One of the great benefits of social media is the ability to reach a large audience at little cost. Using the popular hashtag notation, you can spread your brand, take advantage of popular trends, and get your message out.
Hashtags are a great way to promote your business. Learn how hashtags work, as well as how to use popular tools to assist you with reaching your audience through social media.
Twitter passwords are just too easy to crack. But according to Wired, the platform is finally getting its act together and working on a sorely-needed two-step authentication system.
We’ve even taken an inside look at the flourishing black market for hacked Twitter accounts, and it’s clear that much of this activity is being controlled by inexperienced hackers who are willing to compromise and takeover an account for less than $100, in most cases.
At this point, you're almost weirder if you don't use any social networks than if you were a social media obsessive who tweets, Facebooks, Instagram and hashtags the hell out of your vocabulary. It's how weird the world is now. Social networks are real life. But who are the people who make up these worlds? If there are 12 personality types in social networks, which one are you?
We all read articles about how important it is to market ourselves through social media.
I’ve been talking to successful freelancers to find out the realities of using social media for business and getting their tips for the best ways to network and promote their work. Here are 7 tips that will boost your social media effectiveness.
Habits are easy to fall into. When you’re trying to change how you do things and you’re incredibly busy, falling back into old habits happens quicker than you would expect. While most tend to be minor habits that don’t have an overall impact, there are some habits that can be damaging, make you look lazy, or seriously hinder a page’s growth.
Chances are you’ve visited a page that has done a variation of what’s listed below. Here are a list of the most common habits that will put users off your page for good.
Twitter put months of speculation to rest this morning when it launched its own music-focused service for iOS and the Web. Twitter #Music is a standalone app for discovering, following and listening to artists that draws its intelligence from Twitter's own user activity data. At first glance, it's a win for artists, but the value it adds for fans remains to be seen.
First and foremost, Twitter #Music is undoubtedly good for Twitter. The app takes something that is hugely popular among consumers — music — and intimately ties it to its own service. It also integrates with Spotify and Rdio so tracks can be streamed in their entirety from within Twitter #Music. That feature, the company is betting, will keep listeners glued to the app, where much of what they do is tied to Twitter's core functionality: tweeting songs and following artists.
Large companies aren’t just spending on social media in a way that touches customers directly. They’re also investing in developing social media capabilities within their own organizations. According to a study of worldwide companies with over 1,000 employees conducted by the The Altimeter Group, companies dedicated between 20% and 37% of their total social media development spending to “internal social media” in 2012. Larger companies were the biggest investors in internal social development, both in dollar terms and as a percentage of total social development spending. Companies with revenues between $1 billion and $10 billion spent an average $562,069 on internal social media, compared with $968,548 on external spending. Companies with revenues over $10 billion spent $1.3 million on average on internal measures and $2.9 million on outward-facing ones...
With high profile brands such as Gap, Gamestop and, in the US, JCPenney, having opened and then subsequently closed Facebook stores (presumably because they weren't delivering ROI) it would be easy to assume that social media is not suitable for sales – too easy, perhaps.
But those who dig a little deeper may find that opportunities abound if social media is leveraged in the right way.
"We haven't tried to use social as a sales channel at all. It doesn't suit our demographic and we're not a discounter," argues Andrew Curran, chairman at luxury homewares e-tailer Amara. "Having said that, there are examples – take Fab.com – of retailers for which social is a significant proportion of what they do and drives a large percentage of their business."
Oh, Google and Facebook. Thanks to the two giants of search and social, you can’t really hide very easily anymore. If you have things in your past that you don’t want known, businesses considering hiring you don’t have to hire an investigator to go beyond the standard background check. They simply need to find you online.
Facebook today is rolling out two more features for Pages used by brands and businesses and public Profiles for individuals with more than 10,000 followers: it is adding replies and threaded comments. The move — like Graph Search, designed to increase time spent on the site — confirms our report from last week, which we wrote about in detail, and which Facebook also later confirmed for us.
Both replies and threaded comments — which lets the most-commented-on or liked replies and those closest to your network gravitate to the top, while those marked spam sink to the bottom — had been in testing since November 2012, so a few accounts already had them in place. Today’s news means that they will now be rolled out across Facebook for desktop everywhere.
Buddy Media recently published a report titled Strategies for Effective Tweeting: A Statistical Review. The report is based on the data compiled from their analysis of user engagement from over 320 Twitter profiles managed by various brands. Based on their data they make several recommendations for how best to maximize the use of Twitter as a business. The main results, including day, time and how to increase engagement and retweets, can be easily seen in an infographic put together by Fusework Studios.
Social networking is all about staying in touch with friends and making new contacts. On Google Plus, you add friends by putting them into your circles. You meet new people by hanging out in Google Plus communities.
In this article, I give you a freelancer’s guide to who you should add to your circles, how to meet new people in communities, and how to use communities and circles as a marketing tool.
Let’s get started by looking at what circles are.
The popularity of social media networks has skyrocketed and today’s generation is so dependent on it that I can’t even imagine what will happen to the world if the internet ceases to exist.
What’s great about social media is the fact that it allows the community to share useful information and resources online in various forms like images, videos or audio files. Members of social networks can interact with each other through chats and private messages.
Social media plays an important role in the worlds of business and finance as well as in the entertainment industry. You can easily connect with your target audience and promote your products and services. Traffic can also be generated to your site through the help of these social networks.
Designers and other computer experts dominate social media because they know how to use it properly in order to get the benefits they need unlike the other users who spend a lot of time on social networks without really having a specific goal in mind.
In an ideal world, marketing content through social media would be an extended process because we would all have the time to do it the right way. We could focus on positioning it, nurturing it, and timing everything out exactly like it should be timed. Unfortunately, this isn’t a perfect world and we have to maximize our results while minimizing the time and effort to achieve them.
There are plenty of shortcuts that make promoting content on social media faster and easier and there are plenty of techniques used to make the promotions more effective. The real key is to find the right mix of the two to get the most out of it. Here is a process that can be used to get the most exposure for the content without spending too much time on it.
Facebook is reportedly working on incorporating the hashtag into the social network.
A Twitter staple, the Wall Street Journal reports that Facebook has plans to bring the hashtag to its service, offering users the ability to index conversations around a particular topic, just as they currently do on Twitter. Sources ”familiar with the matter” told the Journal that while Facebook is working on the feature, it wouldn’t necessarily be released anytime soon.
Facebook has made some pretty significant changes to its web platform since launching back in 2004.
What started off as a place for college students to connect with each other has grown into the world's largest social network.
In Facebook's maturation, its design has also evolved quite a bit. (Although it seems that every time Facebook makes even a subtle change, users become outraged.)...
Still in line for the new Facebook News Feed? Want to take a look at the menu while you're waiting for a table? We've got you covered. Check out the gallery above.
The News Feed changes, which start kicking in for users Thursday, aren't just about making the site look cleaner (and more Google+ like) or increasing the size of photos. It's about giving you more options than you could possibly want for how to view content on Facebook.
For the first time in a long time, Facebook is actually making some of those feeds chronological. "All Friends," "Following" and "Photos" will appear in the order they came in — though this is still an experimental arrangement, a company spokesperson said.
And besides, even chronological order means the algorithm is making decisions for you on which of your friends you're most likely to want to see content from.
Google+ launched in June 2011 to much fanfare. Some commentators predicted it would slay Facebook. Others anticipated a rapid demise for the network.
Neither predictions came to pass.
On the one hand, Google Plus grew at lightening speed. By December 2012, it had over 500 million users, on a par with Twitter, and around half of Facebook’s total userbase.
On the other hand, Google Plus remains a a social media ghost town. Though it has half a billion users, almost no one actually uses it, at least not regularly.
Is it really worthwhile for freelancers to use Google Plus? Or is it best to watch from the sidelines to see what its future holds?
Let’s take a look and see how using Google Plus can benefit you as a freelancer.
There are now 1 billion Endorsements on LinkedIn, an impressive figure for a feature released just six months ago.
As the infographic below shows, some 50 million Endorsements are batted around the business-friendly social network each week and "strategic planning" is the most popular subject for an Endorsement.
Introduced in September, Endorsements represented a frictionless alternative to formal recommendations. Instead of going to the trouble of writing up a formal recommendation, you merely have to click a button to endorse someone.
The ease of use, however, has simultaneously made Endorsements ubiqutious and meaningless. However, LinkedIn is clearly pleased with its accomplishment.
Facebook has not gotten its fake account problem under control — yet — but it appears to be making progress.
In its annual report, Facebook said that the number of duplicate accounts on its network had risen to 5 percent of all accounts in Q4 2012, up from 4.8 percent in Q2 2012.
However, the number of accidentally misclassified accounts and the number of abusive accounts (run by spammers and the like) has declined.
Overall, the total percentage of fake accounts declined from 8.7 percent to 7.2 percent. In whole numbers, the number of duplicate accounts went up from about 45.8 million to 52.8 million; but the total number of fake accounts (which includes abusive and misclassified accounts) declined from 83 million to 76 million over the last six months...
