Social Media Tips and How-To's for Beginners

During a recent update, Facebook added a little security control for your wall posts. You could easily have missed it, but it’s the little lock icon just to the left of the Share button. This control lets you decide on a case by case basis who can see your post. For instance, you might want to let only your friends see personal information about you, but you could want to let Friends of Friends see your latest blog post (to drive additional traffic). This tool gives you the option.

Follow these steps:

1. Enter your update and add a link or other media as needed.
2. Click the lock icon and make a choice.

Your choices are defined below:

• Everyone: Lets all of Facebook see it. You probably only want to use this on rare occasions to share your post with the entire Facebook community.
• Friends of Friends: This lets your whole Friends list and their friends see your post. You could use this choice when you are publicizing something you want a lot of people to see.
• Only Friends: This is the default choice and lets your entire list of friends of see it. If you have set up separate groups of friends, you can confine it to a particular group by using the Customize choice (defined below). Otherwise it goes to your entire list of friends.
• Customize: This lets you confine who can see this post to individuals or groups you have set up. You may want to do this if you are posting about something that is only relevant to a certain group of your Facebook friends, but you don’t want others to see.

Click Share and that’s it. Your post will only be seen by those people you select.

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I have to be honest, this is driving me crazy. I totally get how novice bloggers and social media neo-phytes are missing the boat here, but big name bloggers are messing it up too!

If you look down towards the bottom of this post, you’ll find a fantastic green button that says ‘retweet’. The folks at Tweetmeme could not have made it easier for you to pop this on your wordpress blog and let people retweet you with one simple click. You can also click on the grey box to see who retweeted you.

But, sadly, most bloggers forget to customize the button, something that’s painfully easy to do. In fact, when you install it, you get directionals that tell you where to go and how to customize it/set it up. As a result of this missed step, when we click to retweet, the twitter post says, “RT @tweetmeme 10 easy step to total bliss: http://xyz.com”.

Do you see it yet? The missed opportunity? With a simple customization, you can make that tweet say, “RT @JohnSmith 10 easy step to total bliss: http://xyz.com”. Now you get the benefits:

• You get to see and track the retweets by clicking on your @JohnSmith (@replies) tab.
• You can respond to or thank those retweeters.
• People in your retweeters stream and across Twitter, will see your handle and what you’ve tweeted

It simply must be done.

1. Install the Tweetmeme plugin (fyi, you can now do this right from your dashboard, just click on plugins, add new and search for tweetmeme).
   
2. Then scroll down to the bottom of you dashboard navigation over there on the right side.
3. You’ll see an option (similar to the buttons that say ‘posts’ ‘pages’ ‘appearance’ that says ‘Tweetmeme’.
4. Click it and you’ll get to a page with many options, find the line that says, ’source’.
5. Type in the Twitter handle you want listed in your retweets.
6. SAVE CHANGES at the bottom of the page.

Please, for the love of Charlie – use the plugin so that we can share your information easily and PLEASE customize that button!

Come to think about it – check custom setting options for every plugin you install!

Image credit: Leeni!

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We’ve been on hiatus for awhile, but today, the Friday Five returns. We’ve reformatted a bit and we’ve added some brief commentary. Enjoy!

1. Seth Godin Talks about Being a Linchpin. David Meerman Scott Webinknow Blog. Must see interview.
2. How to Suck at Facebook. The Oatmeal. Hilarious.
3. Why Twitter is Shunning Celebrities. Pete Cashmore, CNN. Twitter puts fortunes behind relationship building.
4. Free marketing in 2010 ebook. The Conversation Agent Blog. Free ebook.
5. 3 Facebook Settings Every User Should Know. New York Times. We’ve covered some of these, but good stuff.

Photo by Looking Glass on Flickr.

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Guest Post by Deb Boyken

Ron and Julie have been doing a wonderful job explaining the ins-and-outs of some of the established social media outlets, and there’s no denying the usefulness of Twitter, LinkedIn, and Facebook in building your business.

However, the world of “social media” does not stop at just a few sites.

The “big boys” of social media are huge and cover every topic, interest, and type of person under the sun. You can always find people to talk to, but there are many, many more who could care less about your freelance writing skills, or how fascinating your business conference was last week. They’re just there to talk about skiing, or turtles, or raising sea sponges for fun and profit. They don’t care about what you care about. Sure, you don’t have to listen to them drone on about the mating habits of box turtles, but why can’t they find their own place to play?

Which is exactly the point.

For just about every interest a person can have, there’s a social media outlet just waiting for them.

Let’s say you have some other interests, like, say, knitting. (This is a particularly easy example for me, because I am, in fact, very interested in knitting.) You’ve found other knitters on Twitter, and you have joined a LinkedIn group or two, but it’s not satisfying. You want to talk to people about your favorite hobby, and the “generic” sites just aren’t cutting it any more.

You can think of the big sites like a nightclub–busy and crowded with people from every walk of life. You might be lucky enough to find a couple people to talk to who have similar interests, but it’s not going to be the same as, say, a convention FILLED with people. This is exactly why the world has Star Trek conventions, and conferences for web designers, or women in media. They bring lots of people with similar interests together in one place to share ideas, learn new things, and just hang out.

Trust me, a knitter cannot blather on about different methods of turning a sock heel to a non-knitter for more than about 22.7 seconds before eyes start glazing over. But, if you get a bunch of knitters together? You can go on for hours.

Knitters have Ravelry.com for their most pressing social media needs.

Sure, there are lots of sites out there devoted to knitting. (You would be amazed how popular it is these days.) Knitter’s Review is one of the older sites and has a great forum for talking about knitting and spinning. But Ravelry is totally unique. There are message boards devoted to just about everything a knitter could possibly be interested in–from knitting topics to Green living, favorite tv shows local yarn shops, to cooking with crock pots. It also has a database of patterns and yarns so that, if you’re interested in any of them, you can see what other people have done with that yarn, or what the pattern looks like when NOT worn by a professional model. You can keep track of what yarn you have, and offer unwanted skeins up for trade or sale–and find extra skeins if you need just one more to finish the sweater you’re making.

Actually, Ravelry is kind of amazing. I’ve never seen a site quite so thorough, quite so perfect for its target audience. It’s more amazing when you consider that it was started by a knitter and her programmer-boyfriend, and is run now by a total, paid staff of four people (and lots of unpaid volunteers). The place is HUGE … but it’s all about knitting, spinning, yarn, and crochet. You can always find someone to talk to.

The point, though, is that special interests have websites and message boards just for them.

This means you can find lots of other people to talk about box turtles, car repair, baking, archery, or pretty much any hobby you have–but it doesn’t stop at hobbies. Are you starting a business? Want opinions on what a professional photographer should carry in his camera bag? Wondering how other bakers built a clientele? Social sites devoted to special interests have a wealth of information for people who do whatever-it-is professionally, as well as the hobbyists.

That also means that–by being a member of the community–you have access to potential clients, partners, collaborators, or customers. I can share links to my knitting book reviews on Ravelry to get traffic to my site. I can advertise, ditto. I can share knitting tips with other people to show my expertise and to demonstrate to potential clients that I know what I’m talking about. I can send messages and build a network with people who make their livings by knitting to make sure they know who I am … making it easier to sell my freelancing services. (With a light touch, of course, so as not to alienate anyone.) All while having fun talking about one of my favorite subjects.

Deb Boyken spends an inordinate amount of her free time baking, knitting, spinning yarn, reading, and playing with her dog, but mostly, let’s not forget, she writes. She writes about knitting at www.knittingscholar.com, writes about writing and freelancing at www.punctualityrules.com, and writes about more or less everything else at www.chappysmom.com.

Image credit: joathina

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Running a blog and managing your social networking sites is part of your job. That’s what I tell my clients. It’s a critical piece of the marketing and promotion and syndication pie. And if you can’t do it, you get help. You outsource.

But it’s a lot of work, they say. Yes. yes it is. And that work is really important. However, sometimes, life happens – and we simply have to take a step back. From our online participation, from our extracurricular activities, even from our work.

For regular readers and subscribers to this blog, you might notice that while we have a hefty backlog of posts and information, we haven’t been updating quite so much lately. Both Ron and I have run into some ‘life’ situations that put this blog that we love on the backburner. It pains us that we’ve had to do it, but in this online world – where we strive so hard to be genuine and authentic, to bring our very selves into the information that we share – we end up bringing the good with the bad.

It’s happened before, and the glory of having two of us driving this ship was that one of us could take over. But this time, we both got sidelined.

In essence, as my good friend, farmer and blogger, Susan Gibbs, just wrote – this is the ‘dark side’ of social media. (or one of them anyway – don’t get me started on SPAM). Essentially, this dark side illuminates the old adage, ‘women and children first’. But in our case, it’s ‘health, family and paying gigs’ first.

Still…we love this blog. We love the community we’ve created. So, we’re not going anywhere. We’re figuring out how to get back to our regular flow. (and we’re always happy to have guest posters, hint, hint, nudge, nudge). And we thought it was vastly important – in light of both our philosophies that being human is your most important job when engaging in social media – that we tell you what’s been going on.

Hey, while I’ve got your ear: are there topics, sites, terms, technologies that you’re wanting to hear about? Please let us know, and we’ll answer your queries!

We hope this finds you well…and thanks for being here,

Julie & Ron

Image credit: Scoobymoo

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I’m torn.

You see, I have these ‘friends’ on Facebook and these ‘followers’ on Twitter (and on and on) – that I really don’t fancy being connected to. I like to think that they’re nice people, but I’m not sure. (Can we ever be?)

So, my torn-ess comes from this: do I stay connected? or do I let them go?

For example, I’m not a religious person (which isn’t to say that I’m not spiritual – I was recently told that ‘I got soul’) and there are a few Facebook friends that constantly (5-10 times per day) update their status with quotes from the bible (I’m not sure which one) and the like. Now, this is their prerogative – but I’m looking at my Facebook feed to get information about the parts of the world that I’m interested in. Honestly, I don’t want my feed clogged up with revelations about what Mary would do.

After reading that, it seems simple, doesn’t it? The easy answer is, stop being their Facebook friend.

BUT, here’s the other side. I’m a freelancer writer. And social media has been integral to the expansion and success of my company for the sole fact that now roughly 15,000 people from around the world know who I am. A seed was planted, sometimes they send me business. It’s hard for me to shut doors – who knows if one of those ‘friends’ doesn’t have a big job waiting for me around the next bend – and then, suddenly, they can’t get to me on Facebook anymore?

A gaggle of women, aka ‘tweethearts‘, were featured in Vanity Fair today for their massive amounts of followers. They’re getting work and notoriety. But, what do they have to put up with? 30K+ followers and friends that fill up their airways?

It’s an interesting dilemma. Riffraff vs. quality. And I’m sure there are as many answers to it as there are people on Twitter.

Image credit: bcymet

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Guest post by Joe ‘Zonker’ Brockmeier

Most people have learned, by now, that it’s bad Netiquette to forward every little joke, picture, or whatnot to every person they know. It’s OK to forward those cute bunny pictures to the friends who will appreciate them, but just because your dentist is in your address book it doesn’t mean he or she needs to see it. But it took years before not sending mindless forwards was the cultural norm. Now Facebook, more than other social media sites, has become the new mindless forward.

Every application on Facebook seems to require access to my data, and every time you “become a fan” of something, Facebook wants you to spam everyone on your contact list so that people spend the maximum amount of time on Facebook being fans of things and using applications inside Facebook’s walled garden.

Maybe I’m a grouch, or maybe I’m connected to too many people (or both) but a few weeks ago my tolerance for getting suggestions to “become a fan” of things wore out. Maybe it was the small number of really persistent people who kept asking me to be a fan of things I already ignored. Maybe it was being asked to be a fan of completely irrelevant crap.

I know I ignored a few things I would have originally “fanned” just because I was getting too many damn requests. Whatever it was, I’m as sick of seeing “become a fan” as I was sick of seeing “FWD” in my inbox ten years ago. No, Bill Gates isn’t going to give $1 for every time an email is forwarded, and no, I don’t want to be a fan of “WIN NOW 10.000 FVCASH AND BUY EVERYTHING YOU WANT!EXCLUSIVE ZYNGA PROMOTION.”

I understand the give and take of building a “sticky” site and trying to make a business out of getting people’s attention. I fully respect sites like Twitter that strike a balance between providing a useful service and trying to build an audience that will enable a business model. (Whatever Twitter’s actual business model ever ends up being…) But Facebook is well over that line. The new privacy rules and the model of encouraging users to spam their friends and applications that want access to my data and hooks into my profile just to work…

Social media sites should be tools to enrich our real lives. Facebook can be used that way, but the site itself is geared to abuse of personal data and attention. Email’s functionality has been marred by intentional misuse by spammers. Facebook’s flaw is not only abuse by hostile parties — though it has a few of those as well — but that its very design is almost user-hostile. It actively encourages bad Netiquette and overreaching of personal data.

Surely Facebook could do better. Or maybe it’s time for someone to invent a more user-friendly site that encourages good Netiquette, conservative data access policies, and simpler and saner privacy policies.

Joe ‘Zonker’ Brockmeier is a longtime FOSS advocate, and currently works for Novell as the community manager for openSUSE. Prior to joining Novell, Brockmeier worked as a technology journalist covering the open source beat for a number of publications, including Linux Magazine, Linux Weekly News, Linux.com, UnixReview.com, IBM developerWorks, and many others.

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Guest post by the original Geek Girl, Leslie Fishlock

As I started writing this blog post on Saturday morning, I was intrigued by all the blog posts, articles, even local news channels all getting their panties in a bind about the “new Facebook Privacy” issues. I was kind of shocked by all the outrage and nasty comments of the new Facebook announcement for privacy changes making their rounds on Twitter, Facebook and other sites, considering the first rules of the Internet that everyone should know. So, in total Fight Club manner, I give you those rules.

Rule #1: Never post anything to the Internet you never want anyone to see. Rule #2: NEVER POST ANYTHING TO THE INTERNET YOU NEVER WANT ANYONE TO SEE!

Of course I am making a joke, but throughout this post as I explain the new Facebook privacy policies and how to make them work for you; the pervasive theme of Internet privacy does start with your discretion as well.

My views are divided on this issue for different reasons. As a person “in the business” whose company has built social networking applications, we know that search and content is huge and having that content is extremely important to build a platform. Yet, we also believe in filtering to make sure those providing the content are not bogus spammers, and privacy policies . We always have instituted privacy policies and they are dictated mostly on the premise of how the application will be using your data. On the flip side, I started Geek Girl Camp to educate women on the importance of the computer technology, with a huge underlying focus on personal security online. So, you can see why I bring up many different ways why these privacy issues are being introduced by Facebook as well as why the backlash is happening against it.

As for someone being in the business, I would like more content to get in the search stream for things such as better blog post visibility and anything that pertains to my business. I do understand why a lot of other people are upset as they thought they signed up for a social network where their “privacy” was protected. All I can say is no matter how “private” you think everything is, assume it is not and always assume it will not stay this way. The world is evolving how it received information and this will most certainly not be the last time Facebook will try to be “more open” with your information.

I just wish Facebook had been a little bit more forthcoming and had not chosen to use their advancement into search to compete with Twitter disguised as this new privacy settings meme. That was wrong. It does not seem like a privacy issue to me.

Here are some quick things to think about, certainly not in defense of Facebook, but items you need to be aware of.

Some Thoughts on Facebook

1.) You are not paying anything to use this service. It is free. Facebook has and will again change their policies on how it will best serve Facebook, the future of the Internet and the direction of how information will be distributed, searched and stored. They are not making money off of you for subscription, so they need to raise money other ways. Search and advertising certainly are part of that future. Rest assured of this.

2.) Unless you are an investor or Mark Zuckerberg, the CEO of Facebook, you have no monetary windfall coming to you for investing in this service, nor any voting rights, nor ownership, nor really any say in how the business model of Facebook will redefine itself in the years to come. Facebook was not even open to most of you reading this when it first started, as it was available for only college students. Aren’t we glad that they made it “more open” when we joined?

3.) You have been told before that anything you put online can possibly stay there in perpetuity sometimes, so you should be careful what you put online. Despite Facebook originally being a service where people can choose who sees their content, the world is changing and if Facebook wants to compete with search engines and other services like Twitter, chances are they will lessen their restrictions. It’s the future of the Internet.
 It may be disastrous for Facebook to do so, but I contend that most people will still use the service.

4.) If you want to share things you would NEVER want to see online, you better stay off social network sites and use email with only people you know. And as we know, loose lips sink ships there as well. Systems can also get hacked from malicious hackers and your content can be distributed. You hear stories about that happening with medical records and credit cards from time to time. But it also happens offline. Remember when the Boston Globe used everyone’s credit card numbers printed out on paper to roll newspaper bundles in? I see more outrage about people’s Facebook pictures then the other items that affect your well-being and assets. There is a slight bit of risk putting things online, credit cards, pictures, etc. no matter what the policy is. But I do believe information is a lot safer online than providing to a human being. I have never had my credit card stolen online before, but I have had many charges on it from local stores in my town where people steal the credit card numbers for use later on. And just an aside, if you think the Government is not reading your updates, then think again.

For some to really understand the changes, one must understand the nature of the Internet, search and the future of web applications, and how things are changing for Facebook.

The Reason:

Facebook is changing their privacy settings policy because of the all-powerful ecosystem of search. They want to compete with Twitter and Google. Allowing more content from Facebook would allow the social network behemoth that ability to compete in search, and most importantly, live search. Now, of course this is for several reasons, most of all advertising dollars, but I think we all know that whoever controls the data is king. Google has been the leader in search, and has now unveiled live search. Bing recently partnered with Twitter to allow real-time search on their search engine. These are huge advances in how we search and receive content. And if you have a website and want to be found, you want as much search engine visibility to get people to your site.

At least Facebook was all in your face about the changes and you could not escape this notification every time you signed it. Compared to Google, who released their new live search with pretty much nothing to let you know except for an after the fact update in a blog post, Facebook did make it extremely transparent and did not hide it at all.

If you do not like the new Facebook Privacy Policies, there are several things you can do.

• Follow the instructions below by going to your privacy settings right now and change to make sure you are protected (until of course they change that policy again). Will this protect you from people who are following you from reading your content and making screen shots of what you say and floating it out to others? No.
• Stop putting content on your Facebook site and restrict what you say in the event it goes onto the Internet. You don’t want people to know you got blitzed last night and peed on the neighbor’s rose bush? Then don’t say it. Google’s CEO Eric Schmidt just said recently, “If you have something that you don’t want anyone to know, maybe you shouldn’t be doing it in the first place.” Read full story here.
• Delete your account. There. Case closed. It won’t be that disastrous. How did you stay in touch with friends before Facebook? How did we ever get along without the tv remote, either?
• Invest millions of dollars into your own social network where you can make your own rules. My favorite one but it’s not so easy. I know. My company builds them and it takes a lot of money to build them. And though the rules are made that best suits the community, they are also made by what befits the business model as investors want their money back someway. Just like Facebook will make the rules in the future in determining how they will be profitable. They may revisit search again in another way.

Changing Your Privacy Settings back to your Original Settings

If you choose to follow #1 from above, follow the guidelines below to make sure your settings are pretty much back to your original settings. This will make sure the original settings you used will continually be used. For now at least. But don’t think that Facebook’s desire to be “more open” is going to go away.

When you get this image, please read carefully and click the “Continue to Next Step”.

You will then come to this page, which will say “Please update your privacy settings”. As you can see, Facebook has changed some of your privacy settings to make things more open. All you have to do is go back to your old settings from here. How do you know what were your old settings? Hover over the choices with your mouse and it will tell you. Change all the ones you want to your original settings by checking off all the ones on the right side.

After checking , the page should look like this:

This will restore all your old settings, as long as you hit “Save Settings”. Don’t forget, or they will not save.

If for some reason you bypassed the above sections, you can also get to this page right now by going up to your navigation bar on right, and click where it says “Settings”, and then “Privacy Settings”.

You will have choices in a row: Profile, Contact, Applications and Websites, Search, Block List. Though you should review all of these, start first with Profile and Contact. Make sure you change all of them to: “Only Friends” in both the first two, Profile and Contact.

Also, check through Search, as you may want to change this to determine if you want people other friends to find you by search, and if you want your search engines to access your publicly available info and any information visible to everyone. If you do not, please uncheck “allow indexing”.

You will want to go all though each line and make sure they are set the way you would like them.

Ask Questions – Get Help

If perhaps a visual element like video will help you best, the official Facebook video is available on Facebook here, “How do I use Facebook’s Privacy Settings?”
If you have any questions whatsoever, please contact Leslie at Geek Girl Camp by commenting below this post, through Twitter, their Facebook Fan Page, their LinkedIn Group, or by email.

Do not let this information go undone, especially if you are not tech savvy and need help. We are here to help you.

Leslie Fishlock lives at the helm of Genevate, a professional web development, design and social media/inbound marketing firm specializing in standards compliant, Ruby on Rails web application development for clients all over the globe. She is also the founder and #1 Geek Girl of Geek Girl Camp, whose mission is to educate and empower every girl and woman at every age level, on every skill level, at every income level on computer technology.

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I hit an incredible milestone this month on my DaniWeb TechTreasures by Ron Miller blog. I passed 100,000 page views for a single month. In fact as of today, I blew through it, powered by my best post ever, which is a tad shy of 60,000 page views as of today. It wasn’t always this way. I’ve been writing this blog since April 2008. My first month I had about 15,000 views. A year later I had my first 50,000 view month.

It takes time and patience. DaniWeb is an IT community with over 600,000 members. As such, it has some reach that your site might not, so you shouldn’t compare numbers on a pure level. The lesson you should take away is that it takes time to build an audience, lots of time. As Julie wrote the other day in If you Build a Cafe in the Woods, you can’t just build your online presence and expect they will come. That’s just the first step.

As a blogger, you have to write regularly, produce quality content and constantly promote yourself in your network. If your content is good enough, the audience will get there. Keep in mind at the beginning, you are only going to get as much traffic as your most recent posts drives to you, but over time quality content lives on in search engines, and you will find that your daily traffic increases as you build up a back catalogue of older posts.

So be patient, keep writing and keep pushing. Your blog will build an audience. It might not be as fast as you like or as big as you wish for, but as long as your numbers trend upwards over time, you should be pleased.

Art work courtesy of DominusVobiscum on Flickr. Used under Creative Commons License.

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