7 types of social media fans and making the most of them [Infographic]

Social media fans
Chances are, you’ve come across one of these social media fans at some point. It could be someone you know, your friend, a fan on your Facebook Page, or even you!

Reachlocal recently published the following infographic on the different types of social media fans that you’ll find online.

According to Reachlocal, there are the seven types of fans that you’ll likely encounter.

The seven most popular types of social media fans are:

  • The quiet follower
  • The casual listener
  • The deal seeker
  • The unhappy customer
  • The ranter
  • The cheerleader
  • The loyal fan

To find out which kind of social media fan you are, check out the infographic below.

7 types of social media fans Continue reading 7 types of social media fans and making the most of them [Infographic]

Modern marketing with the modern marketer [Infographic]

Modern marketing infographic

In just a few short years, marketing has changed. In fact, we’re now looking at modern marketing as being the new standard.

This means that marketers aren’t just coming up with ideas and passing them off to a designer to make those ideas come to life.

Modern marketing now blends the role of the marketer with the role of the creative team.

This means you essentially have a jack-of-all-trades on your team – someone who is creative, understands social media, but also has the skills to be able to comprehend, track, and measure the results of their efforts as well.

While marketing used to be an area that most business owners didn’t understand or didn’t see value in spending money on. Today, with the rise of digital media, marketing has moved to the forefront. In fact, it’s now one of the first things a business thinks about when creating a product.

This is because while marketing used to mean spending lots of money to get the word out about a product, modern marketing has provided a new means of getting the word out – all while tightening the pursestrings.

So what skills does a modern marketer need to succeed?

  • Ability to write
  • Capable of creating visual content
  • Social media skills
  • Capable of crafting compelling email marketing campaigns
  • Expert at budgeting
  • Master performance tracker
  • Trendspotting

In addition to having the skills mentioned above, the modern marketer also needs to know the 10 commandment of modern marketing so that they can learn what makes a good marketer and what makes a bad marketer.

Learn more about the skills needed in modern marketing with this infographic from Pardot, a marketing and analytics company.

Modern marketing – part artist, part scientist

Continue reading Modern marketing with the modern marketer [Infographic]

5 ways to add Vine videos to a blog post

Embed Vine videos

No doubt, Vine is an extremely powerful tool to help you create great content for your social media channels. But what about using Vine videos in your blog posts?

Once you’ve created your Vine masterpiece, you’re not just limited to sharing it with the Vine community. In fact, you can take it a step further and include Vine videos on your blog.

Note: This should work on WordPress (self-hosted and WordPress.com sites), Blogger, Tumblr, even on a Facebook landing page.

5 ways to add Vine videos to a blog post

Continue reading 5 ways to add Vine videos to a blog post

Video on Instagram – the definitive users guide

Video on Instagram

Today, Facebook announced “video on Instagram.” While this wasn’t exactly a surprise to most people (it has already been leaked a few weeks ago), it is a surprise because of how similar, yet different Instagram is when you compare it to the video-sharing app, Vine.

Features of video on Instagram

Instagram’s foray into video now gives users the following capabilities within the Instagram app.

How to shoot video on Instagram

Shooting video on Instagram

Continue reading Video on Instagram – the definitive users guide

Why do people unfriend on Facebook? [Infographic]

Why unfriend on Facebook?

You’ve gone through the trouble of vetting someone on Facebook, approved their friend request, and seen their updates in your news feed. So why do people unfriend on Facebook?

To friend or unfriend on Facebook?

While 82% of people add someone as a friend on Facebook because they know them in real life (tweet this), just because you know someone doesn’t mean you want to be friends with them on Facebook.

For example, I could know someone in real life, but once I’ve connected with them on Facebook, I might learn new things about them that I don’t particularly like. This can include political views, their posting strategy (sharing too many Internet memes or chain letter content), or simply because they post content that doesn’t add any value to my current relationship with them.

In this situation, if you find that someone’s habits on Facebook are unbecoming, it might be time to start to unfriend them.

Why people unfriend on Facebook Continue reading Why do people unfriend on Facebook? [Infographic]

Turning your social media obsession into your job [Infographic]

Social media obsession

Hi, my name is Christian Karasiewicz and I have a social media obsession. How many of you often find yourself saying the same thing? It’s ok to admit it.

With the growth in social media over the past few years, we are spending a lot more of our time online or at least thinking about what we’re going to post next.

Couple that with the fact that we’re always connected to our mobile devices – or at least constantly being reminded with each new notification that comes through and it is becoming increasingly difficult to escape social media.

Some people see this as a bad thing because it keeps us from interacting with people in-person. I see this social media obsession as a good thing though.

The social media obsession

Having an obsession with social media isn’t necessarily a bad thing. While it may take you away from your normal life, many businesses need help with their social media. That’s where having a social media obsession can pay off big-time.

In fact, here are a few helpful stats to help you turn your passion with social media into a long-term career.

  • 30% of brands are not using social media to its fullest because they lack employees with the proper skills.
  • 85% of businesses with a dedicated social media platform reported an increase in their market exposure
  • 56% of customer tweets to companies are being ignored

Tips on turning your social media obsession into a long-term career Continue reading Turning your social media obsession into your job [Infographic]

Messaging & how to make it stick [Infographic]

Make it stick - messaging

If you’re someone who gives a lot of presentations, it is important to get your message across and make it stick with your audience. Not only does this help your presentation leave a lasting impression with your audience, but it can have an even greater impact on future presentations as well.

Why make your message stick with your audience?

When you’re giving a presentation, you want to keep your audience interested. Good presentations often have a clear, strong message and are able to make it stick with their audience.

This means their audience will leave their having learned something valuable.

Unfortunately, this doesn’t always happen though. For every good presentation, there are lots more bad presentations.

For me, there’s nothing like sitting through a boring presentation where the presenter just reads through the slides or worse off, they have too many points on each slide. Not only is this unattractive, but it’s confusing to the audience. 

While the presenter is able to deliver their message, they are not able to make it stick. This means they did not accomplish the goal of their presentations, which should be to inform and educate their audience with a clear message.

Did you make it stick?

You’ll know that your presentation was successful when your audience does the following:

  • Tell their friends and colleagues
  • Shares your name on their social media channels
  • References you in their own presentations
  • Blogs about you on their website

How to make it stick when giving a presentation?

The team over at Slideshop, a website that creates and sells powerpoint templates, put together this infographic about messaging and how to make it stick with your audience when you are giving a presentation. 

Personally, my favorite piece of advice is to limit the number of bulleted items you include on each slide. Often times, I comes across presentations that try to cram too much information onto one slide. There’s only so much information the mind can absorb at one time.

Look these over and let me know if you agree with these tips on how to make it stick with your audience.

10 techniques on how to make your message memorable and make it stick

Continue reading Messaging & how to make it stick [Infographic]

How to delete Facebook recommendations [video]

Delete Facebook recommendations

The Facebook recommendations box can be a valuable tool for your Facebook Page. What do you do when you receive Facebook recommendations that are negative or untrue?

Facebook recommendations – the good and the bad

Unfortunately, not every review your business receives on your Facebook Page is always going to be positive.

Reputation management is extremely important for every business, even when we’re talking about Facebook. When you are in this situation and have Facebook recommendations like this, what can you do to handle them?

Handling Facebook recommendations

The positive Facebook recommendation

If you receive a positive recommendation on your Facebook Page, since you cannot respond directly to that person, try seeking them out through their website, Facebook profile, or even their Twitter account, and thank them for the review. Hopefully you’ll make new friends and potentially create new opportunities for your business.

The negative (but true) Facebook recommendation

If someone has used your services and has left an unfavorable review about your business, don’t get mad because you don’t like what they had to say. Instead, you should try to make it a point to fix that aspect of your business. It could be a customer service issue or they simply received a bad product. The best thing you can do is not to delete this Facebook recommendation. Instead, work to resolve it.

This will go a long way to help your business improve and get better.

The negative (and entirely untrue) Facebook recommendation

In some cases, people will leave a recommendation on your Facebook Page that isn’t true. In fact, they may not have even used your services (ridiculous).

If you find yourself in this situation, it’s time to delete these types of Facebook recommendations from your Facebook Page.

How to delete recommendations from the Facebook recommendations box?

Continue reading How to delete Facebook recommendations

The Twitter media grid – quickly access tweeted photos and videos

Twitter media grid

Did you know, Twitter has its very own grid for storing your media. It’s called the Twitter media grid.

What is the Twitter media grid?

The Twitter media grid is a page on Twitter where you can quickly access any photos or videos that you’ve tweeted out. This is a very helpful tool and definitely a link that you should bookmark if you’re someone who shares a lot of photos and videos and want to be able to access this information quickly.

Twitter media grid vs Twitter archives

For those of you thinking of downloading your Twitter archive to find your tweets with photos or videos, while this is another way to access past tweets, it’s not as efficient.

While you can download your Twitter archive, the Twitter media grid can help you save time having to comb through past tweets.

If you know that you’re looking for a photo or video that you tweeted out, instead of using your Twitter archive, you can quickly access the Twitter media grid to find what you’re looking for.

And because the Twitter media grid is visual, you can easily scroll through and see the content you’re looking for whereas your Twitter archive would require you to search for the specific terms you’re looking for.

As your tweet volume grows, this may mean you’ll have to go through tens of thousands of tweets. Not exactly an efficient use of time.

How to use the Twitter media grid Continue reading The Twitter media grid – quickly access tweeted photos and videos

How to turn off retweets on Twitter & should you?

How to turn off retweets on Twitter

Earlier this week, the question was raised on if you should turn off retweets on Twitter and if this was common practice among other Twitter users.

If you’re unfamiliar with this feature and are scratching your head on why someone would want to turn off retweets on Twitter in the first place, you’re not alone.

Most users don’t even know this feature exists, so why would they want to turn off retweets?

The overcrowded Twitter stream

If your Twitter stream has gotten overrun with too many retweets from specific followers, you can simply reduce the number of retweets that you’re seeing in your stream just by turning off retweets.

When you turn retweets off on Twitter, one thing to remember, you’re not turning off all of the retweets that you see in your Twitter stream. What you’re doing is turning off retweets for specific users that you follow.

This means that in your Twitter stream, you’ll still see all of the normal tweets from a specific user, just not the ones that they retweet from others.

Should I turn off retweets on Twitter?

One thing that puzzled me about turning off retweets is that it doesn’t make a whole lot of sense to begin with. Why would someone want to turn off their retweets?

Most sites on the web are teaching you different ways to get more retweets. There’s even the Twitter list feature, which was recently expanded to allow you to create 1,000 Twitter lists with 5,000 members in each.

You can also create a Twitter retweet link to include in your content to encourage people to retweet and share it more!

So should you turn off retweets on Twitter?

Personally, I don’t see the point of turning off retweets. Sure, my Twitter stream may be full of retweets, but that’s a good thing, because normally, that’s how I discover new people to follow.

To discover or not to discover, that is the question

When you go to turn off retweets on Twitter, remember, there’s no magic switch to automatically turn off retweets for specific users. You actually have to go to each profile and turn off retweets for that user.

To me, that seems like a waste of time. I could avoid all of this by creating a Twitter list for people that retweet too much (make sure you make it private so they don’t see the name of the list) and consume my Twitter stream this way.

One other thing about turning off retweets is that you are turning off the discovery side of Twitter.

Retweets are a great way to learn about new content, but also to find new people on Twitter that your followers follow, but you don’t. This means you’re going to need to spend more time finding new users to follow.

Overall, it seems like you’ll need to also find more time in your day if you choose to go this route and turn off retweets.

I like to give the following example when talking about turning off retweets.

Turning off retweets on Twitter is like turning off likes, comments and shares on Facebook. (tweet this).

How to turn off retweets on Twitter

If you’re still not convinced and want to turn off retweets on Twitter, here’s how.

1. Sign in to Twitter

2. Visit a Twitter users profile who you want to turn off retweets for

3. Click the dropdown menu next to the “follow” button. Select “turn off retweets”

How to turn off retweets on Twitter

Question: Do you find your Twitter stream overcrowded with too many retweets and would you consider spending the time to go through your hundreds or even thousands of followers to turn off retweets for each? Let me know how you feel about turning off retweets by leaving a comment below.