Category — Social Media

The new Facebook Timeline for Pages goes live and becomes mandatory today. The New Timeline not only makes your business page on Facebook look different but also changes some of the ways you were using your page for marketing.

There is so much that has been shared across blogs about Facebook Timeline for Pages that writing on the topic seems to cover nothing new. Here are a few blog posts you should check out for you Facebook Page.

Learn About Facebook Pages

Facebook Cheat Sheet: Sizes and Dimensions

Facebook Timeline for Business Pages – 21 Key Points To Know by Mari Smith

Facebook Timeline for Pages – Frequently Asked Questions by Tim Ware on the HyperArts Blog

7 New Facebook Changes Impacting Businesses by Andrea Vahl on Social Media Examiner

The Impact of Facebook Timeline for Brands [Study] by Simply Measured

Eleven Ways Facebook Page Timelines Change Your Content Strategy by John Haydon on Social Media Today

Did Facebook’s Timeline take you by surprise? Was you page updated and ready for Timeline? Are you using all the new features? And most importantly do you like the timeline for Pages?

Everyone seems to be talking about Pinterest, it’s the new hot thing and it is pretty cool! I’ve been holding off on it for a while to see how it would go but the talk is non-stop so, I thought I’d take a look.

What is Pinterest?
Pinterest is a virtual pin up board. You can pin an article or page that you found interesting here. Pinterest lets you have multiple boards based on the topic of your pins. So you can create boards about redecorating your home, your favourite recipe’s, etc.

Exploring on Pinterest
You can see what people are pinning most based on category. Pinterest offers 16 categories along with videos, popular and gifts! I’m not sure yet how the gifts category pins are selected but my guess is any pin with a price in it, goes into the gifts category.

With the amount of colour images throw up on Pinterest, it would be fun to explore popular articles based on interests here.

Pinning on Pinterest
A lot of different ways are offered to pin on your boards. You can use the pin-it button, you can pin on the iPhone and you can even add a button to your blog or website.

Initial Thoughts
I like Pinterest, it definitely looks interesting and I look forward to using it more to find recommendations and share great stuff I come across. Thinking of creating boards about Travel, Books I’ve Reviewed, Craft and Social Media. Any others I should have?

But how can you use Pinterest for Marketing your Business
Unless you are selling physical items in variety, posting just what you have to sell would be detrimental to your business. At the least you’ll get no returns from using Pinterest. Frankly, even if you are selling physical items its best to vary what you share so you don’t come across salesy. So then what can you share -

Pinterest is a great place for curators and we need that. People can read only so much in a day, that’s where curators come in. They find the quality stuff and all you have to do is follow them. So how can you use this for your business you ask?

Become a curator in your field. Don’t just share your articles and websites on the board, share what others are doing, what you recommend, what you think people should see.

Pinterest works best when you have images or video. Text would look quite boring, so keep that in mind when pinning posts. That said if you have a website or blog, make sure it has images too, else it’s not going to look great on Pinterest when its pinned by someone.

For example if you are a book marketer, a book coach, a book publicist or in the publishing industry, you can share blog posts you recommend authors and publishing folk should read on your board. That way you don’t come across as salesy and yet set yourself up well as an expert on your subject.

Or if you get affiliate sales on books, don’t just share links to your reviews. Pin others reviews of books you found interesting too. It’s about setting yourself up as someone who makes great book recommendations and is not a sales engine. People will follow your recommendations and the more they value it the more sales you’ll get over time.

If you are a vampire fiction author you should consider creating a board about vampires. I’d love to find a place where I can read all about them and stay updated rather than do a search on Google.

(The examples are all about books, sorry. But I just love them.)

So the idea is to give people a good reason to follow you and your board without selling. Set yourself up as an expert or the must follow person on a topic and the deals will come. Give and you shall receive.

Are you using Pinterest? What do you think of the idea of virtual pin boards? How would you use it for your business?

I stumbled on to Feedly after seeing FlipBoard on the iPad. I was looking for something that would make reading my Google Reader feeds fun and Feedly does a good job of it – on the iPad.

Oh yes, Feedly works well on the iPad but that left me with a problem – the iPad belongs to Che so its not available to me all the time. That got me wondering if it would just as well on the Mac. So off I went to the Feedly site.

Other than the iOS and Android, Feedly also has add-ons for Chrome, Safari and Firefox. I got Feedly for Chrome and took it for a test drive.

What I liked about it –
1. It has a nice newpaper like layout that makes for more colourful reading.
2. You can change the way the articles are laid out with the layout button at the top. So photos could be a mosaic and text blogs tiled.
3. Ties up with twitter and facebook to show newsfeed though am not sure yet just how useful this would be.
4. Based on you feeds, Feedly recommends more feeds you might like.
5. Also based on your feeds its makes recommendations from Amazon, YouTube, Flickr.
6. It offers 13 colours as themes but I like Classic Grey most.
7. Offers tagging – In preferences you can add a comma delimited list of tags you would like to be able to assign to articles for collection. Haven’t used this feature yet and since my feeds are categorised already not sure if I will need it. But I think I will try tags like read later, research, and share.
8. Allows you to tracks stock –wow! I don’t need it but wow!

What I don’t like –
1. On the iPad you flip pages to read further, here on Chrome you have to scroll down and it’s a lot of scrolling.
2. In preferences Feedly offers 5 different types of view settings – magazine, condensed, mosaic, cards and full articles. But when I tried switching between them I saw no change in how my feeds were displayed.
3. On the iPad I had an essentials list of feeds based on category. Here I find it missing and just can’t find a way to get it to show.

Feedly also sync’s with all gadgets so I can read on Che’s iPad, or my Android phone and then come back to the Mac and my feeds and saved articles are synced.

On the whole this is neat… Feedly definitely makes reading blogs more fun than Google Reader. I swear by GR since without it, having my feeds on the cloud would be painful but reading in GR isn’t much fun. Feedly syncs well with GR and lays out all the posts well. Feedly as an RSS reader is a must try!

I’ve been on a break from the blog in the last few weeks. What started with missing one blog post rolled on into missing many posts. Everyday I thought of writing and then told myself ‘Not right now, later’ and later never happened.

I felt guilty but it’s usually easy to convince yourself and let things slip. But blogging regularly is important. Every time you miss a post you lose readers and traffic – you lose a bit of your voice. I should have known better and I plead guilty.

So what am I going to do about it and how am I going to make sure I get with the program – here’s what I plan to do.

The Buddy System
This works and this post vouches for it. Find a friend to make yourself accountable to, tell him/her what you plan to do and give them the right to question you. Evading yourself is easy but it’s difficult to escape another’s queries. Being accountant helps you stick with the program.

Plan a Schedule
Plan the week out and decide what you will be posting each day. That will help you plan ahead. I think, thinking of what to write is one of the most difficult parts of blogging and a plan helps in this. When you know what you are going to write about, half the job is done. After that all you have to do is sit down and write.

Schedule Ahead
Publishing a post everyday does not mean writing it everyday. Yes, you want to write some posts on that day so you can share what is happening in your life. But if you are writing on a topic or doing a review, you can do this earlier and schedule it for publication. Then if you want to on the day you can add a paragraph of the latest news.

These are three things I intend to do to stay on track and blog regularly. What do you do to make sure your blog posts go out on time? Do you have any recommendations that will help me stick with the program?

A day after I wrote a post about asking people for what you want on Social Media, I finished reading Ginny Baird’s ‘The Sometime Bride’. Ginny’s was the first ebook in 22 ebooks I’ve read until now to ask me to engage with her explicitly.

Here’s what Ginny wrote -

A Note From the Author

Thanks for reading The Sometime Bride! I hope you enjoyed it. If you did, please help other people find this book.

1. This book is lendable, so send it to a friend who you think might like it so that she (or he) can discover me, too.

Watch for my upcoming release, Real Romance, due out in May 2012!

Here’s why I think more authors should do this.

Unlike most authors Ginny told me to share her book. Most authors tell you that the book you are reading is not lendable/shareable. This makes no sense as if I bought a paper book I would share it with friends, so why can’t I do that with an ebook as freely. As an author would you consider the number of people who have read your book or would you just focus on how many people have paid for your book? Isn’t the reason we write, to be read?

After reading Ginny’s message i stopped to think about the story and characters of her book. I gave the idea of a review a definite consideration. I don’t review all the books I read so asking definitely put ‘The Sometime Bride’ on my review list. My way of paying back an author for taking the time to write a book that I enjoyed is to review the book. Reviews help authors reach out to more readers and they work as great testimonials too. If you love books help authors reach out by reviewing their book.

I considered joining her newsletter and Facebook page. But what Ginny could have done better was check for typos and add a link to her Facebook page. I would have to search for her page on Facebook and thats a deterrent; giving me a link or way to find her page would have made me take action immediately.

I wish more authors would do this, it makes authors more approachable and human compared to that vague image I have of a person bend over a typewriter as I read a book. It gets me to like the author more, want to know more about the author and her books. Most importantly it builds a community of readers for an author for future books!