Wednesday Words: TL;DR

While today's term isn't often seen on social media, it sometimes is. TL;DR is short hand for Too long; didn't read. It's often used to offer a summary of a much longer post that they realize most people won't read or just to offer a summary for those who didn't read it so they can get a gist of it.

TL;DR is often seen on forum posts either before the post begins or at the very end for someone who scrolled past the block of text to find the summary so they could respond to the post.

I've seen TL;DR on Facebook and Tumblr posts. TL;DR doesn't really apply to Twitter because it's impossible to get too long on Twitter. You might see the phrase occasionally on Blog posts when people want to offer a summary.

Wednesday Words are a series of definitions released on Wednesday each week regarding a word found specific to Facebook's social media platform, or may be a generic word dealing with social media. These definitions are to help provide you with a better understanding of common and uncommon terms associated with Facebook and social media. You can find all the Wednesday Words by clicking on the Wednesday Words tag below.

Wednesday Words: Live-blogging/live-tweeting

Today's term is something you see quite frequently during football games, television shows and more and that's a combination of terms - Live-blogging and Live-Tweeting.

The terms are basically the same thing, just a different platform. Live-blogging/live-tweeting is blogging or tweeting about a particular event (football game, t.v. show, writing a novel, etc.) as it happens in real-time instead of writing them after the fact.

Most of these blog posts (or tweets) are short commentary as things happen. Recent popular live-tweeting events have been the Presidential debates and The Walking Dead (pro-tip, if you aren't watching the Walking Dead live, don't follow the tweeters as you may get spoilers).

Live-blogging and live-tweeting is a great way to get followers if you are attending an event specific to your brand. It gets you coverage and gives you coverage and posts for people to retweet. You can also live-tweet about topics that are important to your brand.

Keep in mind, Live-blogging/tweeting happens as things occur, so you or your social media manager have to be prepared to set aside time during the event to make it happen, otherwise it can quickly flop.

Wednesday Words are a series of definitions released on Wednesday each week regarding a word found specific to Facebook's social media platform, or may be a generic word dealing with social media. These definitions are to help provide you with a better understanding of common and uncommon terms associated with Facebook and social media. You can find all the Wednesday Words by clicking on the Wednesday Words tag below.

Tuesday Tips: Post Pictures on Twitter

For those relatively new to Twitter and Social Media, this might be a surprise. For everyone else who has been around the block a time or two already know this - but you can post more than just words to Twitter, you can post photos and videos as well.

Today's tip: Post pictures to Twitter!

Now, after saying this, there are a few things to remember. You will lose a number of characters when you add an image to Twitter, so keep that in mind when preparing a post to go along with your photo.  Keep the tweet and associated hastags short and sweet.  Make sure the pictures are engaging - since Twitter now shows previews of images in timelines, it is important to make images engaging.

Most importantly - have fun with it.

Tuesday Tips are a series of tips released on Tuesday each week regarding a hint or tip to help you manage and market your social media presence better.  You can find all the Tuesday Tips by clicking on the Tuesday Tips tag below.

Wednesday Words: Repin

Today's Wednesday Words is a continuation of the past few weeks, focusing on terminology associated with Pinterest. Today's word is Repin.

Repinning is when you're looking through the pins of people you follow, see one you like and "re-pin" it to an appropriate board for your Pinterest account. It can also be from Pins suggested to you by Pinterest. Repinning shows you have interest in what the other Pinterest user has shared and helps you find new things to add to your boards as well.

Wednesday Words are a series of definitions released on Wednesday each week regarding a word found specific to Facebook's social media platform, or may be a generic word dealing with social media. These definitions are to help provide you with a better understanding of common and uncommon terms associated with Facebook and social media. You can find all the Wednesday Words by clicking on the Wednesday Words tag below.

Friday Sharing: Why You Need A Social Media Marketing Strategy & How To Start One

Today's article share was found on Pinterest with this fun description: "Running a business? Want to boost sales? You need a social media marketing strategy! Here is how to start an effective social media marketing strategy."

Seeing as I've mentioned social media marketing planning and strategy a few times this past month, I figured this would be a good article to share.

You can find it on Pinterest here: https://www.pinterest.com/pin/275775177159910243/

Or on the original website, here: http://www.twelveskip.com/marketing/social-media/1414/start-social-media-marketing-strategy

Have a great Friday!

Wednesday Words: Pin

Once again, this week delving into terminology from  Pinterest.

Today's word is Pin.

A pin is any image used to mark a website on Pinterest. You PIN the image to denote the article with a brief description. These pins can then be referred back to later on for something you're looking for or wanting to do.

Items are pinned to a Pinterest Board. You select which board you want to pin it to when you decide to Pin it.

Wednesday Words are a series of definitions released on Wednesday each week regarding a word found specific to Facebook's social media platform, or may be a generic word dealing with social media. These definitions are to help provide you with a better understanding of common and uncommon terms associated with Facebook and social media. You can find all the Wednesday Words by clicking on the Wednesday Words tag below.

Tuesday Tips: Is Your Facebook Page Up-To-Date

We’ve talked about auditing your Facebook page in the past, but it’s probably time to talk about that again.

Have you recently checked, say in the last three to six months, to see if all the information on your Facebook page is current and accurate? If you haven’t, here are some areas to check:

1. Review About box and about page

The about box on the main page of your website tells your fans and potential fans about you. It includes a brief description as well as a link to your website. Make sure all of the information is current and the link points where you want it to go.

The about page contains a lot more detailed information, as seen below.  Verify and update all of the information or remove information you don’t want to appear there.

2.  Add your call to action

The call to action feature was added, if I remember correctly, in the last six months. If you haven’t taken time to set this up, now is a great time to do it.

3. Review scheduled posts or schedule posts for the upcoming months.

If you have posts scheduled, make sure they are still aligned with the direction you are going with your social media plan. It’s also a good time to schedule future posts, especially holiday well wishes, notifications of hour changes, sales or other information that may come up during the next few months.

4.  Update Milestones

Milestones are a great way to show achievements. It can be something as simple as a number of likes achieved, 5-year anniversary, 10-year anniversary, $1,000,000 in sales or anything you come up with. People like seeing the milestones made by companies they follow.

Optional:

5. Set a featured video

If you chose to set a featured video, it will appear at the top of your About box on your main page.  Adding a featured video is pretty easy. Simply select a video from your uploaded video, or upload a video, then you have an option to add it as a featured video.

Be sure to add a description to your Featured video that way people know what it's about when they go to watch it.

Tuesday Tips are a series of tips released on Tuesday each week regarding a hint or tip to help you manage and market your social media presence better.  You can find all the Tuesday Tips by clicking on the Tuesday Tips tag below.

Friday Facts: The Power of the Hashtag

Another excellent infographic - this time from the Huffington Post - regarding the Power of the Hashtag.  This offers advice from not abusing hashtags to other best practices regarding hashtags with the various sites that use them. It also explains why using hashtags is important and how you should pick/set up hashtags for your brand.

Check it out here: https://www.pinterest.com/pin/227431849909451172/

You might also want to check out their sources for the article. There may be additional useful information there.

Wednesday Words: Board

Today we're going to delve into terminology from another social media network - Pinterest. While many times we've shared articles about Pinterest and how it can help with social media marketing endeavors, we haven't ever really touched on the terminology, tips or tutorials regarding Pinterest. For many users new to social media or social media marketing, Pinterest can be a bit confusing. So over the next few weeks we will start intersparcing tutorials and tips for Pinterest along with tips and tutorials for other social media networks we already cover.

We start out this week with the word Board.

A board, in Pinterest, is basically similar to a corkboard at home where you'd pin recipes, menus, etc. The difference is, the board is online on Pinterest and serves as a category where you can pin specific things to it.

So, for example, my board "Favorite Recipes" contains nothing but recipes I want to try or have tried and really like. Another of my boards, Video Game related, contains links to things I find interesting on Video games. Some of them contain links to my own articles. Another board, Etsy, contains pins of all items I created in order for me to promote sales through Pinterest.

From a social media marketing standpoint, you want different boards to share things in different topics, but also to promote things specific to your company. You could have a sales board or a book covers board or really anything you can think of.  More importantly, if you blog for your company regularly, you can share your blogs, assuming they have appropriate imaging to do so, through Pinterest.

Pinterest is a whole new world for those new to social media. Take time to learn it!

Wednesday Words are a series of definitions released on Wednesday each week regarding a word found specific to Facebook's social media platform, or may be a generic word dealing with social media. These definitions are to help provide you with a better understanding of common and uncommon terms associated with Facebook and social media. You can find all the Wednesday Words by clicking on the Wednesday Words tag below.

Tuesday Tips: Linking in Tweets

Have you ever wondered where to put your links in your tweets?  I know I have and I have experimented with several different ways, but it seems like passion digital has done some research on the topic and they concluded the following:

Get your links in early. Put your key message before your link. Any after thoughts, opinions or additional commentary should go after the link. Intersparce your hastags as well both before and at the end of your tweet, just remember not to use too many hashtags.

Tuesday Tips are a series of tips released on Tuesday each week regarding a hint or tip to help you manage and market your social media presence better.  You can find all the Tuesday Tips by clicking on the Tuesday Tips tag below.

Wednesday Words: MySpace

For those of us that were using this from the time it came out - before Facebook - we all know what MySpace is. A lot of us no longer use it, but it seems to have made a comeback after Justin Timberlake and others purchased it and turned it around.

That being said MySpace is another social media platform, similar in many ways to Facebook, but was known for users being able to completely customize their profiles and be unique from other users profiles. It was the most popular social networking site until Facebook took over.

All of that said, MySpace is still around and you can check it out by visiting www.myspace.com.

Wednesday Words are a series of definitions released on Wednesday each week regarding a word found specific to Facebook's social media platform, or may be a generic word dealing with social media. These definitions are to help provide you with a better understanding of common and uncommon terms associated with Facebook and social media. You can find all the Wednesday Words by clicking on the Wednesday Words tag below.

Tuesday Tips: How to Create a Social Media Plan

Do you know the things you need to do to start creating your social media plan? If you don't, or are unsure of what you should be looking at, let's look at these four steps to create a solid social media plan.

1. Define your goals.
   Understand exactly what you want to accomplish with your social media plan. Are you looking to drive sales? Are you looking to drive hits to your website? Are you looking to gain more followers? Knowing your goals is an important first step in creating any plan of action.
2. Define your metrics.
   Once you have your goals in place, you have to be able to measure them. What will you be looking at to know if your plan was successful? Will you be looking at conversions, click-throughs, increase in purchases/followers? Know what you will be looking at to define your metrics.
3. Decide your tactics.
   Know what actions you will take on a regular basis that will help you achieve your goals. Have a plan in place if those actions don't help you.
4. Execute your plan.
   Keep an eye on your metrics and redefine your plan as necessary to achieve your goals.

The basics of this blog post came from this infographic on Pinterest. For more details on how to create a social media plan/strategy, check it out here: https://www.pinterest.com/pin/161214861638319635/

Tuesday Tips are a series of tips released on Tuesday each week regarding a hint or tip to help you manage and market your social media presence better.  You can find all the Tuesday Tips by clicking on the Tuesday Tips tag below.

Thursday Tutorial: How to create a Twitter list

I've mentioned several times about creating lists on Twitter. Twitter lists help people to get seen but also help others to see people you follow. Lists can help you sort people into categories based on their type of posts. I have lists for authors, book promoters, social media marketing, gaming and a few other categories. You can promote your lists as part of your tweets as well.

Don't know how to create a list? Well that's what this tutorial is here for.

Login to your Twitter account then look at the top right next to the Tweet button where your Avatar is. Click on your avatar to generate a drop down menu. Click on Lists. This will take you to a Lists page that looks like this:

On the lower right hand side, click on create new list. It will generate a pop-up menu that looks like this:

Fill out the name of the list. The description is optional, but could be handy if you have multiple lists that are similar and want to differentiate them a bit. From there you can chose whether others can see the list you created (public) or if only you can see the list (private). Once done, click "save list" and it will load a page like this:

You can add people to this list by searching for people. The other option is to go back to your profile and go to your Following page, which looks like this:

From here, you can select the little gear icon on anyone you want to add to a list. The gear icon will pop up with these options:

Click on "Add or remove from lists" and the following pop-up window will appear:

Simply put a check mark in the boxes of the lists you want to add them to - yes you can add them to more than one list - and then click on the X and you're done.

However, if you want to create a new list, just click on Create a list. The same image from above for create a list will pop up, complete it and it will return you to this page. You will still have to check mark what lists you want and close out.

Pretty simple!

Enjoy your list making!

Thursday Tutorials are a series of tutorials designed to help people who may not be as Facebook savvy as other people. Some tutorials will be targeted towards newbies to the social media world, others will include tutorials for more advanced users. Thursday Tutorials are written for the layman and are designed with everyone in mind. You can find all the Thursday Tutorials by clicking on the Thursday Tutorials tag below.

An Unintended Break

Between the extended holiday and thinking I had an extra week of posts already planned for the second week of September (and ended up only have one post already scheduled), there was an unintentional lapse in posts last week and for that I do apologize.

I try to write a month's worth of posts, or more, at the beginning of each month, the only exception to this being the weekly job listings and the occasional extra shares that appear during the week outside of Fridays or Saturdays.

That being said, if you are looking to pad your resume a bit and would like to help post a second post a few days a week, please contact me. I am looking for an additional poster. It is an unpaid position - just like mine is - but I'll promote your posts as well as mine.

Here's looking forward to regular posts this month and next. Thanks to all my readers and hope everyone has a great week.

Tuesday Tips: Show Restraint

Many people new to social media for their brand make one common mistake: they spread themselves too thin and put their brand on social networks that don't support their brand like it should.

Don't make the same mistake - or if you have made the mistake, now's the time to scale it back. Learn which social media networks your patrons are on then embrace those. In addition, when considering adding new social media networks to your marketing plan, make sure the network will effectively support your brand's promise to your customers as well as your customer's perceptions of the brand. If the network doesn't do these things, don't participate on it.

So the ultimate tip here is, exhibit restraint when you start using social media for your brand. Start with 1-3 social media networks then grow from there if it is appropriate.

Good luck!

Tuesday Tips are a series of tips released on Tuesday each week regarding a hint or tip to help you manage and market your social media presence better.  You can find all the Tuesday Tips by clicking on the Tuesday Tips tag below.

Wednesday Words: Optimize

Today's word is one we've used frequently, but haven't actually defined it and that's Optimize.

We often talk about optimizing for social media - making websites useful to people browsing from mobile devices or finding ways to make it easier to post social media. Optimizing is finding ways to increase performance and ensure efficiency by reworking copy and creative endeavors. With platforms changing and the addition of new social media platforms being a regular thing, it's become important to optimize when it comes to social media.

Some ways people have found to optimize social media are programs like WordPress which will automatically post to social media outlets when an article is posted to a blog. Other people use programs such as HootSuite to schedule specific posts over a week and then posting and responding to people outside of that.

How do you optimize your time when dealing with social media?

Wednesday Words are a series of definitions released on Wednesday each week regarding a word found specific to Facebook's social media platform, or may be a generic word dealing with social media. These definitions are to help provide you with a better understanding of common and uncommon terms associated with Facebook and social media. You can find all the Wednesday Words by clicking on the Wednesday Words tag below.

Friday Facts: How Much Time You Should be Spending on Social Media

How much time do you spend on your brand's social media creating posts, images, etc., engaging users, sharing content and more? How much time do you spend creating blog posts? How about how much time are you spending dedicated to researching and content strategy as well as content curation?

Each brand is different, but if you're a full time employee focused on Social Media, then Mark Smiciklas, digital strategist at intersectionconsulting.com, has a useful infographic for you showing how your 40-hour work week could be broken up. If you aren't spending 40 hours on social media, reduce accordingly.

I came across this nifty infographic on Pinterest. Check it out here: https://www.pinterest.com/pin/147422587779933692/

Wednesday Words: Listed

Another word from the Twitterverse - today we talk about Listed.

In a previous article, we talked about taking advantage of Twitter Lists. Today's word has to do with Lists. Listed is a word meaning the act of being added to a Twitter List. Lists are often arranged by creators depending on what you're posting about. I've been added to a number of social media and gaming lists because that is what I post the most about. I've also been added to a few author lists as well - since I'm an author, of course.

Twitter users create lists of various users they follow and are interested in in order to have all information based on certain content in a specific place for easy consumption. Some lists are public and other users can use them to find content as well.

As a brand, you may consider creating lists as well - perhaps grouping them into social influencers, users who praise your brand, etc.

Wednesday Words are a series of definitions released on Wednesday each week regarding a word found specific to Facebook's social media platform, or may be a generic word dealing with social media. These definitions are to help provide you with a better understanding of common and uncommon terms associated with Facebook and social media. You can find all the Wednesday Words by clicking on the Wednesday Words tag below.

Saturday Sharing: Everything You Need to Know About Hashtags

Over the past few years we've covered quite a bit on hashtags in a number of articles, including these articles:

• Friday Facts: The History and Power of #Hashtags
• Tuesday Tips: Don't Hashtag Every Word in Social Media Posts
• Wednesday Words: #Hashtags
• Tuesday Tips: Use Hashtags

I will, however, admit I may have missed some things. That's where the article I am sharing comes into play. Check out The Beginner's Guide to the Hashtag on Mashable found here: http://mashable.com/2013/10/08/what-is-hashtag/?crlt.pid=camp.Gxjj4sXBL6v0

While the article covers some of what I have covered above, it also contains other useful information to consider, especially if you are new to hashtaging and social media.

Check it out! You may find it useful.

Friday Facts: The 3 S's of Social Media Maintenance

Do you know what the three S's of Social Media Maintenance are?  Well the S's are easy:

1. Setup
2. Strategize
3. Schedule

Obviously, there's going to be more to that than just those words, but it's a great thing to remember - you have to set up your social media before you can began strategizing. Once you have your strategizing down, schedule posts.

The infographic, found here https://www.pinterest.com/pin/165296248800925370/ , outlines exactly what you need to do with steps for each S to follow.  It also includes some interesting facts, such as "Blog posts shared on twitter and Facebook receive 149% inbound links than those not shared."

If you're still working on your social media strategy, check this article out.