Category: How to

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Politicians Idiot Guide To Twitter

idiot guide to Twitter8 years into the making, British members of parliaments were just issued an “idiot guide to Twitter” or, how to tweet without how to avoid being boring, pompous or sued.

The “idiot guide to Twitter” guide contains pearls of wisdom… or just some common sense advice to a real time communication tool like Twitter that can be extended to any social media platform.

  • Always tell the truth
  • Do not tweet while drunk
  • Only tweet when  ‘when you have something interesting or worthwhile to say’
  • Adopt a ’60-second rule’ before posting anything online, composing a message but then waiting ‘one minute before pressing the tweet button’.
  • Tweet about ‘almost anything’, including a mix constituency work, parliamentary activity and their personal life.
  • Tweet about things normal people are interested in like music, sport, films and TV. ‘But make it genuine, don’t fake an interest in your local football team or Coronation Street if that’s not your thing.’
  • It isn’t good practice to constantly retweet tweets that praise you, or even to sarcastically retweet tweets that criticise you. It is too aggrandising and pompous.’
  • Instead, favourite every tweet where someone says something nice or positive about you
  • Tweet yourself and be yourself, your team can help you, but can’t do it for you
  • Talk less than you listen
  • Tools make it easier and more effective
  • Tweets should never be deleted
  • Hashtags improve engagement, but should be used sparingly
  • Lists save you time
  • Your views aren’t your own
  • Photos and video make it more interesting

The “idiot guide to Twitter” was produced for Parliament by the Chartered Institute of Public Relations and officials stated that it had not cost any money to the tax payer

What do you think…  chime in in the comment section

 

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Facebook Algorithm Likes and Dislikes

Facebook algorithm likes and dislikesFacebook may not have a dislike button but its algorithm, so to speak, does and knowing what Facebook algorithm likes and dislikes greatly influences whether your post will show on your followers wall or not.

Knowing how it works, what it likes or dislikes will go a long way to get your post seen by your audience and improve your ROI.

So, here we go, Facebook algorithm likes and dislikes:

What Facebook algorithm loves:

  • Posts with lots of comments
  • Posts with lots of likes
  • Post types with photos videos (posted to Facebook instead of linked) or status update
  • Posts that reference a trending topic but don’t abuse it
  • Posts that receive a high volume of likes, comments, or shares in a short time
  • Posts with links, there is a way Facebook prefers it done
  • Videos uploaded to Facebook (instead of just linked) with a large number of views or long viewing time
  • Posts that tag other pages
  • Posts that your friends like or comment on
  • Posts from pages that have a lot of interactions
  • Post types with a lot of interactions
  • Posts from pages that have completed profile information (about tab)
  • Posts from pages whose fan base overlaps with the fan base  of recognized quality pages
  • Original images and videos not previously referenced in the Open Graph
  • Original Links

What Facebook algorithm dislike:

  • Clickbait
  • Frequently circulated content and repeated posts (duplicate content)
  • Like-baiting now banned by Facebook
  • Posts that include spam links
  • Text-only status updates from pages (no photos or graphics)
  • Posts that are frequently hidden or reported (a sign of low quality)
  • Posts that contain the words “like, comment, or share”
  • Posts with unusual engagement patterns or schemes (a like-baiting signal)
  • Posts that are classified as memes by Facebook (memes are images withf overlayed text)
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Stopping Spam in LinkedIn Discussion Groups

Stopping Spam in LinkedIn Discussion GroupsWe all know spam has become a plague in LinkedIn discussion groups and the big challenge for most owners is stopping spam in LinkedIn discussion groups.

I a previous post, I showed how to spot fake LinkedIn profiles, usually created for the sole purpose of spamming.  Spotting them and banning them is one of the steps you can take to help manage the problem.  LinkedIn gives us other tools to help us and if you know them and know how to use them, you can help make the group discussion a much better experience for your users and stem the flow of users leaving because of the spam. Continue reading “Stopping Spam in LinkedIn Discussion Groups”

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Six Ways To Detect Fake LinkedIn Profiles

How_to_detect_a_fake_LinkedIn_profileBefore we look at the six ways to detect fake LinkedIn profiles, it’s important to understand the driving force behind these profiles and the main reason is spamming.

Spamming has been around for a long time, first via email and as blogs started proliferating, spammers started polluting blogs, it was only a question of time before they  started polluting social media platforms

Coming back to LinkedIn, two of the best way to get maximum exposure on LinkedIn are growing your network or participating in large, active discussion groups.  Both imply creating a profile and since spammers learn early on that to effectively spam, they needed many identities, in case they were filtered out.

Over the past few years, we have seen a rapid increase in the number of fake profiles created by spammers either joining discussion groups or asking to join users networks, they usually target large active discussion groups and/or users with large networks, especially LIONs (LinkedIn Open Networkers) who are not too selective in growing their network and allow spammers to develop their network based on first and second degree connections.

Of course, there are a number of ways to stop them, the first one is to be selective in who you accept in your network, the second is for group owners to be more proactive in monitoring who joins their groups and to not fall into the temptation to grow the size of their group at the expense of the quality of the discussion. Continue reading “Six Ways To Detect Fake LinkedIn Profiles”

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How To Report Fake or Misleading LinkedIn Profiles

How to report fake or misleading LinkedIn profiles has become an increasingly difficult endeavor.

How To Report Fake or Misleading LinkedIn ProfilesIn a previous post, I wrote about how pervasive fake profiles are on LinkedIn and how difficult LinkedIn makes it to report them, for good reasons, they stopped caring a long time ago about the quality of user experience to focus on growing user numbers ( regardless of legitimacy) prior to their IPO

Another issue, when you created and think you “own” a business or brand page, is controlling who shows up as an employee on your page and that can have implications when it comes to your brand and/or reputation.  It turns out you do not control that information.

In any case, finding a way to contact what LinkedIn calls “customer service” has become a feat in itself, but the response is probably as frustrating as trying to contact them.

There is however an easier way to report a fake profile, if you look in the right place but you have to dig into the user’s profile in places you would not think about right off the bat, here are the steps Continue reading “How To Report Fake or Misleading LinkedIn Profiles”

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How To Stop Facebook to AutoPlay Videos On IPhone

How can I stop Facebook to autoplay videos and using all my data plan?

You may have noticed that recently Facebook started auto playing videos.  It’s annoying at best when you are on your computer or tablet at home, it can get downright expensive when viewed on your mobile phone, especially if you have a limited data plan.

Videos are a huge drain on your data plan and could easily put you over your limit and incurring additional and substantial costs

You cannot stop Facebook to autoplay videos but on your IPhone you can tell Facebook to only auto-play only when you are connected to a WiFi network and stop draining your data plan

On your IPhone:

  1. go to “Settings”  Stop Facebook to autoplay
  2. scroll down to Facebook Stop Facebook to autoplay
  3. click on Facebook
  4. click on settings Stop Facebook to autoplay
  5. push the slider “Auto-play on Wifi only”  Stop Facebook to autoplayShare with your friends
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How to Preserve Your Privacy on Facebook

In light of the changes Facebook recently sneaked in privacy settings, it is important for users to adapt and understand how you can still preserve your privacy on Facebook, at least some if not most of it.

If you elected to keep your profile private and out of the Facebook search feature, well no more.  Now anybody can find your profile if you have one of Facebook.

The change was announced in a Facebook blog post (see bellow) by the company “Chief Privacy Officer”???  Michael Richter.  Yes, they do have a CPO although it seems privacy is really a second thought when it comes to Facebook and some other social media platforms.

“The (previous)setting also made Facebook’s search feature feel broken at times. For example, people told us that they found it confusing when they tried looking for someone who they knew personally and couldn’t find them in search results, or when two people were in a Facebook Group and then couldn’t find each other through search

Although I can see the second point, the first point was what keeping a profile “private” was about.

Now mind you, let’s say only 5% of Facebook 1.2B users opted for that privacy setting, that’s 60 million users, roughly the population of a country like France.

If you elected to keep your profile out of searches, well, it’s not going to happen but there is a lot you can do, it’s going to take some work though.

The first thing you need to do is segment your “friends” list. Segmenting is another word for creating groups of friends (called “Lists” on Facebook) based on their interests in order to show them what they will be interested in.

If you don’t have hundreds, that will be really quick, otherwise it will be time consuming but well worth your time if you value your privacy.  And if your profile was set as private I assume you do.  Follow these quick steps Continue reading “How to Preserve Your Privacy on Facebook”

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Edit Facebook Posts… New Feature

Sometime ago Facebook added a feature allowing users to edit their comments and the general reaction was how about letting users edit Facebook posts?

It’s happened to all of us, we write a Facebook post, publish it and… darn… there is a typo we did not catch and darn again, we already collected a few likes, shares and comments, some of which mocked our mistake.

What could we do, write a “Oops” comment or delete the post, rewrite it, proofread carefully this time and post it, all the while losing all the likes, shares and comments.  One of the reasons was that editing could potentially change the meaning of the post and mislead readers, commentators and sharers and that could lead to excesses.

No more, Facebook is deploying a new feature allowing us to edit and correct the mistakes

To edit a Facebook post: Continue reading “Edit Facebook Posts… New Feature”

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