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Automation and Social Media: You Need to Know How to Balance

February 11, 2016 By Carol Stephen 7 Comments

Automation and Social Media: You Need to Know How to Balance

Finding that sweet spot between live interaction and posts can be a tricky business. Some people like to automate everything, and others are purists about live posting. A hybrid approach can save you time and energy, but what is the best ratio of automated to live posts? And how often can you post before your audience starts to roll their eyes and unfollow you? Here’s a look behind the curtain, so you can choose what you want to do.

By the way, you may have missed this post about social media automation.

Being Informative vs Being Annoying

Hardly anyone sets out to be annoying, but sometimes there’s a fine line. Being top of mind is what we’re all aiming for. In an interesting article from Buffer about social media frequency, author Kevan Lee suggests posting 14 times a day on Twitter, or about once per hour. Of course, there’s another ratio to consider: how often to post about yourself. Could you post about your own brand once in five or once in ten times?

Scheduling Tweets

Twitter: Live Engagement & Automation

For Twitter, I started with scheduling nothing, then went to scheduling 10 tweets daily, then 5 scheduled tweets, and now 0. When an interesting topic comes up, it goes into my scheduler so it appears at an optimal time. Besides that and the Tweet Old Posts plugin (every 4 hours), the rest is live engagement. The result has been that my follower count has gone up. My ratio of automated to live tweeting is about 1:3 or 1:4. By the way, here’s an article about why not to buy followers and who has the most fake Twitter followers.

Facebook Analytics

Facebook: Optimizing Through Analytics

Do not believe those articles and infographics about the best times to post. Check your Facebook analytics to find your best times and frequency. Unless you bought followers, you should be able to see when your fans are online. I find the best engagement before 9 am and up to 3 pm. It’s important to use a big picture. Some people like to tag others, but I find those posts annoying. For Facebook, I post about once daily. Hubspot has an interesting article about how often you should post on Facebook. As far as automation goes, I’d recommend it and especially if your audience is up early, for instance, and you’re not. Again, check your analytics.

Pinterest Scheduling

For Pinterest, since about half of all users are in the United States, you might want to limit your pinning to those times when your audience is online. I’ve been pinning roughly 8 times a day: 4 times live pinning and four scheduled pins. The scheduled pins are from my own blog, and go out between 5:30 to about 8 pm. The others go out usually all at once.

What Works for You?

Do you schedule? How much? Leave me a comment! I’d really like to know!

Filed Under: Blog Tagged With: automation, balance, celebrities, Facebook, Pinterest, POTUS, Social Media, Steph Curry, Twitter

How to Avoid Writing Bad Pinterest Headlines and Get Found

February 4, 2016 By Carol Stephen 6 Comments

How to Avoid Writing Bad Pinterest Headlines and Get Found

This is one of those topics I’ve been meaning to write about for a while. Ok, here’s the deal. You need to think about what you write on your Pinterest pins as being searchable headlines. Because they are. Searchable, that is. After you read this post, you’ll have a clearer idea of how to write the text for your pins. I call it headline writing because it’s similar. For how to write other types of headlines, you might like this article, Headline Writing: 10 Reasons It’s a Pain in the Asterisk.

Pinterest is a Huge Search Engine

This is a thing that many marketers don’t get. Pinterest is a search engine. Pinterest does a lot of stuff that Google doesn’t. Here’s a fantastic article about Pinterest Search, by the way. So if you write “this is great,” or “hoo boy” on an otherwise great pin, nobody is going to find that pin. It could theoretically come across someone’s stream, but for the most part, it will be invisible.

How Do You Search?

Think about how you search. Get on Pinterest right now and do a search for “carnitas.” Now look at the guided search results. You can refine your search by adding the words “Mexican,” “Slow Cooker,” “Paleo,” etc. If your recipe includes all those terms already, why not include those words in your description?

The Good, The Bad, and the Ugly

Here are some examples of bad, better, and best descriptions, using the carnitas example from the last paragraph:

Bad Headline: Yummy recipe!
Better Headline: Delicious Pork Carnitas Recipe!
Best: Mexican Slow Cooker Pork Carnitas – Super easy pulled pork recipe and an amazing way to get juicy, mouth-watering results!

You can see from your search on Carnitas that the top search results already have quite a few good search terms, plus a beautiful, vertical image.

Description Length

Don’t make the mistake a lot of people make and include only a character or a single word in your pin’s description. Add information that lets other pinners know what is behind the pin. Is there simply an image? Is there a full article about cruises to the Mediterranean? Some studies show that descriptions should be 200 characters long to be the most repinnable.

Best Words

Some words are better than other words for Pinterest. You may want to use your own keywords, if you know them, in your pinned blog posts. Take a look at Mashable’s article most popular searches, by country, for 2015. Can any of them be applied to what you pin? Your pin might not necessarily go viral, but you could get a few more repins by using better terms, even if those words aren’t about mason jars, cats, or DIY pallet projects!

Make Your Description Flow

Write in a concise, short sentence, if possible. If you must use a phrase, make sure it makes sense. For instance, if you’re pinning something from your own blog, describe what it’s about and why someone would want to click on the link.

Avoid Hashtags

When Pinterest first appeared on the scene, people used hashtags. Sometimes too many hashtags. Now Pinterest is moving away from hashtags, and if your post has too many hashtags, your pin could be labeled as spam.

Pinterest Image Sizes

No post about Pinterest would be complete without a discussion on pin size. You might have a fabulous description with keywords, but a lousy picture. Don’t do that! Here’s a good article on pin sizes. That said, the longer, skinnier pins do the best on Pinterest.

Study Your Own Pins! The pin above has been repinned nearly 7,000 times.

Study Your Own Pins

Which of your own pins has been popular? For instance, the pin above continues to be repinned one year after it was pinned! Can you tell why? Repeat what you did with that pin, if possible!

Filed Under: Blog Tagged With: descriptions, hashtags, headlines, pin length, pin size, Pinterest, search

How to Resist Change: Confessions from a Curmudgeon

January 14, 2016 By Carol Stephen Leave a Comment

How to Resist Change: Confessions of a Curmudgeon

When I was a kid, I looked up to celebrities. There was something magical about their hair, their makeup, and their clothes. I remember being alone, dancing in my room to David Bowie. Sometimes, I would grab a hairbrush (for a mic) and sing along with the Rolling Stones. Sam, our cat, was a willing audience to these outbursts of song and dance. Imagine my dismay when the Beatles broke up. I still can’t believe it’s over!

Breaking Up is Hard to Watch

Miss Piggy and Kermit split up this past year, which was difficult to watch even though they are muppets. What happened to their love? And their ridiculously cute squabbling? Maybe it was never an act at all. And what about Ben Affleck and Jennifer Garner? Is nothing sacred? Well, Batman is sacred, but that’s another story, Ben Affleck!

Change is Intolerable!

When change happens, we should pull the blankets over our heads and go back to sleep. Like the proverbial ostrich with its head in the sand, we can ignore changes and pretend they didn’t happen. It’s easy, right? Sure! So long as you don’t read your friends’ Facebook posts, or see anything trending on Twitter!

Get Off My Lawn!

Even though I don’t have a lawn, I’d like to get one just so I could yell that at kids. They don’t belong on my non-existent lawn! Not that there are tons of kids running around where the lawn would be, still it’s troubling to think that they could be. What were they thinking, those imaginary kids?

Ads, Throttling, and Spam

Facebook is doing more targeted ads and throttling who sees posts. Is that right? No! They should’ve kept it the way it was, where people could see everything. Not only that, but Facebook is terrible for you, says Salon. Twitter has become less about engagement and more about spewing ads. Again, it was way better before. Pinterest now has ads, too, whereas in the beginning it was only about pinning interesting pictures of kittens and flowers.

Deny Everything

One thing you can do to avoid change is to deny it exists. The earth is still flat, Elvis lives, and you don’t have to update that software. Then again, if you procrastinate long enough, you might not have to think about it at all.

Coping with Change

Of course, you could learn to cope with change, as this excellent article by Adam Dachis explains. But if you did that, you wouldn’t be able to gripe about it, would you?

Filed Under: Blog Tagged With: change, Facebook, Pinterest, Social Media, Twitter

Is There Pie in the Cloud?

November 5, 2015 By Carol Stephen 4 Comments

Is There Pie in the Cloud?

It’s so wonderful that Pinterest has free tech talks. The most recent engineering talk that I attended was about about cloud engineering. I always meet interesting people at these tech talks, enjoy the speakers, and the icing on the cake is the free food.

Irony alert: this time there was no cake. Or pie! Which to all God-fearing clowns is dessert. By the way, if you need to hear more about clowns, here’s an article any pie-loving clown would like: Secrets of the Social Media Circus.

So no cake, no pie, and no dessert of any kind? Well, I’ll just have to make do!*

Easy as pie?

First up for her tech talk was Nori Heikkinen , a Google engineer, who spoke briefly about the history of search and Site Reliability Engineering (SRE) and a stint at Healthcare.gov. She did not make her time with Healthcare.gov sound as easy as pie. And speaking of pie, my favorite kind is blackberry. But since it’s November, there is mostly pumpkin and apple pie.

Since I wasn’t allowed to take pictures, here’s an image of some blackbirds instead. This picture is not meant to resemble any living cloud engineers.

Four and Twenty Blackbirds

Another Highlight was Jeremy Carroll who reassured us that the pins we pinners pin are copied in triplicate so we can rest assured that they won’t disappear like hot pies left on the windowsill spotted by famished blackbirds (not his exact words). And did you ever stop to think about how many things have to happen after a pin is pinned? Someone has to make the list of other things you might like related to that first pin. Whew. Thinking about it might make you need a piece of pie. By the way, this Four and Twenty Blackbirds Pie Book sounds heavenly, doesn’t it? But I digress.

Pie Before E, Except After C

Pie before E Except After C

Raj Patel, head of cloud engineering at Pinterest, made one of the best points of all in his talk: A Pin Lives Forever. He discussed the half life of other social media posts, emphasizing that pins live on and on and can be rediscovered days, weeks, or months after they’re pinned.

You can’t spell Pinterest without PIE

Not to rub it in, but Pinterest without the PIE would just be ntrst! Which doesn’t sound very delicious. If you’d like to read about another Pinterest tech talk, here’s my Discover Pinterest: Behind the Scenes.

*I am in no way intending to malign Pinterest: just thought I’d offer them some pie for thought.

Filed Under: Blog Tagged With: cloud engineering, dessert, Jeremy Carroll, Nori Heikkinen, pie, Pinterest, Raj Patel

Social Media in 60 Minutes a Day

October 1, 2015 By Carol Stephen 10 Comments

You’re creating your new app, your new software, or your new restaurant. You’ve been at it for months. Suddenly, you look up. Oh no! You need social media. You have to spread the word! But you have nothing! What to do, what to do? After all, 72% of all internet users are now active on social media (Jeff Bullas).

Look at the Top Traffic Generators

Facebook has 1.44 billion monthly active users, of whom 65% are daily users (VentureBeat)
Twitter has 316 million monthly active users (Twitter)
LinkedIn has 300 million users (Forbes)
Google+ has a few million active users (TechTimes)
Pinterest has 50 million users (Mashable)
YouTube has 1 billion monthly active users (Social Media Hat)
Instagram has 300 million monthly users (CNN Money)

Consider Your Demographic

And please don’t say it’s everyone! Are they Millennials? Women with college degrees? Of a particular ethnicity? This article from Pew Research gives an excellent overview. Then consider where that person shops, eats, and lives. Ask five people who would use your product or service how they use social media. A short survey could help. Don’t forget to consider the visual aspect of your business. That is, is it very visual or not at all visual? If it’s very visual, Pinterest and Instagram are good choices.

Consider age, gender, ethnicity, as well as interests and level of techno-savvytude.

Pick Three

Choose the three that appeal most to your target audience. Let’s say you’ve picked Facebook, Twitter, and Pinterest. The easiest way is to begin with the one you already know or use.

Narrow it to One

Start with the platform you already know to hit the ground running. Say you’re already a Facebook user. Set up a business account. Set up your profile, business hours, and physical address if you have one. Then: 1. Post when your fans are online, 2. Use large, beautiful pictures. 3. Use Facebook’s native scheduler.

Choose Daily Topics

Say you’re going to post five times a week, Monday through Friday. Let’s say you have a restaurant, for instance.

Your daily topics could be:

Monday: DIY food, specials
Tuesday: Behind the scenes with the chefs, nutrition
Wednesday: Wines and beer that goes with food
Thursday: Comfort food
Friday: Why people deserve to have dinner out, Happy Hour

Rinse and Repeat

Once you have Facebook under control (it will take more time in the beginning, naturally), add Twitter to the mix. Then add Pinterest. Now spend 20 minutes per social platform (use the same or similar topics). Schedule some posts and engage with people. Of course, this is greatly simplified. Facebook is not Twitter is not Pinterest. But you get the gist.

Still Stuck?

Hire a social media manager. Here are some things ten of the worst social media managers do. Make sure yours don’t do any of them. Let me know what else you’d like to know in the comments!

Filed Under: Blog Tagged With: Facebook, Instagram, Pinterest, posting, Social Media, time management, Twitter, YouTube

Twitter Trending Topics: Secrets for Using Them

July 16, 2015 By Carol Stephen 10 Comments

Secrets to Using Twitter Trending Topics

When most people think of trending topics, they think of Twitter. But there are trending and popular topics across other platforms, too. If you’re just getting started on Twitter, here are ways to use Twitter as a listening tool. Google, Facebook, Pinterest, and Twitter all have trending and popular pins and articles. There’s too much about trending topics for just one article, so it will be a series.

Catch a Trending Topic

Catch a Wave

Trending topics can be like a wave. You might see one coming and decide to catch it. It’s not the most evergreen of content, but something that’s here one minute and probably gone the next. If that’s part of your strategy, it can lend an air of spontaneity to your posts. If most of your posts are scheduled and carefully crafted, having some spontaneity can add an element of fun.

Real-Life Trending Topics

Real-Life Examples

Above are trending topics, from my own Twitter account. The top one, about Amazon’s Prime Day, could be used by anyone selling something. You could say something about a July sale that isn’t disappointing. If you’re in music, you might want to comment on Neil Young pulling his catalog from streaming service. If your audience enjoys science, you could jump on the Charon (Pluto’s moon) trend. For someone in the social media arena, Kim Kardashian’s buying likes could be a major failure, and a good topic of conversation.

If Your Audience Enjoys Science, You Could Tweet about Charon

Find a Trend for Your Audience

You might not want to pick just any trend to post–decide based upon what your audience would like to see. For instance, I tweet about startups, leadership, and social media, so I’d want to make sure that those were the trending topics I posted. If you post about cars, look for trending topics around automobiles, tires, car safety, etc., which are fairly common.

Twitter’s New Detailed Trending Topics

As outlined in the Wall Street Journal, Twitter has recently added descriptions under its trending topics to give them some context. Previously, Twitter had a Discover tab (missed dearly by some of us old-time Twitter fans). Supposedly, these new and improved trending topics will add context to appeal to Twitter newbies. For anyone, having some context could be useful.

Check The Number of Tweets About a Trending Topic

You can also see how many tweets there are about a trending topic, although I wouldn’t base my decision to jump on a trending topic wave based solely on the number of tweets. For instance, the #GrowingUpUgly hashtag would probably not appeal to my audience, despite its 104 thousand tweets.

Local Trending Topics Can Be Useful

Change the Trending Topic to a Nearby City

The trending topics can be changed to another city. For instance, since I’m in the San Francisco Bay Area, I could switch from tailored topics to San Francisco to see what’s different. Just click at the top left (on desktop) to switch back and forth.

How Do You Use Trending Topics?

Do you pay attention to them at all? Or just ignore them? Leave me a comment!

Filed Under: Blog Tagged With: audience, Facebook, Google, local search, Pinterest, tailored trends, trending topics, Twitter

10 Arguments for a Pinterest Business Account

July 9, 2015 By Carol Stephen 2 Comments

10 Arguments for a Pinterest Business Account

You may have a personal Pinterest account, that you got when Pinterest first arrived on the scene in 2010 (remember when it was by invitation only?). And you’ve loved some of Pinterest’s changes, such as the move from search to guided discovery. Now that some of your friends have business accounts, why don’t you make the leap, too? If you’re undecided about getting a business account, here are some reasons you need to get off that fence.

The Red Check Mark Gives Legitimacy to Your Business Account

Red Check Mark

For now, as outlined by Business Outsider, Pinterest needs to come to you if you want the red checkmark. It’s a good way to verify whether you’re following a real celebrity or fake. However, checkmark or not, you can still drive traffic to your site. Google takes Pinterest seriously.

Pins and Boards Are Now Being Indexed By Google

Google Search

With both pins and boards now being indexed by Google, it makes sense to have a business account so that you can pin your own content and drive traffic to your website. For instance, above is a Google image search I did on a pin. Pins dominate the search results on Google.

Want to learn more about your audience and your top pins?

Analytics

Want to learn more about your audience, your top pins, and your all-time most popular pin? Sure you do! To get started, login to your business account and check your analytics. As you can see from the above screenshot, I have a lot of views, but views on my website are a spot that could use an upgrade. I’ll be writing more about Pinterest analytics in the future, so keep your eyes open.

A Pinterest Business Account Helps to Increase Your Brand’s Legitimacy

Legitimacy

For any brand, having a business account lends an air of legitimacy. Having a business account adds to your credibility. It’s surprising when a business doesn’t even bother to upload a logo or photo before starting to follow many, many accounts. And by the way, here’s a list of Five Things You’re Doing Wrong on Pinterest and How to Fix Them.

A Business Account Draws More of the Right Kind of Followers

Followers

Just like a business account on Twitter, Facebook, or anywhere else, a business account will draw more of the right kind of followers. If you haven’t taken the time to set up your account yet, here are some first steps you can take.

Rich Pins, Like Sponsored Pins, Can Increase Your Traffic and Profits

More Business

With a business account, you can check what your ideal client is pinning, and then take steps to create pins that match those pins and that will be interesting to them. Besides, you don’t want to miss out on rich pins, sponsored pins or the upcoming buyable pins, do you?

Pinterest Drives Sales to Shopping Networks, Like Etsy and Shopify

Increased Sales

With all the ammunition you’ve gathered from your analytics, you’ll surely have more sales. You should know more about your ideal client and what interests them. Especially in a retail environment, sales can come directly from Pinterest. Pinterest users spend more time on the site, and tend to buy from sites like Etsy and Shopify while there.

A Business Accounts Helps People Recognize Your Brand

Brand Recognition

People will recognize your brand and image if they see you consistently pinning pins that match your brand. You won’t be “out of sight and out of mind” when your pins remind people of your brand.

Know Where the Market is Headed with a Pinterest Business Account , Image: ©PBS Works

Barometer

By analyzing the popularity of your pins, you can get an idea of where the market is headed. For instance, you could pin the same pin with a different image to different boards, altering the time you pin, in order to see which draws more attention. The marketplace’s taste fluctuates as quickly as the weather; what you will find within Pinterest’s business analytics is a barometer that helps you maneuver through the market trends.

Who Doesn’t Need More Brand Loyalty? Image Credit: ©Julio Palacios

Brand Loyalty

According to Access Development, “the most important driver of brand loyalty for millennials is a great product at 77%, followed closely by brand recognition and trust at 69% (NewsCred)”. A Pinterest business account can help you to retain those loyal customers, whether they’re millennials or not.

Convinced?

Will you take the plunge and get your brand a business account now? I’d love to know if you do. Leave the word “Done!” in the comments if you do!

Filed Under: Blog Tagged With: Business, buyable pins, discovery, pins, Pinterest, search, sponsored pins

Seven Deadly Sins of Social Media

June 25, 2015 By Carol Stephen 8 Comments

Seven Deadly Sins of Social Media

You’ve probably heard of the seven deadly sins, or maybe even grew up having to recite them from memory. But did you ever associate them with social media? Maybe you did on one of those long, sleepless nights. Here then are the seven dead sins for social media.

Lust Equals Popularity

Have you ever known someone who needed “social proof” (also known as followers)? If you end up buying followers, whether on Twitter, Facebook, or Pinterest, you could permanently hurt your reputation or throw off your analytics. People can tell if you’ve bought those followers, so there’s the embarrassment factor. And when you try to figure out when your real followers are online, all those fake followers in Estonia will throw off your numbers. No offense to any Estonians!

Sloths Refuse to Check Into Their Accounts

Sloth or Laziness

While adorable in their slowness, sloths enjoy hanging out in hammocks, eating fruit, and refusing to check into their accounts. A sloth would rather chill than post or comment or share. By the way, completely automating your social media accounts so the same post appears in multiple places without any change is definitely slothful.

It’s easy to act out when you can’t see who’s on the other end of that post

Wrath or Anger

It’s so easy to strike out at people when you’re sitting in your comfy computer chair, oversharing on Twitter or Facebook, isn’t it? And remembering that there’s an actual person who has to read your comments is tough to do sometimes. But realize that there’s someone just like you sitting on the receiving end before sending a flamer.

Don’t Let Greed Become One of Your Marketing Tools

Greed Is Greed

Similar to social media lust, greed would have you buying followers, when instead the focus should be on creating good content, sharing, and reaching out to others in your social media sphere. If greed is one of your marketing tools, as the above quote from Jon Foreman says, we lose part of our humanity. And become more like Gordon Gecko.

Greed Asks You To Buy Followers

Envy

Keeping up with the Joneses (or even the other moose) never works well. Instead of envying what someone else has done, why not measure yourself against yourself?

Keeping up with the other moose never works

Gluttony

On social media, gluttony is that inability to get offline. There’s always one more tweet to send, one more post to comment on, or one more meme to see. Gluttony results in burnout. Keeping balance can be difficult when there is so much information available. And being focused on quality over quantity is just as difficult.

Pride or Vanity

Pride is what we feel when others comment on our beautiful photos, or our huge numbers of followers. When one of our posts go “viral” online our ego becomes enormous, and threatens to pop like a giant balloon. Pride has been called “the mother of all sins.” In social media terms, if you are always asking others to share your tweets because you think they’re so wonderful, follow you everywhere before anyone knows you, or ask for favors ceaselessly, then pride has taken hold.

Attention Feeds Our Pride

Is There An Eighth Sin?

Surely I must’ve missed one or two. Did I?

Filed Under: Blog Tagged With: buying followers, envy, Facebook, gluttony, greed, lust, Pinterest, pride, seven deadly sins, sloth, Social Media, Twitter, wrath

Twitter Improvements We’d Like to See*

June 18, 2015 By Carol Stephen 6 Comments

Twitter Improvements We’d Like to See*

Twitter has been around since 2006, and since then has improved its interface and its service. With over 300 million active users, you’d think that for that next round of improvements, a little crowdsourcing would be in order. Or maybe they could just ask me. Here, then, are a few unsolicited improvements. Here is Twitter’s wiki, in case you’d like to read about its history.

*And by “we,” I mean “I.”

How about a better chat solution for Twitter?

Blocking

You can already easily block users who bother you on Twitter with a couple of clicks of your mouse. What I’m referring to are annoying types of messages, such as people who only tweet about chihuahuas during #ChihuahuaChat. Perhaps, as Adam Khan suggests (see below), a better chat solution that doesn’t clog up users’ streams. Adam’s other suggestions are fab, too.

https://twitter.com/Khanoisseur/status/610460043700531200

Opt-in DMs

Recently, Twitter decided in its infinite wisdom that LONGER direct messages would be a good idea. Excuse me, did anyone ask me? No. How about this: if I like you, I can turn on direct messages? This would save us all the trouble of unfollowing those who decide that within 10 seconds of following you I’d want to follow you on Facebook, LinkedIn, plus buy your friendship bracelets on Etsy. Because come on! DMs are horrible enough already without making them longer. By the way, if you’re a newbie, here are my Twitter: Top Ten Terms and Power Tips.

"Tweets with #images receive 18% more clicks, 89% more favorites and 150% more retweets."http://t.co/4RiCJwiL2O pic.twitter.com/uJ5cbad9Od

— HubSpot (@HubSpot) June 10, 2015

Easier Image Sharing

Do you know how long it took to figure out how to share an image on Twitter? And then to schedule those tweets with images? Not so straightforward. Of course, tweets with images or video get shared much more, so everyone has to learn how to do this.

Fix the Number One Mistake Everyone Makes on Twitter

Yes, we all feel special because we know that we have to put a “.” or a quotation mark in front of that “@” for it to be seen. But now that we feel special, how about fixing it, Twitter? Wouldn’t that make Twitter a tiny bit more accessible? Because people really don’t get this! Even seasoned users are surprised by this, as Gary Vee explains in his Slideshare, above.

#Discover tab finally goes from @twitter for iPad too. Perhaps, the biggest loss to content discovery for me after Google Reader was killed.

— Prem Piyush Goyal (@prempiyush) May 6, 2015

The Discover Tab

Bring it back, Twitter. It was a great way to discover content! The replacements (recaps and MagicRecs) are dumb.

Twitter Could Take a Cue from Pinterest

Take a Cue from Pinterest

In general, how about taking a cue from Pinterest? Here’s a look behind the scenes at Pinterest, by the way. Nearly every day I log into Pinterest and there’s something cool, such as what’s trending on search (see above), promoted pins, or the new “buy it now” button. And although I love Twitter, I’d like to see more innovation, or at the very least something that makes me laugh out loud.

How About “Twitter Succeeds” as the next trending topic?

Got an Upgrade for Twitter?

I’m a huge fan of twitter. And I hope that you are, too. If you have an improvement or upgrade, I’d love to hear from you! Leave me a comment.

Filed Under: Blog Tagged With: blocking, Discover Tab, DMs, improvements, number one mistake on Twitter, Pinterest, Tweets, Twitter

Ten of the Worst Social Media Managers

May 21, 2015 By Carol Stephen 23 Comments

Ten of the Worst Social Media Managers

Last week, you might have read my post about Finding Your Next Social Media Manager. If you search Google to find a good Social Media Manager (“SMM”), you’ll find all kinds of advice. However, bad advice is rare! Just kidding.

Here, then, are ten types of terrible social media managers. These people put in the extra work to be really, really bad. And if that’s not enough for you, here are some Bad Social Media Manager Secrets.

Does your candidate send Twitter DMs like this one?

The Direct Message Twitter SMM

The most terrible SMMs send direct messages on Twitter like “Follow us on Facebook!” or “Buy my book!” for no reason. And a link. But the very best of the worst? Those ask you to connect in two places, along with cute emoji, before you’ve even read one of their tweets! Now that’s going the extra mile!

Does Your New Social Media Manager Say She’s an Expert?

The One Pin Per Board Pinner

This SMM is on Pinterest and has boards with one or two pins each. And they should call themselves a Social Media Expert. After all, since it’s on the Internet it must be true!

The “Social Proof” SMM Buys Followers

The “Social Proof” SMM Who Buys Followers

Having “social proof” is a good thing, right? And followers are so cheap! For $59, you can get thousands of them. Never mind that they’re bots from Indonesia, thousands of miles away from your local brick-and-mortar business. Your new SMM prospect should recommend that you buy followers.

Does your SMM Post from Facebook to Twitter?

The “One Size Fits All” SMM

Your new friend should never change their tone of voice, and should use the same post on Twitter, Facebook, Pinterest, LinkedIn, whatever. If the post is too long for one platform, it can break right in the middle of the sentence. As long as lots of people see your posts that’s all that matters.

The UnSocial Social Manager

Your new BFF should never engage with anyone. They can ignore comments, shares, retweets and save themselves a lot of time. There are only so many hours in the day, after all! If you want to know why brands are still using broadcasting in social media, Emma Pauw can tell you why.

The Drunk Poster Sometimes Deletes Posts the Next Day

The Drunk Poster

Drinking and posting is the hallmark of a very successful bad SMM. And then deleting all the bad posts and arguments the next day? Even better.

Is Your SMM a Debbie Downer?

Debbie or Danny Downer

Your SMM should be heard muttering at all hours that “nothing will ever work.” Things always go from bad to worse, people can’t be trusted, and Murphy’s Law always prevails.

The Overposter

This person posts 60 posts in the space of five minutes, then nothing for two days. What’s wrong with that, you might ask?

Is Your SMM Inflexible?

The Inflexible SMM

Why would your SMM ever change his or her strategy on social media? Just because Facebook reduced its reach, or Pinterest added promoted pins, or tweets got indexed by Google? Pffft. No reason!

Does your SMM Use Klod to Measure Influence?

The Klod Watcher SMM

Your new bestie should always watch their influence ranking on sites like Klod (not its real name). That’s what real SMMs do, don’t they?

Your Turn!

What did I leave out? Let me know in the comments! Thanks!

Filed Under: Blog Tagged With: bad social media manager, broadcasting, drunk poster, drunk posting, Engagement, expert, Facebook, fail, failure, Google, inflexibility, Pinterest, SMM, Social Media, social media manager, Twitter, unsocial