This week on episode 17 of The Social 360 Podcast I share my thoughts on the new Instagram update now that I have finally had the chance to test them out, Social Media Day on June 30th, the DDoS attack against Feedly, a WordPress plugin for tweets and I answer 3 common social media questions.

I finally received my Instagram 6.0 update and have been playing around with the new tools available in the app. I have to say I am really impressed with how easy and intuitive the tools are to use and just how good of a job they do at making my photos look really good.

This year Social Media Day will be held on June 30th and the Social Solutions Collective will be holding all day events.

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Three days in a row Feedly (one of my favourite services) has suffered disrupted service because of a DDoS attack that has the goal of extorting money from them. I (and many others) am really annoyed at this because of how much I depend on Feedly in my daily workflow. I am glad to see Feedly not back down and pay the ransom demands and instead fight to defend themselves.

• Feedly DDoS Attacks

This week I answer three of the most common questions I am asked.

1. What is the best social network for my business?
2. How much will it cost me?
3. Should I manage this all myself or hire a consultant?

You can hear my full responses on the podcast.

This week my resource of the week is a WordPress plugin that helps you create tweetable call to actions within your posts. The plugin is called Click To Tweet by TodayMade this is an easy to use plugin that allows you to create click to tweet boxes with your message within your post. If you combine this with a call strong to action you have the opportunity to expose your posts to a new audience that may not have otherwise seen the post.

I just listened to episode 17 of the Social 360 #podcast - Common #SocialMedia questions answered 
Click To Tweet - Powered By CoSchedule

Thank you for listening and your continued support. If you would like to support the show further, I  would appreciate it if you could share it with your friends, leave a comment below or head on over to iTunes where you can leave a comment, a rating and subscribe if you’re not an iTunes user you can also subscribe, comment and rate the show on Stitcher Radio or simply subscribe to the show by RSS in your favourite client.

Want to get the Social 360 Podcast delivered to you every week and for free? Here’s how:

• Subscribe to the show on iTunes
• Subscribe on Stitcher Radio
• Subscribe by RSS

Questions, comments, suggestions about this show or social media in general? Send me an email to chad@socialthreesixty.com and I will either answer it on the show, in an email or both.

The post Episode 17 – 3 Common Social Media Questions Answered appeared first on Social 360.

This week on the podcast I discuss the Instagram 6.0 update, why Facebook (or any other social network) can’t and shouldn’t take the place of your own website and my resource of the week will help you automate some of your more mundane tasks or just do something really cool for you.

If you are an Instagram user you may be very excited about this update as it adds 9 new features that allows you to now do more than just apply a filter. You can  perform adjustments to crop and straighten, brighten or darken your photo, apply contrast, adjust the warmth or coolness of the photo, over saturate colours, apply highlights and shadows, apply a vignette and even sharpen your photo. The biggest addition would have to be the ability to now decided how much of the filter to apply to your images though the filter strength option.

These additions clearly move Instagram into the photo editing realm of other mobile photo apps including Google+ Photos and Camera Zoom FX (which I use) on Android as well as many other photo editing apps on iOS and Android. I have used both Snapseed, Camera Zoom FX and Google Photos on my mobile device to edit and clean up images and have been happy with the results that I have achieved often then importing them into Instagram to share. With the ability to do more photo editing within Instagram I think many people are going to feel the same way and with how big and fast Instagram is growing I can see this update killing off a few other apps.

What do you think of the update? Will you be editing photos within Instagram now?

A trend that I have been noticing more and more lately is small businesses relying solely on Facebook to host their “website” meaning they have no other digital presence and no actual website other than Facebook. This is dangerous. I’m not here to pick on Facebook either as this could just as easily go for a business that relies on Instagram, Google+, LinkedIn or any other platform as their sole digital presence.

Why is this dangerous? I have 6 reasons.

1. You Don’t Own It
2. No Domain, Do Branding
3. You Play By Their Rules
4. You Are Effectively In A Silo
5. Hard To Share Content Outside Of The Network
6. Hard To Sell Products Or Send To Landing Pages

Use social as a method to build an audience, connect with others, grow your brand and push users towards what you own and that is your website. The website you own is your central hub and the social networks are your spokes that are connected to this.

This week for the resource of the week I would like to share a swiss army knife of helpfulness in the tool of IFTTT which stands for If This Then That. This is a website and mobile app that allows you to create or find a bunch of really useful recipes that help you accomplish or automate so many things. I currently use IFTTT to turn off my ringer at bedtime and then wake it up again in the morning, send an RSS feed to Instapaper and I also have created a recipe that works with Feedly to send my tagged items to an Evernote notebook for later use. It really is an awesome tool and I highly recommend checking it out and seeing what it can help you with.

Thank you for listening and your continued support. If you would like to support the show further, I  would appreciate it if you could share it with your friends, leave a comment below or head on over to iTunes where you can leave a comment, a rating and subscribe if you’re not an iTunes user you can also subscribe, comment and rate the show on Stitcher Radio or simply subscribe to the show by RSS in your favourite client.

Want to get the Social 360 Podcast delivered to you every week and for free? Here’s how:

• Subscribe to the show on iTunes
• Subscribe on Stitcher Radio
• Subscribe by RSS

Questions, comments, suggestions about this show or social media in general? Send me an email to chad@socialthreesixty.com and I will either answer it on the show, in an email or both.

The post Episode 16 – 6 Reasons Why You Still Need A Website appeared first on Social 360.

This week on the show I touch on the Reading Rainbow Kickstarter, some Twitter etiquette, the new book The Unofficial Guide To Hootsuite by Mike Allton. The main topic of discussion on this week’s show has to deal with generating ideas for your content creation and I share 8 ways to help you do just that.

Last week on the show I shared with you my list of resources for helping you find more success in social media and I forgot to mention a couple of really great resources.

• Jon Loomer
• The Social Media Hat

LeVar Burton of Star Trek and Reading Rainbow fame launched a Kickstarter this past week to help revive Reading Rainbow. They achieved their goal of a million dollars in less than 24 hours. It’s a great cause that I’m glad to see funded and one my family will be taking part in.

Found this great Xbox prank that as a gamer I really got a good laugh from and I wanted to share it with you.

I have been seeing these two examples of Twitter no-no’s lately and both I though had disappeared but are apparently making a comeback.

1. Auto DM’s – Try not to send out an automatic DM trying to sell to people you just connected with. It looks cheap, sounds tacky and we don’t have a relationship so why are you trying the hard sell on me? It’s the equivalent of email spam and it cheapens your brand.
2. Follow/Unfollow/Follow – I have noticed this tactic again recently where a user follows you, then unfollows and then follows again. This allows them to ping you with a notification that alerts you to new followers in hopes that you follow back. If I am going to follow a new user it’s because of the value they provide not because they pinged me 10 times in a row.

Content is king! But how do we go about creating interesting, informative, valuable and entertaining content on a consistent basis? How do we generate new ideas to help us create the content that will serve our audience the best?

That is the topic of today’s podcast, finding, discovering and generating new ideas to help you create new content.

1. Quora – Input a search term such as Podcasting or Dog Grooming into Quora and a list of questions people have asked will appear. You can then use these questions as a list of topic ideas for you to create content around as it makes sense if people are asking about this information on Quora your audience may wish to read about it on your own blog.
2. Your Peers – Take a look around at what your peers are currently doing with their content and get inspired by their work to create your own content. Did something get said that you disagree with? Create content around that. Do you agree with an article but one point isn’t expanded on enough? Take that point and create the content you wish would have been included. The point is that the peers in your industry can be a valuable source of content discover and idea generation that you can and should turn to.
3. UberSuggest – One of my favourite tools for compiling a list of ideas quickly is Ubersuggest. This is an easy to use search tool where you input a search term and UberSuggest returns a list of keywords related to your initial search term. Looking though the list of suggestions for the search term dog grooming gives me an idea for pricing, equipment needed and how to’s all ideas you can create content around (if that’s your business)
4. Social – Social networks can be a great source of idea generation. Twitter and Pinterest are both great discovery services and when using the search features can put you on a path that helps you discover many more content ideas.
5. Your Analytics – If you have an already established website you  can turn to your analytics to discover what your most popular content is and create new content based around that and discover what users to your site are searching for to then create or update content based on their searches.
6. Your Community – If you’re stuck for content ideas and are active in social media or have an established blog community what better way to generate ideas for content than to turn to those who want to hear from you? Your community invests time in consuming your content, sharing it and commenting on it so use them to help you discover what it is they want to see from you? Ask the question on your blog or social channels and ask them what it is they want to see and then create content based on that.
7. Blog Topic Generator From Hubspot – This is in no way a perfect or even close to perfect tool but if you’re stuck for ideas it is possible to generate a few titles from this tool. You simply include up to 3 nouns to describe your business and it spits out a few random blog titles for you. While many are unusable as they sound like pure jibberish you can find a few gems or spark a few new ideas that can lead you to creating topics to write about.
   • Blog Topic Generator
8. Brainstorming – Sit down with a pencil and paper and jot down as many ideas as you can to describe any and all ideas related to your blog topic that you can. Nothing is wrong here, this exercise is intended to help you bypass a mental roadblock and generate a mass quantity of ideas that have potential to turn into something special later on. When you’re done this exercise go back over everything you have written down and select what has potential or looks promising and start picking off ideas for topics then take a look at everything else and see if you can’t rework some of the ideas into topics that you can use instead of just discarding them. Hubspot has an excellent article on creating a years worth of topics in an hour that is useful for describing this process in more detail.

Mike Allton of The Social Media Hat recently released a new book that can help you to understand Hootsuite best practices and teach you how to best utilize this social media management tool effectively and efficiently.

• Release Notes For The Book
• Buy The Book On Amazon

Thank you for listening and your continued support. If you would like to support the show further, I  would appreciate it if you could share it with your friends, leave a comment below or head on over to iTunes where you can leave a comment, a rating and subscribe if you’re not an iTunes user you can also subscribe, comment and rate the show on Stitcher Radio or simply subscribe to the show by RSS in your favourite client.

Want to get the Social 360 Podcast delivered to you every week and for free? Here’s how:

• Subscribe to the show on iTunes
• Subscribe on Stitcher Radio
• Subscribe by RSS

Questions, comments, suggestions about this show or social media in general? Send me an email to chad@socialthreesixty.com and I will either answer it on the show, in an email or both.

The post Episode 15 – Generating New Ideas For Your Content appeared first on Social 360.

This week on the podcast I am sharing with you my list of books, websites and podcasts to help you learn more about marketing and improve your own social media marketing skills.

I love to read and I read a lot. While I enjoy free reading time and love to indulge in an afternoon filled with a good novel I also enjoy reading as a way to improve my skills. Here is my list of books that I feel anyone looking to improve their marketing skills would find of value. You’ll find my full thoughts on each book in the podcast.

• Enchantment: The Art of Changing Hearts, Minds, and Actions by Guy Kawasaki
• Crush It by Gary Vaynerchuk
• Jab, Jab, Jab, Right Hook by Gary Varnerchuk - My Review
• The Freaks Shall Inherit The Earth by Chris Brogan – My Review
• Youtility by Jay Baer
• Delivering Happiness by Tony Hsieh
• The 4 Hour Work Week by Timothy Ferriss

As with the books above, I feel that these websites are some of the best on the net to help you become a better marketer. Each of these websites has been added to my Feedly feeds to ensure that I never miss an article. For my full thoughts on these sites please listen to the podcast.

• Owner Mag
• Social Media Examiner
• Social Media Today
• Convince and Convert
• Social Solutions Collective
• More Than Metrics
• Jenn’s Trends

I listen to a good number of podcasts each week and find them to be an excellent resource for learning and retaining new information and concepts. I find myself listening to podcast most often when I am out on a run as this is when I have the most uninterrupted time during my day and listening to a podcast while running is a perfect combination. Here is a list of my favourites that I am currently listening to.

• The Owner’s Mind with Chris Brogan
• Social Pros with Jay Baer
• Social Media Marketing with Michael Stelzner
• Online Marketing Made Easy with Amy Porterfield
• Podcast Answer Man with Cliff Ravenscraft

What are your current favourite books, website and podcasts that you feel have helped you improve your marketing skills the most?

Thank you for listening and your continued support. If you would like to support the show further, I  would appreciate it if you could share it with your friends, leave a comment below or head on over to iTunes where you can leave a comment, a rating and subscribe if you’re not an iTunes user you can also subscribe, comment and rate the show on Stitcher Radio or simply subscribe to the show by RSS in your favourite client.

Want to get the Social 360 Podcast delivered to you every week and for free? Here’s how:

• Subscribe to the show on iTunes
• Subscribe on Stitcher Radio
• Subscribe by RSS

Questions, comments, suggestions about this show or social media in general? Send me an email to chad@socialthreesixty.com and I will either answer it on the show, in an email or both.

The post Episode 14 – Resources To Improve Your Social Media Marketing Skills appeared first on Social 360.

This week on the show I talk about the Twitter mute button, the ROI of your Mom, why small business should be using social media and my tool of the week is a YouTube channel that can help you create better audio.

This week in a limited roll out Twitter released  a mute button for iOS, Android and Twitter.com used as implied, for muting users. To mute a user you simply click on the more menu in their tweets on Twitter.com or on mobile by visiting their profile and clicking the gear icon.

Why is this important? Because it means that your followers instead of unfollowing you may in fact mute you to avoid seeing your messages. This can be a useful tool in the case of tweet chats that have high volumes of tweets but it could also be one that users enable to avoid unfollowing, one they could forget to turn back on meaning they no longer see your message or in the case of follow backs someone may follow you after you follow them and then mute what you are saying leading to inflated follower counts.

In my opinion it’s going to be far to easy to forget about users you may have muted and users are going to miss seeing tweets from those they want to see tweets from. I hope twitter rolls out a mute management page in the profile option that allows you at a glance to see who you have muted and then quickly uncheck it to allow for seeing their tweets again.

I’m not sure I will be using this feature as lists are a perfect solution to this type of problem, but I’m sure it will be of use to some.

Happy belated Mother’s Day to all of you moms out there and to mark the occasion Gary Vaynerchuk released a video from one of his talks called what is the ROI of your mom and I want to share it with you and then discuss it and offer my thoughts on the video.

If you know who Gary is you know you will be hearing some language if you don’t know who Gary is, well be warned it’s not PG13.

• Love the take aways from this talk
• You can’t always measure what you are doing but sometimes what you are doing is contributing to your current success
• What is the ROI of a print ad? Not everyone may have seen the ad. Print numbers can be and often are inflated. The same can be said of radio and television.
• I love the video and agree with 99% of what Gary is saying but I also think ROI is an important measurement
• ROI can be calculated and many times your boss, or you boss’s boss will want you to provide these numbers to them. One way to find this out  is by creating measurable goals.
• Saying you want to  be successful in using social media is a recipe for failure. Saying I want to acquire 3000 more email subscribers within 6 months is a goal you can measure. You currently know you have 500 subscribers and that you need to get to 3500 to achieve this. From here you can work backwards and figure out the tactics you will use to get there and the costs associated with achieving these goals in order to help you determine your ROI.

This talk on ROI got me thinking about small business and social media and how many small business owners are completely skeptical about using social media.

I’ve heard many excuses from takes too much time, can’t measure it, don’t know how, I’m computer illiterate, it’s only about food and selfies, it’s only for large businesses with a budget.

• Big corporations are faceless and slow moving, small businesses can be nimble. Big businessses need permission to do things, extra resources and departments created while small businesses can be agile and evolve quickly to meet their customers demands.
• While I could shop at amazon for many items, I find that I have a relationship with several local business owners and I want to support them. That is where social media can really amplify a small businesses reach.
• Create and build relationships with those in your community, become a known entity with a face and a story. Chances are those in your community would rather spend their money with someone they know personally, know the story of and can place a name with a face rather than spend it with a massive company they have no connection with.
• I know that even though I can buy many itemss online and save a few dollars I would rather shop locally as I know the owner, he knows me and my family and he knows his stuff. If I have a question he answers it and if he doesn’t have it in stock he can get it for me within the week anyways.
• Use the tools and build the relationships because in the end they will help you drive sales.
• Time wise you get out what you put in and while you are going to be spending some of your time building those relationships it will drive business.

I am working hard to increase the audio production values of this show and have been experimenting moving from the free audio editing and recording tool Audacity over to Adobe Audition.

What I recently discovered was  the Music Radio Creative channel with Mike Russell.

Here he has uploaded a number of really great videos that guide you through the audio editing capabilities of Audition and even has tutorials on how to make your voice sound better.

If you’re looking to get started in podcasting or like me are looking to create a better product for your audience this is channel you’re going to want to check out.

Thank you for listening and your continued support. If you would like to support the show further, I  would appreciate it if you could share it with your friends, leave a comment below or head on over to iTunes where you can leave a comment, a rating and subscribe if you’re not an iTunes user you can also subscribe, comment and rate the show on Stitcher Radio or simply subscribe to the show by RSS in your favourite client.

Want to get the Social 360 Podcast delivered to you every week and for free? Here’s how:

• Subscribe to the show on iTunes
• Subscribe on Stitcher Radio
• Subscribe by RSS

Questions, comments, suggestions about this show or social media in general? Send me an email to chad@socialthreesixty.com and I will either answer it on the show, in an email or both.

The post Episode #13 – Why Small Businesses Need To Take Social Media Marketing Seriously appeared first on Social 360.

This week on the show I talk about frameworks, discipline, the Pomodoro technique and a new app I discovered called Clockwork Tomato. Then it’s onto the main part of the show where I give my thoughts, feelings and opinions on why the death of Google+ is highly exaggerated and why I think this social network is here to stay.

Does this sound like something you would be interested in? Awesome! Show notes are boring and listening and subscribing to the podcast while you’re out and about or relaxing is far more fun than sitting and reading show notes on a stuffy old computer screen. Plus, if you subscribe to the show, leave a comment or share this with your friends I will love you forever.

As I discussed in Episode 11 of the podcast, finding more time in the day is not only possible it’s achievable not by working more hours daily. Instead as suggested in the excellent book The Freaks Shall Inherit The Earth by Chris Brogan it’s all about being disciplined and creating lists and frameworks to help keep you focus on task and on time. This as I have discovered from reading the book and putting much of it into practice is the key to becoming more productive and how I believe I will ultimately find the success I have defined.

One tool that I have discussed previously on the podcast and one method that I have used to great success is the implementation of Pomodoro Time. This is a productivity framework that uses 25 minute work blocks and small breaks to help you focus and get more done.

To help myself implement Pomodoro time more successfully and to help those who are also looking to implement this strategy I have found the really great app Clockwork Tomato. This is an Android app built to do one thing only and that is help you successfully use Pomodoro time. It is an easy to use and great looking app that also includes a calendar to help you see how many Pomodoro cycles you have used during your day. It’s also free and free is always good.

• You can get Clockwork Tomato for free here

The man behind Google+, Vic Gundotra recently stepped down from Google+ and Google as well leaving many to assume Google+ is now doomed to die. This article from Techcrunch called Google+ Is Walking Dead seems to get the most heat and for good reason.

I have many reasons for why Google+ is not going anywhere and while I go into greater detail during the podcast, here are a few reasons I believe Google+ is going nowhere:

1. One person leaving a company or department of thousands will not cause the destruction or fire sale of a product
2. Remember Buzz? Google will not risk  having another product disaster such as Buzz or they will alienate users and marketers
3. Really smart people such as Wade Harman, Mike Allton, Martin Shervington and Stephen Hovnanian all believe that Google+ is going nowhere
4. The Google+ Chief Architect Yonatan Zunger said as much:

Thank you for listening and your continued support. If you would like to support the show further, I  would appreciate it if you could share it with your friends, leave a comment below or head on over to iTunes where you can leave a comment, a rating and subscribe if you’re not an iTunes user you can also subscribe, comment and rate the show on Stitcher Radio or simply subscribe to the show by RSS in your favourite client.

Want to get the Social 360 Podcast delivered to you every week and for free? Here’s how:

• Subscribe to the show on iTunes
• Subscribe on Stitcher Radio
• Subscribe by RSS

The post Episode #12 – Google+ Is Most Definitely Not Dead appeared first on Social 360.

If you’re a regular listener of the Social 360 podcast you may find things a little different this week. I want to share with you something that I am super excited about and that is the new book from Chris Brogan.

In this show I talk about the new look that rolled out for all Twitter users this week and then I get into the heart of the show with my full on review of the Freaks Shall Inherit The Earth. I really loved this book and if you want to hear all my thoughts you’ll have to listen to the show.

Twitter rolled out a new look for its service a few weeks ago but only select accounts received the rollout. This week Twitter opened that up to everyone and I finally got my hands on the new look for Twitter and as I reviewed in Episode 9 of the show I still really like what Twitter has done as images and video are put front and centre and the ability to pin Tweets could be a very powerful feature. While I think that there is plenty to offer new Twitter users in the way of usability I also think that veteran Twitter users are going to have a lot to like in this update as well. My only complaint with this update is the changes they have made to the followers as they have moved from an easy to use list based page to one that uses images but seems a little more difficult to navigate and use.

If you have made the switch to the new Twitter look you will also have to remember to go back and update your profile and cover photos as both have seen an increase in size. I have neglected my Twitter profile for a while now and with these changes it’s about time I do some work to improve the look to make it stand out.

If you want to know more details about layout changes you can read the excellent post from Jenn’s Trends here

This week Chris Brogan has released his latest book The Freaks Shall Inherit The Earth and after reading the book in it’s entirety I can honestly tell you, go buy this book now.

This is not a social media book (as you heard Chris mention in the above video) but it is instead an entrepreneurial blue print or training guide. You get an insight into how you can use your uniqueness to create a business based around your Monchu (community), providing value and serving your audience.

When I was reading this book I found myself connecting with so much of what was written. In everything from needing to create a frameworks and planning to mastering time and how to frame failure I found myself nodding along and agreeing with what Chris had written. I also have to say that I took more notes and highlighted more parts of this book than I ever did for my high school or college text books.

If you are an entrepreneur, or want to become an entrepreneur or are an employee who works to create more in his job every day then I truly feel that this book will provide you with more information and more value than the cover price.

I highly recommend the book and if you want to hear my full thoughts on the book and why I think it’s one of the most important entrepreneur and business books launched this year you will have to listen to the episode in full.

Thank you for listening and your continued support. If you would like to support the show further, I  would appreciate it if you could share it with your friends, leave a comment below or head on over to iTunes where you can leave a comment, a rating and subscribe if you’re not an iTunes user you can also subscribe, comment and rate the show on Stitcher Radio or simply subscribe to the show by RSS in your favourite client.

Want to get the Social 360 Podcast delivered to you every week and for free? Here’s how:

• Subscribe to the show on iTunes
• Subscribe on Stitcher Radio
• Subscribe by RSS

The post Episode #11 – Are You A Freak? If So, There’s A Book For That appeared first on Social 360.

You may notice that the show notes are a little different this week as I am working on trying a few different things to see what best serves the needs of you and what works in terms of content creation for myself. I also have been working on moving from a heavily scripted show to one with talking points to this weeks where I tried going without talking points and instead used my show preparation to prepare bullet points that I wanted to cover.

I’m not sure which way works best, but please feel free to leave a comment below and let me know how you feel about the quality of the show and what is or isn’t working for you.

The debate concerning Facebook page reach and engagement levels continues on and I finally have decided to give my opinion on the matter in this weeks podcast. Instead of taking the usual approach and blaming either Facebook or marketers I wanted to take a balanced look at the issue from all that it affects including the regular user, marketers and Facebook.

The Regular User

• In talking to a regular everyday Facebook user (in this instance my wife), she has noticed a decrease in some of the content she sees from pages she has liked
• My wife doesn’t understand why Facebook will not just let her see the content from these pages and feels that Facebook has already given her the tools necessary to hide, block or unlike content from those pages she doesn’t want the information from
• It’s confusing to users to have to leave their news feed and visit a separate page just to see content they have missed
• Many users (myself and my wife included) don’t often visit pages and if the content isn’t seen in the feed it means that it doesn’t get seen at all
• If I find memes and other images funny what right does Facebook have to tell me that memes are of low content and quality and show me less of what I like?
• Why can’t pages offer simple voting mechanisms of asking for likes and shares to determine what the audience likes without being told by Facebook that the reach will suffer?

Marketers

• Marketers have  helped build Facebook to what it is and are understandably upset that the audiences they have built are now unable to see the content they share
• Without the marketers building and sharing this content many users may leave Facebook and this means less eyeballs which leads to less advertisers spending money on the site
• Forcing marketers to pay to play on Facebook is causing alienation and abandonment of pages as many small businesses can’t afford to pay to promote every single post which causes them to leave and look elsewhere for promotion

Facebook

• Facebook is not in business to make your business make money they are in business to make Facebook money
• As a publicly traded company Facebook has a responsibility to its shareholders to earn a profit and as such will look at any possible means to do t his
• Facebook has a responsibility to its users to ensure that they receive the best possible experience on the site possible. If the users news feed is filled with spam and other low quality content the user will use the site less and less which will cause Facebook to lose ad revenue.
• Facebook owns the platform and lets you use it freely to advertise to your audience and now they are asking for some of that back in terms of advertising revenue

Final Thoughts

This is a hot button topic that is not going away soon and Facebook is stuck between creating an experience for users that keeps them coming back to the site, pleasing marketers and page managers and generating revenue to please the shareholders. This is a delicate balancing act that Facebook is going to have to get right as without users advertisers won’t spend money to advertise and without content being generated the users won’t have a news feed full of content that keeps them engaged and coming back. It’s a tough spot for Facebook no matter which angle you look at it from.

This is Facebook’s game though and we have to play by there rules and we also need to remember that advertising has traditionally never been free. You are expected to pay to run print ads in newspapers and magazines, you are expected to pay to produce radio and television spots and are expected to pay to run ads on Google and other digital channels. The free advertising opportunity that social channels offered is coming to an end and this ushers in a maturation of these platforms that will see the good marketers creating content users genuinely want to see and engage with while others will pay to get noticed.

Links

There has been so much really great content written on this subject that I wanted to share with you some of the best stuff that I have come across:

• 4 Ways To Fix Your Facebook Problem
• Reachpocalypse
• Facebook Doesn’t Suck Your Strategy And Attitude Does
• The Great Facebook Swindle And What To Do About It
• Facebook’s Feed Now Punished Pages That Ask For Shares And Likes
• Why Is Facebook Reach Decreasing?

As with every week I like to share with you a favourite website, app or tool of mine that I think can help you in your social media efforts and this week I wanted to share with you my content organization, discovery and curation tool of choice Feedly.

While Feedly is a great way to organize your news feeds it does a lot more than that as it also helps you discover new content through the search features, you can also tag news stories (a feature I use with IFTTT and Evernote) as well as share your content out using built in sharing tools, send it to a read it later app and even keep tabs on content through your mobile device.

With Feedly I have one tool that allows me to find and share great content, save content to read later, and even discover new content and it does all of this for free.

Thank you for listening and your continued support. I would really appreciate it if you could share it with your friends, leave a comment below or head on over to iTunes where you can leave a comment, a rating and subscribe if you’re not an iTunes user you can also subscribe, comment and rate the show on Stitcher Radio or simply subscribe to the show by RSS in your favourite client.

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The post Episode #10 – Facebook And The Great Reach Debate appeared first on Social 360.

I always feel like I’m the last person to get these updates but I’m not horribly jealous (maybe a little), because I use Hootsuite to manage my Twitter feeds. In  looking at screenshots of the new design I have to say none of this design is unexpected and like everything new people are bound to complain about it as mentioned in this Mashable article.

Twitter states that goal of this redesign is to make Twitter more accessible to everyone and it looks to me like they have done a good job at this.

The first thing you notice is how big everything is. You get a bigger profile photo, a bigger cover photo and then you notice all of the other changes such as who To Follow and trends have been moved to the right side, the menu list of Tweets, Following and Followers below your profile image has also been moved. The following list has also been dramatically overhauled and looks nothing like a list but instead looks similar to hover cards found on Google+ and while it allows for displaying more information it also clutters up your following list and makes it harder to make sense of. This might confuse new users and makes it hard for those who are following a lot of people to get through the information the old list was easy to use and navigate.

One of the last features that has many people excited is the ability to pin a tweet to the top of your profile. This allows you to pin important tweets and calls to action to the top for others to see quickly as they visit your profile.

So does it look like Facebook? A little bit but it also looks like Google+ which is no surprise because images and especially big images are being embraced in a lot of redesigns. From what I can see in the screenshots  I like the changes they have made and think that new users are going to really like the changes. One goal that Twitter had for the redesign was making the site more accessible to users and they seem to have accomplished this.

My tool selectin of the week in last weeks podcast was Canva and this week they rolled out a big update and announced the addition of Pinterest templates with a hundred different layout options. This is a pretty big deal as it makes creating those big beautiful images for Pinterest a much easier to manage task. I love this feature as it allows me as a  non designer to quickly create fantastic looking images specifically for Pinterest for each of my blog posts. It makes focusing on a Pinterest strategy a little bit easier as I don’t have to worry about having to work as hard at creating images specifically for Pinterest and I don’t have to worry about hiring a designer to do this for me as Canva is easy enough to use and offers enough options that I can create images that get repins and comments on Pinterest.

With how much traffic Pinterest is capable of sending a site  it makes sense to create images for your blog posts that appeal to that audience and thankfully Canva has now made this a lot easier to do.

Peg Fitzpatrick has a post up over on the Canva blog that goes into further detail in the how and the why of creating pinterest images.

Another week has gone by and still the internet is in an uproar over diminished Facebook reach for pages but that’s not the Facebook news I want to discuss.

Now while everyone is going back and forth debating this issue there is other news from Facebook to talk about. The first and probably most important is that Facebook is rolling out a new look to the ads in its right hand column  and these ads have a new look and size that mirror that of the news feed ads. Facebook says that in testing they’ve seen increased engagement in the ads and that some advertisers can expect the rollout later this month.

This is pretty big news as no longer do those advertising within Facebook have to create and choose separate images for news feed and right column ads which saves work and time for those wanting to use the product. It also helps Facebook to create a more unified looking experience for users, overall I’m excited to see and use this new ad.

The second bit of news concerning Facebook has to do with Facebook on mobile and how they have removed the messenger client from within the Facebook app and are forcing users to install the separate Messenger app in order to communicate with friends.  A lot of people seem to be pretty mad about this as they would rather use one app to both view their news feed and talk with friends. I personally have been using the Facebook Messenger app separate from Facebook for quite a while now and see this as such a big deal as the messenger app is well put together and works well and they even recently rolled out free calling over wifi. It seems no matter what changes Facebook makes they can’t win and someone will always be upset.

As  I mentioned last week I wanted to discuss using an editorial calendar and why you need to get behind using one if you want to take your blogging to the next level of success.

What Is an Editorial Calendar? An editorial calendar is quite simply a calendar you use to organize your upcoming content schedule and you can use it for your blogs posts, your social posts or both. This tool allows you to stay organized and by being organized you become more consistent in your activities and when you are more consistent you will find more success.

No longer will you spend time wondering about what you need to accomplish for your blog that day, with an editorial calendar in place you know exactly what needs to be done and by who each and every day.

You may think that  an editorial calendar only works for multi author blogs as it divides up the work and alerts everyone to what needs to get done and yes it works great for that but as a solo blogger it works to keep you motivated as well and provides the framework to your blogs content in the upcoming days, weeks and months.

When I first started blogging I would wing it and go without a plan and while I thought this was working for me it wasn’t until I started planning out my content, my ideas and organizing my content plans that I began to find more success than what I had been previously receiving.

Having an editorial calendar available to you means that you can at a quick glance view which content you will be creating and you can see any problem areas that may be surfacing. If you see that you have too many of one type of post you can switch it up to cover new content or if you see that you are writing about the same topic too many times again you can identify this from the calendar and make changes as necessary.

There is no sense reinventing the wheel when it comes to editorial calendars as there are already some great tools, software and plugins available that can help you get started towards your goal of blogging domination.

The first tool that I want to mention is an old fashioned calendar, the kind you can buy at any box store or pharmacy or even print it from a template.

This is as simple as it gets and you can then fill in your ideas across the days that you will be publishing. This is easily accessible and familiar to everyone and makes getting started a really simple process. The downfall of course is that once you write it down you either have to scratch it off or erase it in order to move ideas around from day to day or to another month.

Excel is another tool you can use to help you create your editorial calendar but instead of starting from scratch I recommend downloading the Hubspot Editorial Calendar template as your starting point as Hubspot has already done the work of creating a template for you. This is a really easy to use tool that can help you get you started in beginning to use an editorial calendar.

If you’re on WordPress I have two plugins you can investigate further. The first is the free to use WordPress Editorial Calendar.

After installing the is plugin you can then find it in your WordPress admin underneath posts and you will see a calendar and by hovering over a date and clicking new post you can create a new draft post with a scheduled time. When you have populated your calendar with posts you can then view, edit, delete by hovering over the title and clicking the appropriate action you can also rearrange your posting schedule through the drag and drop interface allowing you to move and reschedule posts.

The last tool I want to mention is CoSchedule which I talked about briefly in episode 7 and have a full review on the blog. This is not a free tool but it has all the features of the WordPress Editorial Calendar plus allows you to schedule all your social posts related to your blog posts as well. It has an easy to use drag and drop interface, allows for working in teams, has task management and a bunch of other features that I list in the blog post. This has become my go to editorial calendar simply because of how powerful and easy it is to use and with the added benefit of scheduling out my content to be shared on my social networks it really saves me a ton of time.

I can’t believe I haven’t shared this yet but the tool of the week this week is Hootsuite. This is my tool of choice when it comes to managing my twitter feeds, monitoring hashtags, performing searches and now with the changes they have made to autoscheduling it has gotten even better as I now am using it to schedule more of my content where that task used to fall to Buffer.  You can connect everything from multiple Twitter accounts, facebook pages and profiles, linkedin profiles and groups, Google+ pages, Instagram accounts and plenty more. You can use the free edition to manage up to 5 social profiles or upgrade to the pro account for 9.99 to manage even more.

If you’re looking to take control and run your social media instead of having it run you Hootsuite is the tool that can help you get the job done.

Thank you for listening and your continued support. I would really appreciate it if you could share it with your friends, leave a comment below or head on over to iTunes where you can leave a comment, a rating and subscribe if you’re not an iTunes user you can also subscribe, comment and rate the show on Stitcher Radio or simply subscribe to the show by RSS in your favourite client.

Want to get the Social 360 Podcast delivered to you every week and for free? Here’s how:

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Thanks for the support and until next time I hope you have yourself an awesome week.

The post Episode #009 – Why You Should Be Using An Editorial Calendar On Your Blog appeared first on Social 360.

This week Google+ released a new metric called View Counts which now appear on the cover images or pages and profiles. This is a metric that shows others just how many times your content has been viewed by other people but what exactly does this mean?

Mark Traphagen has an excellent write up that you can find here, but from my understanding view counts are a measure of your posts that are viewed with in a stream or engaged with, shares of a post that are seen by others this counts for both the original content producers and sharer, embedded Google+ posts, photos and images seen in stream or on blogger, picasa or chromecast and when someone opens your profile or page in a new tab or window all of this is calculated.

So basically almost every interaction that is taken with our content, including views are calculated by Google and increases your Google+ View Count.

Why Has Google Done This?

As Mark speculates and I agree with him,  is that Google has seen an increase in users gaming the system to quickly build up their follower count with no regard to actual engagement. This is important as an influx of users only interested in gaming the system endangers the entire system by dragging in low quality content which leads to less time spent on the site and keeps users from coming back to the site because of the perception that only low quality content can be found.

Along with this I also think that Google is trying to shake off the often reported label of Ghost Town by showing numbers that people and brands can stand behind and say look I have 3 million views it’s obvious that there is an audience here maybe I should be spending more time developing my community here.

Should You Be Paying Attention To This?

I think that this is a first step for Google in beginning to open up the platform and to begin seriously competing with Facebook. One thing that Facebook has going for it is the ability for me as a manager to look at my posted content and gauge the what and when of how my content is performing with my audience. This information is invaluable as it allows you to then tweak your content based on audience preference enabling you to deliver content that your audience is most interested in.

This is something missing completely from Google+ that is unless you take a third party tool route which can be limiting. Google could easily tie its Analytics product into Google+ and begin showing users on a post by post basis how the content is performing and other valuable metrics that can be used by marketers to deliver even higher quality content to a more engaged audience.

• What Google Has To Say About View Counts
• New Google Plus Views Count: Important Metric or Vanity of Vanities?

It’s been a big news week for Google+ as a Forrester report has came out showing that Google+ is as popular in the US as Twitter and that on average, brands using the Google owned social network have on average 90 percent of the Google+ fans as they do Twitter Fans.

One big thing to mention as well is that this report found that fans are more likely to engage with updates from brands on Google+ than they are on Twitter.

It looks to me like the secret surrounding Google+ is out and that if your brand is looking to make an impact Google+ may just be the place you want to be going forward.

• Google+ as popular as Twitter
• Brands on Google+ get higher engagement than those on Twitter

Switching gears now away from Google+ is a topic that I want to talk about and that would be is social media automation an evil thing? I touched on scheduling tools in Episode 6 of the Social 360 podcast which you can find here.

Now before I get into this I want to tell you a little bit about myself.

I am happily married to my best friend and we will in fact be celebrating our tenth anniversary this month and along with my beautiful wife my family consists of three children all under the age of 10. My son who is 8, my middle daughter at 6 and my youngest daughter at 3 and so my house is busy, loud and constantly changing.

My family means the world to me and I made a conscious decision before having children that my they would always take priority over anything else going on in my life. That means that evenings and weekends are intended  to be work free and instead involves spending time time with the family doing the things that we love to do.

We are an active family enjoying trips to the park, camping, hiking, biking along with many other activities both indoor and out.

So, what if anything does this have to do with social media?

I think that for anyone working in social media or digital marketing we can be consumed by the hours it takes in creating new content, learning new techniques to apply to our marketing, running the day to day operations of our business, marketing out content and services, sharing content with our audience and interacting with our fans, friends and followers on the different social networks we participate in. If we’re not careful on how we manage our time, it’s very easy for this work to spill over into our personal lives which can affect the quality of our home and family lives.

I’m going to share with you my dirty little secret and that is I use automation and scheduling tools for evenings and weekends in order to take back my time and spend more of it with my family.

When use appropriately and not abused social media automation can be a fantastic tool that can help a busy individual like you and me make the most out of the hours we have during the day. But it can be an often abused tool that makes people completely disregard the most important thing about social media and that is in being social.

If you completely disregard actual engagement in your social channels you are effectively turning social media into nothing more than an addition broadcast channel for you and that is not what social is about. Instead you should turn to using tools such as Buffer, Hootsuite, DoShare, Friends+Me, Post Planner, Feedly, CoSchedule and even your mobile phone as a way to augment the work you are already doing in regards to relationship building and providing value to your established networks.

Social media doesn’t have to be a 24 hour job and with the proper tools and system in place you can still deliver high quality, informative, educational and entertaining content to your networks without looking and acting like a robot. The trick to this all is being smart about what tasks you automate and when you automate them.

One piece of technology that can connect all this and simplify it for you is your mobile device. This handy thing is with us pretty much at all times now and if you take advantage of the apps and tools you can install on your phone you can do a quick reply to someone while on your way out to dinner or in the car and all without having to be tethered to your computer.  Now this can also be a downfall and has to be managed appropriately as well because it is far too easy to get sucked back into working if we are constantly connected and if the goal is to get away from work, constantly checking in on your device isn’t freeing you up from anything.

So is automation and scheduling in social media a bad thing? It depends. When used purely to broadcast your message it definitely is but if you use it responsibly as a tool for creating more time for yourself it can definitely be a great addition to your toolbox as long as you remember to still engage and participate on a regular basis then I see no harm in using automation and scheduling tools.

The social part of social media is not being killed off by tools that automate and provide scheduling options, it’s the people who use these tools to broadcast only there messages that are in fact killing the social part of social media.

Canva is my selection for tool of the week and it is a free to use graphic design program that can make even the most graphically design challenged individuals like myself look like artists who know what they are doing.

It has a intuitive drag and drop interface, easy to use colour selection tools, great looking backgrounds, fonts and text placeholders and thousands of elements you can use for free to create stunning graphics and images for your blog posts and social network messages. If you’re wondering how all this awesomeness could possibly be free, they monetize by charging a dollar for certain images, graphics and backgrounds. You can add as many of the free elements, paid elements or a combination of the two to your design and afterwards you pay for only what you have used. I have been playing with this tool for about a week now and have yet to use a paid element because the amount and quality of free to use elements is enough for me to choose from in creating what I need.

The Canva blog is also an excellent resource for learning how to get more out of Canva and for design tips and tricks in general.

With how visual social is becoming not having a graphic element to go along with any content you produce can hurt your chances of that content being seen in the most places possible and while I still love PicMonkey, Canva is now another place that I can turn to in helping me create high quality images to help my content get noticed more and gain more traction.

Thank you for listening and if you want to help support the show I would really appreciate it if you could share it with your friends, leave a comment below or head on over to iTunes where you can leave a comment, a rating and subscribe if you’re not an iTunes user you can also subscribe, comment and rate the show on Stitcher Radio or simply subscribe to the show by RSS in your favourite client  – I use DoggCatcher on my android daily to listen to my favourite podcasts.

Want to get the Social 360 Podcast delivered to you every week and for free? Here’s how:

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Thanks for the support and until next time I hope you have yourself an awesome week.

The post Episode #008 – Is Social Media Automation And Scheduling Evil? appeared first on Social 360.

An interesting article came out this week on Social Media Explorer from site owner Jason Falls titled The Great Facebook Swindle And What To Do About It. This is an excellent and well balanced article that deals with lower engagement rates on Facebook, paying for exposure and what brands can start doing to get their content in front of their Facebook fans. If you haven’t read the article I highly recommend heading over there and giving it a read.

I fully agree with the points that Jason is making in the article and what to add something that many people seem to be forgetting and that is that – this is Facebook’s ball and at any time they feel like taking their ball home and not letting you play with it they can or they can choose to make you give up your delicious chocolate chip cookie to play just for a little while longer. It seems that this debate of pay to play on Facebook has been happening forever and at one point in 2012 Mark Cuban even threatened to pull his Mavericks page off of Facebook because he was unhappy with having to pay for sponsored ads to reach all of his fans. Two years later and guess what, his Mavericks are still on Facebook and my bet is they’re paying to reach more fans.

You want to know why they’re still on Facebook? Because with over a billion registered users on Facebook, chances are that’s where you’re going to find the highest number of fans to connect with.

Facebook is no longer a private company. No longer do they just need to answer to themselves, they now have shareholders that want Facebook to make money, to make a profit because if they don’t the stock price is going to tank.

As much as people are whining and complaining about Facebook, the reality is that there are other social networks and if you don’t want to play Facebook’s game you can leave at any point. If you do want to play Facebook’s games, then you’re going to start working your butt off to create high quality and valuable content that your fans are going to want to engage. No longer will the low quality content work anymore and you’re going to have to start budgeting some marketing dollars to pay Facebook to get in front of more of your fans.

As a business owner would you ever walk into a radio or television station and tell them to run your business ad for free?  I highly doubt it, but for some reason this is what we’ve come to expect from Facebook. We are entering an age of social media maturation and legitimacy as a marketing tool and that means the golden age of free marketing is slowly coming to a close.

To play devils advocate for a moment. Facebook is going to have to watch every more they make very carefully because without people they no longer have an incentive for advertisers to spend money. If Facebook keeps ramping up ads on the site, alienating page owners and making changes to the site the users don’t like or appreciate eventually those users are going to migrate over to a new platform which would cripple Facebook because without the eyeballs they have nothing to sell and no way to make money.

This is a delicate balancing act that Facebook is going to have to be careful with.

Our second story of the week comes from Facebook owned Instagram and the announcement that they have now reached 200 million users, 50 million of which signed up in the last 6 months. These 200 million users are responsible for uploading and sharing over 20 billion photos. To put this in comparison this is roughly only 40 million monthly users less than what Twitter currently has.

If anything these numbers clearly put into perspective just how important visuals are becoming to social media and make the strong case that if you’re not investing in well crafted visuals you’re brand is going to be left behind.

Our final story of the week involves some changes coming to Twitter. Techcrunch is reporting that Twitter has made a couple of big changes to the mobile service. You now have the option of including up to 4 images per tweet as well as having the ability to tag up to 10 people in an image without using extra characters in your tweet.

While the new features will initially be available for mobile devices they will eventually make their way to the desktop.

While photo tagging is the big feature ,the one I will use more often will be multiple image uploads.

Photo tagging is a smart feature for Twitter to include as it will allow them to gather more data on users which should increase the ad targeting and relevance they can offer on their advertising platform. Tagging will also help lure users back to Twitter during the day because much like the alert you receive when someone @mentions you the same thing will happen when you are tagged in a photo. I don’t use photo tagging on any other platform so this isn’t that big of a deal to me but what I am excited about is having the ability to attach up to 4 images in  a single tweet. The feature looks to be implemented quite well and the overall display of multiple images looks quite good.

As with every week I try and introduce you to a new tool, app or website that I find particularly useful and this week I wanted to share with you the WordPress plugin CoSchedule.

CoSchedule is an editorial calendar plugin for WordPress blogs that functions within your wordpress blog or alone on the CoSchedule website that allows you to schedule posts, assign to team members and the best feature of all is you can then schedule your posts out to your social networks from within your post.

You can connect your LinkedIn profile and groups, Facebook profile, pages and groups, Pinterest boards, twitter accounts and even Google+ pages along with having Buffer and bit.ly compatibility.

It’s even smart enough to allow you to create different types of Facebook posts such as Link, Image or Text and you can change images for use in your Pinterst boards and all other connected accounts.

This tool is awesome and only costs 10 bucks a month to use after the 14 day credit card free trial expires. I am only  a week into my trial but can already tell that this is going to be such a huge time saver for me that I am considering upgrading to a full account before my trial ends.

I will have a full review of CoSchedule on Social 360 for Monday if you want further details.

Want to get the Social 360 Podcast delivered to you every week and for free? Here’s how:

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The post Episode #007 – Is It Time You Consider Paying To Play On Facebook? appeared first on Social 360.

This got me to thinking about scheduling and automation and how many social media users may be unaware of the different tools available to them for helping them schedule out their social media content. This week what I decided to do, was share with you a few of my favourite tools that I use to schedule my content for sharing.

My hope is that one of the tools on this list is able to help you save some time each day when working on your social media marketing.

Before I proceed in sharing some of these scheduling tools with you, I would first like to say automation and scheduling does not take the place of actual social interaction. While scheduling content can definitely be helpful and save you time, you still need to get down and dirty in the trenches and be social with your audience. You have to communicate with them, engage with them and act like a human.

The second thing I want to mention is be careful of automation and scheduling during times of crisis as many brands have been burned by a scheduled tweet that came out during a bad time and did serious harm to the brand. If you notice that a massive worldwide crisis or news of importance is taking place, quickly turn off all your scheduled content updates or face the wrath of the internet.

Now with that out of the way let’s talk about some of my favourite scheduling tools.

I have been using Hootsuite for as long as I can remember and while this wise owl is my personal favourite social media management tool it is also so much more than that. You can use Hootsuite to post to many of your social networks including Twitter, Facebook, Linked in and your Google+ pages from within the app itself but you can also take advantage of its scheduling and auto-scheduling features which allow you to queue up multiple posts, set a time (or let Hootsuite take care of that) and then Hootsuite will deliver it as scheduled.

If your site has an RSS feed you can also plug that into Hootsuite, configure a few options and Hootsuite will deliver the content of your RSS feed to your selected social networks. If you pay for a pro account you also have the option of using an CSV file to bulk upload your shares which can save you a lot of time.

Hootsuite even allows for the + mention of users and pages when sharing to Google+ something only one other scheduling tool that I am aware of can do right now. Mike Allton of the Social Media Hat has a write up on how to accomplish this here.

One other feature that I enjoy is the option to install the Chrome extension and with the click of a button you can now share the page you are on, to your social networks including using the auto-schedule or scheduling features.

I’m a huge fan of Hootsuite and even with how long I’ve been using the tool I still only use a fraction of its features on a daily basis. If I had one knock against Hootsuite it’s that its auto-scheduling feature is a little weak and has never been effective for me. I would prefer they implemented a Buffer style scheduling option and if they did and with how much I love Buffer as an app and even more as a company I would probably drop Buffer from my social media tools.

In my opinion Buffer does scheduling right. Even as a free user you have the option to connect multiple social accounts to Buffer for sharing (but only one Twitter account), you then you create a schedule for each connected account. A free account is limited to creating only one schedule for each network meaning that your Twitter account has one schedule used for each day of the week including weekends and this goes for each other network you have connected. If you subscribe to the awesome plan for only ten bucks a month this limit is removed and you can create a new schedule for each day of the week for each and every one of your social networks.

Buffer also offers a Chrome extension for one button sharing and recently they have started offering content discovery as well. When you visit your Buffer account you will receive a few suggestions of content that your audience may appreciate. It’s often good stuff and adds even more value to an already great service.

While many tools offer the ability to schedule posts to your Google+ business page, Do Share is the only tool that I am aware of that offers the ability to post to your Google+ personal profile. This is a really easy to use extension and once you have it installed and open it functions and looks similar to the Google+ posting window you are probably already comfortable with. You have the ability to format your posts, include an image, a link and even a poll and then you have the option to share the post now or schedule it for later. 

Do share is free to use and extremely awesome but it does have a few draw backs. The first being as it’s free to use and only maintained by one person, sometimes there are bugs that aren’t fixed as quickly as some would like. The second being that you have to keep Chrome running in order for your posts to be delivered and if something goes wrong with a post you do not receive an alert to the problem and are only made aware once you return to Do Share.

But, for the low low price of free you really can’t complain, especially since it is the only tool that can do what it does.

If you run a Facebook page you know the importance of keeping your fans engaged by delivering them high quality content on a consistent basis. The problem is that sometimes, especially if you’re a small business and you run your social media and business alone it can be difficult to get back to your page to post on a consistent basis. If you suffer from this problem, then you may want to look at the free to use Facebook Scheduling tool. This tool has come a long ways and is new fairly intuitive and easy to use and gives you the freedom to schedule your posts far in advance.

When the tool first became available it was very basic and even choosing the date and time to publish was a bit cumbersome. Facebook has streamlined the process and you even have the ability to edit your posts once they have been scheduled. You can view and edit your scheduled posts by visiting the activity log.

One thing I should mention about Facebook scheduling tools is that if you use a third party tool to schedule posts to Facebook you cannot use the tagging feature which means that you lose the ability to mention other pages and people in your posts. You can only use the tagging features if you post from within Facebook using the share box or by scheduling a post using Facebooks own scheduling tool.

• More about Facebook’s Scheduling Tool

Another Facebook only scheduling tool and one that I have been experimenting with lately is Post Planner. They claim that you can save up to two hours per day on your Facebook activities and I can’t substantiate that claim yet but it definitely is possible as Post Planner works as a content discovery tool and planning tool at the same time.

Post Planner allows you to quickly find new content to share to your network and even has a feature that helps in coming up with questions you can ask your fans to increase engagement on your page.

Like I mentioned, I don’t have a lot of experience with this tool as I have just recently begun experimenting with it but it seems like a tool that could be very useful for those who are just focusing on Facebook marketing.

Pricing for Post Planner starts at 19 bucks a month and goes up from there depending on features.

I’m a little hesitant to mention Klout as it’s definitely not my favourite tool in the world. If you want free Klout does now have the ability for users to schedule content to Twitter and similar to Post Planner and Buffer they also have a content discovery tool that you can adjust and tweak to surface content that your audience may be interested in.

If you’re not using Hootsuite or Buffer or want an alternative to those tools, Klout is something you could look at using to schedule content but the scheduling features are minimal at best and I would recommend looking at something else first.

• More about Klout here and here

As you can see there are numerous scheduling options available to use and this list doesn’t even scratch the surface. There are many other alternatives includeing: Sprout Social, Social Oomph and even Triberr exist and while some only post to Twitter others can be used for multi-platform scheduling.

If you want to get serious about using social media as a marketing channel for your business I would start investigating the use of scheduling tools.

Many of these tools can be used for free and some like Hootsuite offer functionality outside being used just to schedule content.

My suggestion? If you want to start using a scheduling tool to help in your daily social media routine for my money I would begin with either Hootsuite or Buffer as they offer the most value for the money and I can firmly say that the support offered by both is rock solid.

If you listened to the show, what do you think of the length? Do you prefer listening to podcasts around 10 minutes in length? Is 15 minutes OK for you? Or do you prefer a 30 minute or longer show? Let me know in the comments.

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The post Episode #006 – Social Media Scheduling Tools appeared first on Social 360.

Last week I talked with you about being more productive and my attempts at implementing Pomodoro time and focusing on one task at a time. I did well on Monday and part of Tuesday but I slipped into bad habits the remainder of the week. I did notice that while working on one task and doing the Pomodoro schedule of 25 minutes work followed by a 5 minute break I was being more productive and getting more useful work done. I need to work harder for the upcoming week as I think this could really help me achieve more of my goals this year.

After researching and reading and more research I finally broke down and bout a  a Snowball microphone from Blue. This is one of the coolest things I have on my desk. I love the look of it and I hope you notice a sound difference for the show (in a good way). Let me know in the comments if things are sounding better.

Need a good laugh today? Here is one of the funniest things I have found on YouTube in recent memory and I swear the more you watch it the funnier it gets.

Twitter Goes Down

Last week  Twitter accidentally reset 1% of its users passwords and while inconvenient really caused very little harm. That was bad enough but this week Twitter hits another snag when they went down for over an hour. How am I supposed to tweet about Twitter when Twitter is down? It’s an inception style puzzle.

According to the Twitter explanation on Techcrunch what happened was:

During a planned deploy in one of our core services, we experienced unexpected complications that made Twitter unavailable for many users starting at 11:01am. We rolled back the change as soon as we identified the issue and began a controlled recovery to ensure stability of other parts of the service. The site was fully recovered by 11:47am PDT. We apologize for the inconvenience.

It’s been a rough month for Twitter (and we’re only half way through March) between the two incidents and reports of growth stalling things aren’t going so well for Twitter. I have a soft spot for the little bird as they were the first social network that I latched onto and the one that made me realize how impactful and important social was going to become. I do have to say while I hate Twitter going down and wouldn’t wish it on them ever I do miss seeing the old fail whale, the new down time image just isn’t as cool or as nostalgic.

Google+ Gets Bigger Images

Now on to Google+ and a recent change they made which increased size for thumbnail images for link shares in the feed. Now when you submit a link to share on Google+ and a high quality image is available the larger image will be displayed.That image is now is clickable and contains the article description below. The new images really stand out as a jagged page look is also applied to the bottom of the image.

Along with the larger images and description, the new look also includes the site name from which it was shared and an icon to circle the site that when moused over pops up the hovercard. As big images tend to get more engagement these changes should help your articles been seen more often and receive more engagement. You can see what I mean in the example below.

Mike Allton from The Social Media Hat has an excellent write up on this topic here

This is similar to the updates pushed out by Facebook and Twitter that also seen an increase in size for thumbnails. I really like the new look as it really makes the big images stand out on within the stream. Google+ has come a long ways since first rolling out and it seems that every change and feature they add to the service is working towards making the site better for users.

With the switch to making images more visible and more pronounced it’s now more important than ever to ensure that every piece of content you push out has a high quality image attached to it.

As a bonus tool of the week I also wanted to share with you a new chrome extension for Google+ called Post Editor for Google+ that allows you to easily format your Google+ posts using a button click vs knowing about the formatting commands. If you’re new to  Google+ or were unfamiliar with formatting posts in Google+ I highly recommend checking out this chrome extension.

Are you a Google+ user? What do you think of the changes Google has been making to the platform? Let me know in the comments, I would love to hear your thoughts.

Facebook Makes Some Changes

Facebook is at it again making even more changes, this time though it’s not algorithmic and simply cosmetic. I have not received the change in either my newsfeed or on my Facebook Page but from what is being reported the newsfeed is receiving a simpler looking interface with new fonts, bolder images and a cleaned up left column giving the entire site a more cleaner and simplified look. The pages have received a bit of a makeover as well with them receiving a more streamlined look that keeps them in line with the changes the news feeds are receiving. Tabs are on the way out as well as they are being replaced with a More drop down menu option.

• An Updated News Feed
• A Streamlined Look For Page

From what I have seen I like the look and the changes being made. Like many I wonder what effect removing the tabs will have but I believe most fans don’t visit pages and instead see news as it streams through their feed, which is probably why Facebook is redoing how they look. I hope to have the new look soon so I can give it a review in full.

It’s time once again to share with you my social media tool of the week and for this week I chose to share with you a tool that saves me plenty of time every day. That tool is Buffer.

Buffer is a scheduling tool that allows you to connect your Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn and even Google+ Business Pages to the service, create a custom posting schedule and then as you send content to buffer it will place that content in a queue and then share it out according to your posting schedule.

This is an invaluable tool as it allows you to keep content flowing to your social networks without you having to be present to do the sharing which allows you to serve content at those times when you are sleeping or just away.

My only complaint with Buffer is the inability to schedule content to a Google+ profile but seeing as only DoShare can do this currently it’s more an inconvenience than anything.

I hope that you got a chance to listen to the show and if you did I would love to hear your feedback.

As always thanks for listening and I hope you have an awesome week and I will talk to you again soon.

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The post Episode #005 – Google+ Gets Bigger Images appeared first on Social 360.