information you want them to see.
Sparks
Sparks brings content to you automatically based on whatever ‘sparks’ your interest. Maybe you’re interested in cycling, dogs, cooking, or you’re a car enthusiast – sparks collects interesting content from across the internet and brings it right to you, on a separate page for each topic. It’s easy get started with Sparks, you type a topic of interest, such as ‘social media’ into the search box and, if you like the content that appears, you can click ‘Add Interest’ and social media will be added to your Sparks.
If you later decide you don’t want to follow a certain topic, it’s easy to delete it from your Sparks – simply hover over the topic you wish to delete and click the X.
Hangouts
This is basically video chat, with an added twist of being able to have a multi-person video chat. You can choose which friends, or even entire circles, you wish to video chat with, and anyone in the Hangout can invite their own contacts to join as well.
Mobile
Huddle
If you remember group messaging from the days of msn messenger, you’ll quickly understand the Huddle feature. Instead of having multiple similar conversations, you can instead start a Huddle where everyone can chat together. This feature could be incredibly useful for trying to make plans to get any group of people to meet all at one place at one time.
Instant Upload
Photos taken on your mobile phone will be automatically added, with your permission, to a private photo album in the Google cloud. This way, you can share them straight from Google+, without the hassle of traditionally uploading them. Many users fear only having a copy of their photos in the cloud, which is why it’s easy to backup your online images to your home computer using Google Takeout.
Location
You can easily add your location to every post you make in Google+. Or not, the choice is up to you.
Privacy
Social networks, most notably Facebook, have been notorious for their privacy issues. Google has tackled users’ privacy concerns by making it easy to customize your Google+ profile’s visibility. Your name and photo (if you upload one) are the only things that are public on your profile, everything else can be customized to private. Or, you can assign different levels of profile visibility to different circles. Furthermore, the names of your circles won’t be disclosed, not even to the people that are in them. So, feel free to put someone in the acquaintance circle without worrying about insulting them!
As with Facebook, you can block people you don’t want to interact with, and choose whether or not your profile is indexed by search engines.
How to join Google+
Currently Google+ is in Beta testing stage and can only be accessed through invitation from a current Google+ user. If you have a friend already on Google+, ask them to invite you! Or, you can sign-up here with your Google ID and be notified when Google is allowing more users access to the testing stage.
If, once you’re a Google+ member, you decide it isn’t for you; you can downgrade your account by following the steps in this guide. Deleting just your Google+ account will leave your other Google accounts unaffected, or you have the option to delete your entire Google Account and all associated services.
Have you tried Google+? What do you think of it? Let us know below in the comments section.
Wikipedia has introduced their ‘love’ button, called WikiLove. This new feature will help users and editors of the crowdsourced web encyclopedia show their appreciation for one another. It can be tough to be accepted by the inner circle of experienced Wikipedia editors, and many editors feel looked down upon and discouraged from contributing to articles. Wikipedia is hoping that WikiLove will change this, and make it easy and fun for users to demonstrate their positive feelings towards one another.
How It Works
Starting today, WikiLove will be available for all English Wikipedia users. If you don’t see it yet, you can still test out the prototype by following the instructions and creating a test account.
To get started, login and visit any user, or user talk, page. In the upper right hand corner, between the search bar and the watchlist icon, you will see a new red heart icon.
Clicking this button will bring up a screen that looks like the following:
From here, users can show their appreciation with a Barnstar, Food and drink, Kittens, or they can make their own gift. There are also further subcategories within the Barnstar group, in order to give someone a gift that more closely resembles what you appreciate about them. For example, under the ‘Barnstar’ tab, users can choose the ‘Real Life Barnstar’ which is awarded to editors who make contributions both online and offline, by organizing wiki-related real-life events.
After you’ve chosen the gift you would like to give, enter a personal message and click to preview your selection. If you’re satisfied with your choice, hit ‘send WikiLove’, and you’re WikiLove will appear on the user’s user talk page.
Benefits of WikiLove
WikiLove has built-in analytics that allows Wikipedia to see how often it is used, and whether or not its usage affects new editors’ activity on the site. WikiLove will be a first step in making Wikipedia more inviting and friendly towards the new user. Futhermore, Wiki administrators can modify the user interface using the instructions for customization. This enables different cultures around the world to award culturally significant gifts – such as matryoshka dolls in Russia, or coffee in Brazil.
If you’re not interested in WikiLove, you can disable it by going to ‘My Preferences’ in the top right-hand corner by the log-out button. Next, click the ‘editing’ tab, and scroll down to the bottom where you will need to uncheck the box titled ‘enable showing appreciation for other users with the WikiLove tab (experimental)’. Remember to save your changes when you are done.
In the spirit of the collaborative nature of Wikipedia, once you’ve tested out WikiLove, let them know your thoughts and comments on the WikiLove talk page.
Twitter is rolling out some new features on their site. If you don’t yet see the following changes, you will soon!
The biggest changes are to the ‘following’ link, under the profile tab. Now, instead of seeing a list of everyone a person is following, you will see their Twitter stream as they see it. The exception is that you will not be able to see the tweets of people they follow that have protected their tweets. This is what users will see when they click the “following” link on Out-Smarts’ Twitter page.
To see the old following list, click on the ‘people’ tab as shown in the above image. This will enable you to see all of the people that person is following in the old format. From the people tab you can also see a list of people you are both following by clicking the ‘you both follow’ link.
You can also access the old following list by clicking ‘view all’ beside the ‘following’ heading on the lower right hand panel.
Finally, Twitter has introduced a new ‘shuffle’ feature. When you have clicked to see who a person is following, and are viewing their Twitter stream as they see it, you’ll find the shuffle button in the upper right corner of your screen.
Hovering over this button tells you that you can ‘jump to someone you follow’. This option takes you to the Twitter account of someone you both follow, and shows you their Twitter stream.
The following is a blog post written by Lauren Bacon, a partner of Raised Eyebrow Web Studio. With her permission, we’ve reprinted it on our blog. If you’d like to see the original, click here.
If you’re a registered nonprofit and you’re not using Google’s Grants program, you might want to get on board. I’ve got lots to say about the benefits of this program, but let’s start with these two very appealing benefits:
Free Google Ads worth up to $10,000 per month.
A designated “nonprofit” channel on YouTube, also free.
For a long time, these benefits have been available to U.S.-based charities but not up here in Canada. That’s changed, and Canadian nonprofits are eligible too.
If this is enough to convince you, and you’re ready to go apply right this instant, I won’t stop you – here’s the link to the application form. But if you want more details first, read on.
Let’s start with the free advertising. Google sells the text-based ads that appear alongside their search results (brand name: AdWords) via an auction-like system: you select the keywords you want to advertise on (e.g. if you’re Covenant House Vancouver, you might want to show up on search results pages for searches like “homeless youth”, “homelessness Vancouver”, “at-risk youth Vancouver”, and so on), and you tell Google how much you’re willing to pay per click – perhaps 5 cents, maybe a dollar, maybe more. The more you’re willing to spend, the more likely it is that your ad will appear at (or near) the top of the ads, and on the first page of search results.
There’s an art to choosing the right keywords, of course, and Google has some tools to help you here. You’ll benefit greatly from taking a trial-and-error approach, and by crafting the text of your ad very carefully to be a) relevant to the search results on which it appears and b) enticing enough to attract traffic.
In any case, the premise of the Google Grants program (more details here) is that they will allow you to bid up to $1.00 per click, and they won’t charge you a penny – and you can “spend” up to $10,000 a month for your free ads. It’s a great deal, with no financial risk to you that I can see. (If you know of any, please leave them in the comments.)
OK, on to benefit #2: your own branded “channel” page on YouTube. YouTube (which is owned by Google) has their own nonprofit program aimed at helping charitable organizations improve their reach & support online activism and fundraising. The primary benefits of their program are:
Your own “channel” page (like this one from the Canadian Centre for Policy Alternatives), which can be branded to coordinate with your other online communications channels.
The option to drive fundraising through a Google Checkout “Donate” button (this isn’t for everyone, as you may have your own online donation software you want to use to ensure that your contacts are kept in one place);
And perhaps most interestingly, they provide you with the option to add a call-to-action overlay on your videos, to drive traffic to your online campaigns.
If you’re using YouTube at all, this is well worth pursing. Full details on the YouTube Nonprofit Program are available here. And you can apply with the same Google for Nonprofits account you use for AdWords.
A recent question by a fan of the Out-Smarts Facebook page regarding ‘giveaways’ prompted us to take a close look at Facebook’s rules and regulations
regarding contests, promotions and giveaways on their site. Running a promotion on Facebook is an effective way of generating buzz about your business, increasing the number of ‘likes’ your page has, increasing engagement with existing fans, and even adding to your business’ email list.
However, Facebook has some specific guidelines regarding these promotions, and most giveaways and contests on Facebook are actually in direct violation of these terms! Below, we will decode the legalese and give you the information you need to avoid being in violation of Facebook’s promotion guidelines and having your business page shut down.
First, you should ask yourself the following questions:
1. Do people enter your contest by ‘liking’ your business page?
2. Is your promotion being run on your Facebook fan pages wall? For example, do people enter your promotion by liking posts or leaving a comment?
If you answered yes to either of these questions, your promotion is illegal and you are at risk for Facebook shutting down your business page.
Basically, if you are using Facebook in any way to run or support your contest, you are in violation of their promotion guidelines. Instead, you need to run your promotion on a third party application such as Wildfire, Involver, Friend2Friend, and other similar application builders – see Facebook’s list of preferred developer consultants. You can also create your own custom application by building an iframe and running your promotion from there. See ‘create a custom iframe tab for your facebook page’ for how to make your own iframe application.
What does Facebook consider a promotion?
Before going further, we should clear up what exactly Facebook considers a promotion.
By “contest” or “competition” we mean a promotion that includes a prize of monetary value and a winner determined on the basis of skill (i.e., through judging based on specific criteria).
By “sweepstakes” we mean a promotion that includes a prize of monetary value and a winner selected on the basis of chance.
Basically, any sort of promotion of Facebook in which you will be choosing a winner in some way has to follow their promotion guidelines. Furthermore, the guidelines go on to say that you cannot use any of Facebook’s features in your promotion, ie as a condition of entering your promotion you cannot have users ‘liking’ your page or posts, uploading pictures to your page, or commenting on your posts or wall. Lastly, you cannot use Facebook in any way to announce your winner, either by posting the winner’s name on your wall, posting their photo on your wall, or contacting them through Facebook chat or a message.
Note: Acondition of your promotion could be that users need to be fans of your page, but that alone cannot enter them into the promotion. They need to take some further action on a third party application or iframe in order to ensure your promotion is legally within Facebook’s guidelines. Read more
Google recently unveiled their new social button, “+1”, pronounced “plus one” and digital shorthand for “this is pretty cool”.The +1 is similar to the ubiquitous Facebook ‘like’ button in that it allows users to share content they find on the internet with their friends and contacts. This content can be anything you find interesting, from websites and news articles to organic and paid search results.
How the +1 button works
When you use Google search, the +1 button will appear next to both organic and paid search results. When you mouse over the +1 button, its outline will color, and when you click the button it will shade in, as you can see in the example below.
You have the option to undo your +1 if you change your mind, or accidentally clicked the mouse on a result you didn’t want to +1.
It is important to remember that Google +1’s will be publicly visible to all people viewing the content you +1’d. If people are a part of your social connections – made up of your Google contacts, Gmail chat lists, and people you follow with Google Reader – they will be able to see that you personally +1’d something. If a person is outside of your social connections they will see an anonymous tally of total +1’s. Remember to only +1 sites and results that you don’t mind everyone knowing you like!
Currently, the +1 button is only available in search results, but soon webmasters will be able to add the +1 widget to their websites similar to how they’ve probably already installed a Facebook ‘like’ widget.
Get started with Google +1
First of all, you will need to create a Google Profile, or upgrade your existing one. Once you have an up-to-date Google Profile, you will be able to see a listing of all your +1’s, essentially you will be able to ‘bookmark’ the page in your Google Profile for future easy access. From your Profile you will also be able to edit and delete your +1’s if you no longer want to publicly endorse that item. To see and interact with +1 in search results you will need to be logged into your Google Account while you are using Google search.
Google is currently phasing +1 into all their search platforms, starting with Google.com. If you can’t see the +1 buttons yet, and would like to, you can opt-in by going to their experimental search site and clicking ‘Join this experiment’.
The Effects for Businesses
CTR and Adwords
The +1 button is bound to affect the click through rate of both organic and paid search results. Users are much more likely to click on results that have been endorsed by someone within their community whose opinion they trust. Users will not only be able to see the total number of +1’s for that particular result but also the names of people they know that have endorsed that result. Also, Adwords users will soon be able to see +1 statistics for their ads. There will not be a way to remove the +1 button from your ads; however, Google has stated the +1 button will not affect the way they calculate an ad’s quality score.
SEO
The +1 button will have a direct impact on search results. Google has stated they are more likely to crawl, or recrawl, pages that have +1’s and store the title and content of that page. Furthermore, it is quite likely that results with +1’s will appear higher in Google search results than a similar result that hasn’t been +1’d. We all know that social media affects Google’s ranking algorithm, and +1’s are public endorsements of trusted and popular results – this is sure to affect SEO.
For more information about the +1 button, view the following video from Google:
Social media web-based dashboard, Hootsuite, overhauled their analytics capabilities earlier this month resulting in powerful, customizable reporting tools for users. New features include the ability to track Twitter brand mentions and measure your Twitter follower growth, examine Facebook Insights for your page including ‘likes’ and demographic information, overlay social link clicks and website visits via Google, and over 30 report modules with which to create customized reports.
Social analytics is accessible from the left sidebar on your Hootsuite dashboard. To begin, click ‘Analytics’, then ‘Custom Analytics’ and then ‘Create New Report’. You’ll see a screen that looks like this:
From here, you can choose to create a completely customized report, or choose from one of four report templates. Regardless of which template you choose, you can customize it with your logo, header, and contact information. The custom report also allows you to arrange modules so that information is presented in a certain order, as well as include up to 30 different charts and graphs.
If you choose to build a customized report, you will see a blank canvas that looks like this:
To add modules to this report, you hover over the plus sign on your module of choice from the list on the left-hand side.
You may have noticed that some of the templates cost a certain number of points. This is a new feature whereby modules are available through Hootsuite’s custom point payment system. There are 3 levels of Hootsuite packages – Basic, Pro, and Enterprise. The basic level is free, but users are limited in the modules they can access. To access all modules, users mush upgrade to Hootsuite Pro for $5.99 a month. Pro users will be given 50 free points. Each module costs a certain number of points, as do the report templates. Most modules cost 10-20 points each, with the more sophisticated graphs and charts costing up to 30 points. When users have run out of points they have the option to purchase more. Hootsuite Pro users will end up paying a bit more per month with these new features; however, the analytical insights will be a great asset in quantifying your social media efforts.
For more details about social analytics, here’s a video from Hootsuite:
