First Friday: The Previous Month in Review

As I have finished up the first full month of this blog, I was thinking it might be nice on the first Friday of each month to do a quick article reviewing the topics from the previous month, including links to the articles, breaking it down by platform and theme as well as providing a link to read the full article.

As always, I'm glad to answer questions folks have and look forward to more questions coming my way.

Facebook - Tuesday Tips

• Jan. 7: Respond to Messages - An important tip that seems reasonable, but is often easily forgotten.  You should always respond to replies and messages sent to your private message box of your page.  It helps to engage your fans.
• Jan. 14: Engage Your Fans - Ask fans questions, respond to their questions/comments.  Engage them.  Engagement helps more people to see your posts.
• Jan. 21: Create Quality Content - Some pages focus on quantity of posts over quality.  You want your posts to be shareable, so they need to be good.  Focus on quality.
• Jan. 28: Optimize Post Times - Knowing what times to post is important for increasing the number of views your posts get.

Facebook - Wednesday Words

• Jan. 8: Facebook Place - If you have a business with an established location, there's a chance that you may have a "Facebook Place" page already created and you should claim it from Facebook.  Learn about Facebook Place in this article.
• Jan. 15:  Algorithms and Social Media - This article explains the basics of how many of your fans see your posts and how engaging users affects this.
• Jan. 22: Sharability - This article explains why making posts interesting and something people want to share is important.  TLDR version: if people don't share it, your post views won't increase.
• Jan. 28: Edge Rank - An outdated term that is no longer used by Facebook, but is still pertinent to the algorithms of vies for pages.

Facebook - Thursday Tutorials

• Dec. 19: Finding the Create Page Button on Facebook - A common question I've had from friends and clients - where is the button to create a page?  Three ways to find it in here.
• Dec. 26: Picking the Category for Your Facebook Page - A guide explaining the various categories and what they're for.
• Jan. 16: Creating a Page - This takes you through the initial process of creating a page.
• Jan. 23: Setting Your Page Cover Image - This one talks about how to set up a cover image for your page/profile.

Other Posts from January:

• Jan. 13: Important News: Name Change - An article explaining why the name of this blog changed from Facebook Marketing: Tips and Hints to Social Media Marketing: Hints and Tips.
• Jan. 17: Friday Facts: Interesting Statistics - This article links to a slideshow showing the mass immersion in various social media outlets and puts an emphasis on why marketing with Social Media is important.
• Jan. 20: Video: Why Facebook is Broken - An embedded video from a known YouTuber explaining how Facebook is broken when it comes to fans seeing pages' posts.
• Jan. 24: Friday Facts: Facebook Losing Users, Unappealing to Teens -  While this article isn't surprising by any means, it does provide more information on how things are changing within social media.

Thanks for reading!  Posts will continue to roll out this month and on-going.  Please leave any comments, questions, etc. in the comment section below!

Friday Facts: Nifty Infographic with Sizes for Social Media Graphics

This great article was linked by a coworker earlier this week - and while I don't like linking to other websites, I do when there is good information available.  And this week, this site definitely has good information.

The most often thing I look up when creating a Facebook page for clients or for my projects or other pages for other projects within Twitter or LinkedIn is "what are the dimensions I need for this image again?"  And then either googling it or trying to find it on the site I'm working on so I can create an optimized image for it.

Well this site has all the dimensions in one easy to find infographic.  Check it out here: http://www.mediabistro.com/alltwitter/social-media-image-dimensions_b44957

Bookmark it.  You'll thank me later.

Image above also links to the article and is used in promotion of the article and is in no way affiliated with this blog except to promote the article.

Thursday Tutorials: How to Schedule Posts via Facebook

Note: There's an updated version of this article here.

Today's Thursday Tutorial is a guide showing how to Schedule Posts.  A follow up guide will show you how to access scheduled posts and change when they are posting or how to delete them.

For this guide, I'm using one of my fanpages for UO Home Decor, to demonstrate scheduling a post.

Access the page you wish to schedule a post for.  At the top it should say: "You are posting, commenting, and liking as YOUR PAGE NAME — Change to YOUR NAME".  If it doesn't say this and it has "You are posting, commenting, and liking as YOUR NAME — Change to YOUR PAGE NAME," click to change it to your page name - that way you are acting as the page admin.   Scroll down to where you post a status and click in it to type your post.

You should see these options below your status window area.

The button to the left, that looks like a clock, is the scheduler.  The button immediately to the right of that that looks like a pin is the location tool which allows you to put a location with a post.

Click on the clock icon and the following should appear:

This allows you to set a date and time for it to publish.

Click on the calendar to set the date.  Use the arrow keys to change the month, then just click on whatever date you want.

The date will auto-fill in and the calendar view will disappear once you've clicked on the date you want.  You can alter this information at any time, including after you hit the schedule button, but that will be covered in another tutorial.

If you click in the "Add a Time?" box, it will let you type in a number, then provide a drop down menu to select AM or PM and a specific time from.  It looks something like this:

Select the time you want. 

Now, if you click in the status box to write your post, the options above will disappear, but you will still see the "Schedule" button instead of the "Post" button.  You don't have to set up the time and date before you type your post, but I find it helps with not accidentally posting a post if you set the time up before you create the post.

Once you create the post, just hit Schedule and it's saved.  You can change between Status, Photo/Video and Offer/Event, but I suggest selecting what you want prior to scheduling it to help with efficiency.

So now that you know how to schedule posts, you may be asking why you want to schedule posts.  The answer is simple.  If you are busy with work or attending an event or on vacation, scheduling posts allow the posts to post for you without you having to worry about it.  You should still have some page admin checking things.  But it also allows you to plan some things out in advance and not have to worry about it each week - especially if you do weekly questions or memes.

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.

Wednesday Words: Follow Friday (#ff)

Today's word comes from the Twitterverse and is something that has been a part of Twitter for almost as long as it has been around, but some people aren't sure what it is or how to use it.  The word: Follow Friday or #ff.

#ff is the hashtag used by Twitter to encourage people to follow other Twitter handles and is short for Follow Friday.

Why should you participate in #ff?  Well, first of all it creates good will because you are promoting people and encouraging folks to follow them.  Often times, this creates a bit of good publicity for you for some of those folks will see their handle mentioned and either retweet your post, allowing it to be seen by their followers and possibly resulting in some people following you; or they will favorite the post which will give it exposure and result in the same possibility.

Other times, people who participate in #ff will encourage others who suggest people #ff them, they will in turn tweet to get people to follow you.

Ultimately, #ff is a good way to add followers for yourself and brands/people you like.

Participating in #ff is easy.  All you have to do is when you create your tweet on Friday, start off with #ff then simply list the twitter handles of people you want to promote.

So, for example, if you wanted to promote me, you could do #ff @kayhynn and check out her awesome blog on social media.  Or you could just do #ff @kayhynn @othername @genericname @Twitterhandle etc. till you are out of characters.  You can do multiple #ff too, just space them out a bit.

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: Schedule Posts

One of the simplest things you can do is to schedule posts for upcoming events, sales, or other topics to automatically post on your Facebook page.  It takes a little bit advanced planning, but is well worth it in the long run.

Facebook has a nice system set up for scheduling posts and a recent upgrade to the system made it even easier.  You can tell it what day and time to post the blurb, image, video, or whatever.

If you're more tech savvy, you can schedule posts using Hootsuite to post to multiple social media sites.

If you want to learn how to schedule posts, check out this week's Thursday Tutorial, which will show you how to schedule posts via Facebook - we'll do Hootsuite at a later time.

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