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.
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.
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.)...
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...
News Feed, one of the three so-called "pillars" of Facebook - alongside Timeline and Graph Search - is the bustling epicenter of the social network. And it's overdue for an overhaul.
In a press invite sent out Friday, Facebook invited us to "Come see a new look for News Feed" on the morning of Thursday, March 7, at the company's Menlo Park, Calif., headquarters.
There’s a strange change that has been happening since the dawn of social media and that continues to accelerate every day. Teens are talking less to their parents and engaging more with their peers through social networks and mobile devices. The first shift, not talking to parents, has been happening for a long time but social media has made it even more prevalent. Engaging with their peers – it seems many communicate more with their fingers than their mouths nowadays.
t's 2013. Social media is no longer new. It's a mature medium, one that has been woven into the fabric of consumer life online. So why are brands still determined to act like naive tourists, blundering around a foreign land and upsetting the natives? It's time to take back control.
Brands have been lectured for the last few years on the need to let go of the vice-like grip on their brand, to hand over control to their customers in social media. And it's true that social media has ushered in a new age of transparency, where customers want a far greater stake in any brand they interact with.
But this doesn't mean you can shrug your shoulders and simply launch your brand unguided onto a social network. In fact, it's your responsibility to guide your customers' social experience. And that means welcoming them back to your home online.
There are many reasons that social media platforms will never fully replace email within the working environment, despite Yammer and others bringing social media and social messaging platforms into the workplace:
Email provides a level of privacy and professionalism
Email inboxes provide a one stop-hub for tasks and one-to-one communications
There's not the worry about privacy issues with email as there is with social media
Email works across all platforms and applications
Email has become more than just a two-way communication tool
Social media does not provide a professional online space for business one-to-ones
Social media has a major issue with ownership
As Sally Fields once said as she was accepting her Oscar, “I can’t deny the fact…that you like me…right now! You LIKE me!!” How great was that? You can’t even fault her for gushing, right?
Okay, so you may not want to go the tux, gown, and statue route, but you do want to share your energy and passion for your work. That’s the goal when you’re trying to spread the word about your creativity and skills through building your Facebook presence. Connecting with your audience is the primary objective; once that happens, your reputation will spread like wildfire. Let them see your pride and passion, and get them to react to it.
Your reading audience must take action, and there are some excellent techniques with which you can experiment. See which ones elicit the most action from your readers...
Professional networking site LinkedIn reached the 200 million member mark on Friday, with more and more signing up to the site all the time, making it one of the fastest growing social media sites in the world.
Bearing this in mind, I thought I’d share a few tips on how to get the most out of LinkedIn, for companies and individuals alike.
Firstly, it’s important to remember that LinkedIn is a network for professionals and so the tone you use on your profile should be relatively formal, rather than the kind of updates you would post to Facebook. Secondly, LinkedIn is great for getting found in search, so it’s important to ensure that you have optimised your profile for SEO.
A company should not only create a company page on LinkedIn, it should also create groups and ensure that all of its employees are involved and on the network. This will allow your message to be spread much more effectively than a page/group alone.
