Facebook for Beginners Update: This post was updated October 2013 to reflect current statistics and tools. Against all odds, you likely know someone who still hasn't succumbed to the lure of Facebook. Maybe you’re a beginner yourself. Or perhaps you just haven’t had the gosh darn time to explore every last corner of the world’s most expansive social network. Below, we offer a refresher course for those eager to learn more about the basics of Facebook. Even if you’re a pro, it’s fun to look at the platform through a beginner’s eyes. 1. Before you begin searching for friends, it’s important to complete your Timeline (aka your personal profile), which includes everything from uploading a profile picture and cover photo to outlining your employment history to determining your relationship status (OK, that’s optional). Check out these additional resources for building the best Timeline: 2. Once you’ve filled out a healthy portion of your Timeline, start searching for and adding “friends.” 3. 4. 5. 6. 7. 8. 9. 10.
45 Best Mobile Apps and Tools for Marketers You get a ton done when you’re at your computer, speeding away on the day’s social media strategy. Might there be a way to wring some productivity when you’re away from your desk? Mobile apps and tools can make it so a marketer’s entire day is filled with opportunities to connect, engage, and share. You can get more done while commuting, lounging, waiting, and any time when you’re not tethered to a desktop or laptop. Which apps are best for social media marketers? I gave a huge number of them a test run and came up with 45 amazingly useful apps that can help you accomplish social media marketing tasks with a tap, swipe, or touch. I’d love to hear which ones are your favorites, and if I missed any that you love to use. 45 best mobile apps for your social media marketing Dashboards and clients for social media management 1. You can schedule updates to multiple accounts on Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, and Google+, as well as follow-up with statistics on how each post performed. Other options – 2.
5+ Tools to Create Cool Visual Content | Swiftpage Social Media Newsroom - Visual content is a crucial piece of any company's marketing strategy. Us humans are compelled by visual content. How do we know? Company status updates which include photo albums get 180% stronger engagement and videos get 100 % stronger engagement. (source)An infographic from Simply Measured says photo and video posts on Pinterest now refer more web traffice than Twitter, StumbleUpon and Google+ combined! (source) So we can all agree visual content is important, but how do we create it if we aren't designers and can't afford to pay for one? Edit Images with Ease Pixlr is a free online image editing tool with a lot of functionality. Make Beautiful Quotes Quotes displayed visually are popping up all over. Turn Data into an Infographic Infographics have been steadily gaining popularity. Create a Meme We've all seen memes across the internet. Use Your Phone It's amazing how many tools are available on smartphones to create compelling visuals.
Not All Content Has to Be Epic I’m here to tell you something really important… Not every piece you publish on social media has to be epic. Now that that weight is off your shoulder, you can relax. Don’t get me wrong, publishing epic content is great but you can do it every.single.time. No one (or business) is ever 100%. There is no need to stress about publishing epic content every time you hit “post” or “publish”. Good, quality content is always important. Let me share with you why not every post has to be epic… You want to stay relevant. A lot of times what some deem as “epic posts” are not relevant to the topic or industry of that particular business. Every now and then it’s okay to go off-topic but don’t do it just to try to be epic. You need to show some personality and be relatable. When you try to write an epic post, many times the language turns robotic and you lose the fun, personal approach. At the same time you need to be relatable. If you aim for perfection every time you will wear yourself out. Mandy Edwards
5 Reasons Listicles Are Here to Stay, and Why That's OK | Underwire Image: IS/Getty Lists are everywhere. They’re the bread and butter of sites like Cracked and BuzzFeed, and regular content or sporadic filler at dozens more. (Yes, even WIRED.) From the multimedia gallery to the humble top 10, list-format articles — listicles — are rapidly becoming the lingua franca of new-media journalism. They’ve met with no end of resistance from the old guard, cantankerous readers and old-school journalists convinced that listicles (and their admittedly unfortunate portmanteau) are rotting our brains, destroying our attention spans, and generally contributing to the decay of all that is right and good. Are lists overused? 1. Welcome to the information age! With near-infinite information at hand, and reporting moving at more and more breakneck speeds to keep pace with social media, it’s easily to end up either trapped by choice paralysis or whittling away hours on end trying to keep up. 2. 3. Lists are the survey courses to long-form’s advanced study. 4. 5.
14 Social Media Marketing Tools Recommended by the Pros Are you looking for new social media marketing tools? Do you want to know which tools today’s social media professionals recommend? It’s not always easy to know which tools are worth checking out or how to use them. We asked 15 top social media marketers to share the tools they find most useful right now. In this article you’ll discover 14 tools to add to your social media marketing toolbox and why you should consider using them. Find 14 social media marketing tools recommended by the pros. #1: Quill Engage for Automatic Google Analytics Reports Ian Cleary Google Analytics is full of valuable information, but sometimes there’s too much data to sift through. Quill Engage is a free tool that connects with your Google Analytics account and emails you a weekly summary of your data. But what makes Quill Engage stand out is that it uses an artificial intelligence engine to process the information and deliver it to you as if somebody wrote a report explaining all of the important information. 1.
7 Free DIY Tools to Create Visual Content — Bloom Communications Spend any time on the Internet and you're bound to come across some great images, infographics, and other visual content. You're probably thinking that yeah, it looks great, but their graphic design budget must be huge. In some cases, like major corporations, you're probably right, but for smaller operations there are a few tricks of the trade that can keep your costs low, or even nonexistent, for your online content marketing needs. The secret is finding the free services and programs that turn visual content creation from a chore into a pleasure. Here's seven of the best that we've found: Dumpr (Free) It may have an, umm... unfortunate name, but Dumpr is an excellent tool. Pictaculous (Free) Not everybody is born with innate graphic design knowledge - for most of us, coordinating colors is something best left to the pros. PlaceIt (Free, Monthly fee for advanced features) Using a screenshot to illustrate your point is a common practice, but how can you jazz it up a bit? Infogr.am (Free)
20 Ideas for Content That People Love To Share on Social Media Social media is a hungry beast. The social networks require constant feeding. They need to be thrown a diet of content that keeps readers and viewers coming back for more. This is one of the biggest challenges if you want to do social at scale. Finding ideas for content then leads to the resource intensive process of creating, publishing and promoting that content. We want to read and view knowledge and ideas on our PC’s, laptops, smart phones and the latest hot hardware platform… the tablet. It also needs to be focused. The Content Foundation There are four main types of content that you should be considering creating: Educational contentInformative contentEntertaining contentInspiring content Do all four well and you are on your way to producing advocates and ambassadors on Facebook, Twitter , Google+ and other platforms that will spread and share your content for free. Content is Multi-Media Content on a social web also needs to be multi-media rich these include media such as: #1. #2. #3.
This Video Will Have You Completely Rethink How You Conduct Yourself Online And In Person (Video) World• Robert Gordon • We, as human beings, think that through social networks, we’ve somehow become more social creatures. The problem with this theory is, the more we “connect” online, the less actual human interactions we have, making us actually fairly unsocial. A new video breaks down exactly how the social aspects of human beings have evolved and transformed, showing how we’ve regressed from a social standpoint. Shimi Cohen shows exactly what’s wrong with our social structure now, and how we manipulate how we want to be presented to peers, family members, and potential mates on social media, rather than having vulnerable and genuine conversations in real time. Check out this video below, and take a moment to truly assess how you conduct yourself, both online and in person. Top Photo by Brittny Moore
14 Tools to Streamline Your Social Media Marketing Do you want to manage social media more efficiently? Do you have the right tools? To streamline your approach, you’ll need resources that work well with your business. In this article I’ll share the best tools to manage and optimize your social media marketing. Find 14 tools to streamline your social media marketing. #1: Find Your Audience Once you define your target audience(s), find the social media platforms they frequent online. Here are tools you can use to find your audience across the web. Followerwonk My favorite (and free) hidden gem is Followerwonk. Traackr An influencer marketing platform, Traackr creates specific lists of influencers and their qualifications, based on the criterion put into the system—whether it’s a region (New York) or topic (chocolate-lover). Search for influencers on Traackr. This technology searches all public-facing channels and builds full online profiles for every influencer on the list ranked according to reach, resonance and relevance. SEMrush Hootsuite Kapost
3 Must-Have Tools For Creating Easy Visual Content If there's one thing I've learned from this imminent switch from written to visual content, it's that stock photography should be a crime. Seriously, it's that bad. Don't get me wrong, I'm all aboard the visual content bus, but lately I've been left wondering what other visual tools are out there that can help marketers become more influential. While anti-stock photo was on the top of my list of requirements, I also wanted to find tools that were non-designer friendly, because believe it or not, not everyone has a whole team of designers on hand 24/7. So I did a little research, and this is what I've come up with. Here's 3 free, easy-to-use, must-have tools to help your business create more remarkable visual content. Recite Transform your text into something so much more with this painfully-easy content creation tool. Simply insert the text of your liking and select one of their 43 different typographic templates and allow Recite to do the rest. Chisel Pretty neat, huh? Quozio Photo Credit
An Appropriately Quick Guide to Gifs From Buzzfeed listicles to your Twitter feed, the mythical gif has risen from obscurity into a pillar of the internet in only a few years. These magical photos, that move and loop before your watering eyes, fill the social media masses with glee. From being used to document magical moments in sports to becoming a daily source of news, gifs are on the rise. Want to hop on the gif rollercoaster? Here’s a quick guide to gifs that should answer all of your burning questions: What are gifs? Gifs (technically pronounced like jifs, if you enjoy starting meaningless debates with coworkers) is the acronym for Graphics Interchange Format, which refers to a file format that supports both static and animated images. How to explain gifs to young kids: “They’re like the moving pictures in Harry Potter newspapers.” How to explain gifs to your grandparents: Don’t bother, they probably don’t care about gifs. Where can I find gifs? Giphy If you’re looking for a gif, they’ll have it. /r/gifs Reaction Gifs
generational audience habits News organizations have been confronting the problem of a shrinking audience for more than a decade, but trends strongly suggest that these difficulties may only worsen over time. Today’s younger and middle-aged audience seems unlikely to ever match the avid news interest of the generations they will replace, even as they enthusiastically transition to the Internet as their principal source of news. Pew Research longitudinal surveys find that Gen Xers (33-47 years old) and Millennials (18-31 years old), who spent less time than older people following the news at the outset of their adulthood, have so far shown little indication that that they will become heavier news consumers as they age. Notably, a 2012 Pew Research national poll found members of the Silent generation (67-84 years old) spending 84 minutes watching, reading or listening to the news the day before the survey interview. Younger generations just don’t enjoy following news Older Americans’ habits show little change