Author Archives: Jonathan Pollinger

Twitter adds photo tagging. Social Media Snippets

Twitter to launch photo tagging and multiple photo upload - In its ongoing efforts to become more user friendly and seemingly more like Facebook, Twitter is launching a couple of new photo features. The former is available on Android (at least for me) and according to Twitter’s blog annoucement and the app notes, both should be available on iPhone and iPad although they’re not yet available for me. These features provide the opportunity to create further engagement by publishing photos that are relevant to your brand. You can choose whether you want to be tagged or not and by whom under Settings on twitter.com (see below).

Pinterest Ads here next month - This month will see the launch of Pinterest Ads or to be more accurate ‘Promoted Pins’. Taking a similar approach to Twitter, images will appear in the feed marked with ‘Promoted Pin’ on the bottom left. However, unlike Twitter there is no self-service platform with the product only available for marketing agencies, at least for now. Apart from the Promoted Pin label, it will be impossible to distinguish from regular pins so shouldn’t jar too much with users. Video ads will follow in June.

Instagram passes 200m users - Last week the photo and video sharing social network Instagram, reached a milestone yesterday when it passed the 200 million active users mark. Now owned by Facebook, it’s growing fast with 50 million of Instagram’s users signed up in the last six months, which means its total members grew by a massive 100% in the last year.

Twitter also testing “Share” and “Fave People” - In addition, Twitter is experimenting with replacing the “Retweet” with a new “Share” button and some Android users have noticed an alternative to Twitter lists in the form of a ‘Fave People’ button that is displayed between “Home” and “Discover” on the top menu.

LinkedIn to scrap Products and Services tab -  LinkedIn Company Pages are to lose the Products and Services tab. If you’ve spent time adding details of your Products and Service you need to take action now, particularly if you’ve obtained recommendations. With effect from 14 April 2014 all Products and Services information and recommendations will disappear so if you want to keep it you need to copy and save it elsewhere. LinkedIn advise people to set up Showcase Pages which they introduced in November. The idea is to have a Showcase Page for each of your product or service. This is fine for larger companies who have a range of products or services and the resources to maintain them but not so much for smaller businesses. Read more about this on LinkedIn’s Help. Please book some time with me if you need advice on this.

Linkedin to launch content score and trending topics - LinkedIn have introduced two new features to help make your use of LinkedIn a bit smarter; Content Marketing Score and Trending Content.  The former measures member engagement with your Sponsored Updates, Company Pages, LinkedIn Groups, employee updates, and Influencer posts (if applicable) and ranks you against your competitors on those same criteria. Mimicking Trending on Facebook and Twitter, Trending Content will display the most popular articles on the professionals network. These features will help you understand more about your and others content and help you measure your progress.

Facebook Page redesign coming soon plus more news

Here’s  a roundup of key Social Media news items that have caught my eye over the past month that will help you make the most of your use of social networks:

Facebook Page redesign coming soon - Your Facebook Page will take on a new look shortly: out goes the double column and in comes a new single column to bring it in line with your personal news feed; tab/app thumbnails will be moved to the left although they’ll be accessible under a More menu and a redesigned Admin Panel for Administrators is now on the right.

Twitter testing redesign - Not be outdone, hot on the heels of a change in January, Twitter is testing a major redesign with a number of users that makes it much more like Facebook. Here’s a screenshot I took of the new style design on the @chelt52 profile.

Note that Twitter are only testing this major redesign so it may or may not be implemented. I hope it isn’t as I really don’t like it. What do you think? Let me know in the Comments below.

LinkedIn to introduce new publishing feature for all - Since last year ‘Influencers’ on LinkedIn have had the opportunity to blog and write articles for the site. LinkedIn will shortly extend this platform to all members allowing anyone on the site to publish what their content. This is great news for bloggers as their posts will automatically be showcased as recommended reading to relevant profiles, thus providing a larger audience and a further opportunity to develop a community.

LinkedIn to integrate its Terms of Service with Pulse and SlideShare - With effect from 26 March, LinkedIn will merge its Terms of Service with Pulse - the source of news on the site, and SlideShare - the content repository it acquired in 2012. This will have a number of benefits for users. LinkedIn state that “SlideShare can be personalized based on your LinkedIn profile, your network, and your engagement with content from both services, and Pulse will be able to deliver more relevant personalized professional content.” If you’ve not yet done so I’d encourage you to check out SlideShare and if you’re already signed up connect SlideShare with LinkedIn to take advantage of the benefits outlined above. An interesting further change is the ability to log in to LinkedIn using your mobile number.

Facebook introduce Ad Sets - Facebook have revamped the structure of their Ads with the introduction of Ad Sets which fall between Campaign and Ads. (See diagram below).

Each campaign can feature multiple ad sets, each with its own budget and schedule. You can also organize each Set to represent different audiences, for example, people who live near your shop. Facebook says “this will help you control the amount you spend on each audience, decide when they will see your ads, and measure their response. The ad delivery system will optimize delivery for the best-performing ad in an ad set.”

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How to communicate on LinkedIn

You can communicate on LinkedIn via Messages to first degree connections in your network or via InMail to anyone if you subscribe to the Premium service. This feature alone makes it worth considering paying around £20 per month to upgrade as it’s hugely powerful to be able to email most of the 270 million members of LinkedIn. I say most because a few people, typical high profile, choose to block approaches via InMail.

Here are five tips providing advice on how to craft your messages when communicating on LinkedIn:

1) Introduce first, sell later - There are plenty of sales messages being sent and received on LinkedIn so you have to do something different. Make sure you introduce yourself and explain how you can help the recipient of the message if they’re a prospect. Don’t launch straight into your sales pitch.

2) Be personal - LinkedIn is just like a network meeting, albeit a very large one, so behave how you would in a face to face meeting. That is, don’t be a robot! Personalise approaches to people by using their first name and giving a reason why you wish to connect. When responding to an invitation to connect, send a thank you message.

3) Make a good first impression - Give some thought to your subject line. Get straight to the point and don’t be vague. For example, “Ecommerce opportunity” is better than “Meeting”.

4) Be concise - Don’t waffle in the body of your message. Keep your message clear, purposeful and concise - less is more.

5) Reference commonalities - Build your relationship by mentioning common threads such as a shared contact, the same past employer or even someone who works in a similar location. If you’re messaging a prospecting client,  an ideal commonality is a mutual contact who is one of your clients. You can then mention that you can help your prospect in the same way that you’ve helped your mutual contact.

The above communications tips should help you grow your network and increase the chances of you doing being over LinkedIn. If you have any questions on LinkedIn please let me know in the comments below.

Thomas Cook holiday deals via Twitter

Thomas Cook have set up an innovative Twitter service called ‘Holidays to go!’ that allows holidaymakers to obtain special holiday deals and book their trips by tweeting @TCOffers with the name of their chosen destination. This is an example of the trend for businesses to harness the power of Twitter for transactions and purchases. For example, Starbucks allows customers to buy their friends and colleagues a cup of coffee using a tweet and in the States, travellers can book a room for the night via @Loews_hotel.

I gave the new Thomas Cook service a try to see how it works. On the plus side the concept is good, the automated response to my initial tweet was within seconds and further tweets were nicely personalised with the name, Phill. However, the first link I was tweeted was broken and the second link simply took me to a generic search page, when I was expecting a page relating to trips, travel and hotel deals for Brussels. Here’s how the conversation played out:

@intranetfuture Hello Jonathan, All of our Brussels deals can be found here: http://t.co/D0gzntn4up - Phill

— Thomas Cook Cares (@ThomasCookCares) March 17, 2014

@intranetfuture Sorry about that Jonathan, This link does work: http://t.co/qR9Oc2g1qC - Phill

— Thomas Cook Cares (@ThomasCookCares) March 17, 2014

 
Expect to see more companies use Twitter for  automated responses to information, transactions and payments in future. How could your business help customers by using Twitter in this way? Let me know in the Comments below.

Solve your Facebook problems with these hacks

Below are some hacks (or tips) that will help you solve some pesky Facebook issues. I’ve called them hacks as most aren’t documented by Facebook and some you won’t have read about anywhere else.

How to break the link between Facebook and Twitter
Do you want to stop your Facebook posts being published automatically on Twitter? If not, you should! The most common way (5 million+) of linking the 2 social networks is by using the Twitter app but it can be difficult to uninstall and break the link. The easiest way is to go to http://facebook.com/twitter and uninstall or uncheck options as appropriate.

How to invite all your Friends to a Facebook Page event
To invite all your Friends or everyone on a Friend’s list, install the Facebook Friend Inviter extension to a Chrome browser. Select the Invite Friends button then Search by Name or a list. Scroll down to the very bottom of the list, and then click the extension icon on the top right of your browser bar. All Friends will then be invited and you can uncheck those you don’t wish to invite. If you’re inviting several hundred friends the browser might appear to crash but if you wait a minute or so it should complete the task.

How to get Facebook Graph Search
Frustrated that you haven’t yet got Facebook’s new snazzy search that was launched over a year ago in January 2013? Go to the cog symbol on the top right and select Settings then under General switch to English (US). You should be able to use the new and improved search straight away. Read 5 ways to use Graph Search to attract visitors.

How to contact Facebook about a Page problem
Here’s the form you need to contact Facebook about an issue with your Page, but don’t expect an immediate reply. Facebook has just over 6000 employees but there are 1.3 billion users.

Unable to add a Facebook Admin?
If you are unable to add an Admin to your Page make sure that the intended Admin has Liked your Page. If you still have no joy then the hack is to friend the person you are trying to add. If you only have a business connection with them, you can always unfriend them afterwards. If you’re still having problems then try adding using their email address, but make sure it’s the address they use to login to Facebook.

If there’s something else you’re struggling to do on Facebook let me know in the Comments below or contact me.

Valentine’s Day Social Media Massacre

Interflora’s Facebook and Twitter accounts have taken a hammering from unhappy customers, plus intended recipients of Valentine’s Day flowers, complaining about late deliveries and flower bouquets that failed to arrive. There were also complaints about ’mouldy’ bottles of wine, underwhelming flowers and spelling mistakes on greetings cards.

Interflora had promised customers Valentine’s Day delivery on all orders placed before 1pm the day before but it appears from tweets and Facebook posts that they couldn’t fulfil their promise.

Their social media managers have been in overdrive with a continuous stream of apologetic tweets and posts to an army of unhappy people from around 4pm on Valentine’s Day. Not all complaints have been replied to and they still haven’t stopped.

@antoncymru Hi Anthony, We are deeply sorry that your flowers turned up 3 days late, please confirm your order number

— Interflora Flowers (@InterfloraUK) February 18, 2014

This episode shows that whilst social media gives you the opportunity to respond and resolve problems, you’ll need to ensure that you have the resources to manage and respond to communications from customers. Social media can’t resolve poor service or products. If you don’t fulfil your promises or live up to customer’s expectations, unhappy and possibly angry customers are going to be broadcasting their experiences across social media.

Here’s another example from Facebook plus one from Twitter:

Judging from their twitter acct, it looks like I’m maybe one of 100s of customers whose @InterfloraUK Valentines orders was never delivered.

— D. (@libertinegrrl) February 16, 2014

Thank you to @SueKelsoRyan for spotting this example and flagging it up. If you notice an interesting or newsworthy example of social media, please let me know.

Facebook is now bigger than Amazon

Here’s a roundup of the social media news items over the past 2 weeks that have caught my eye:

Facebook is now bigger than Amazon - With Facebook’s share price rising and Amazon’s falling, the social network is now bigger than the online retailer in terms of market capitalisation. This is calculated by multiplying the share price buy number of shares issued and last week Facebook’s market capitalisation was $170 billion and Amazon’s $165 billion.

Pinterest launches updates site and apps - Pinterest’s new mobile site includes an updated sign-up flow, new board page plus recent boards are now displayed in the board picker. Pinterest says the new mobile website offers a “great alternative” to the mobile apps with further updates to follow in the coming months. Visit www.pinterest.com on your mobile device to try it out. The mobile iOS and Android apps remain the fastest way to access the site and now display over 10 million GIFs that have been uploaded. The iPad app now supports place pins which contain geo-location information. Place pins can be used to plan travel or map out locations of sights, venues and restaurants in a city they are planning to visit, or keep a map of their favourite bars in their town.

Twitter introduce scheduling - Regular readers will know that I’m a big fan of Buffer and it’s scheduling features. Twitter have now introduced scheduling but only as part of its Ad Platform so you’ll need to sign-up for access although you don’t have to pay to promote tweets to schedule. Unfortunately, it seems impossible to change the Los Angeles time setting. If you’ve figured this out please let me know.

Twitter users are growing but not quickly- On Thursday 6 February, Twitter announced that it averaged 241 million monthly users in the 4th quarter ending 31 December, up 3.8 percent from the previous three months. The stock market considered this to be slow and Twitter shares dropped nearly 25%, wiping out about $9.8 billion in market value. This was despite better-than-expected 4th quarter revenue of $243 million. Meanwhile, LinkedIn is growing its membership at a rate more than double that of Facebook and nearly double Twitter. It’s monthly active user growth for the 4th quarter was 7% – faster that either Facebook or Twitter and LinkedIn monthly active users now number 277 million monthly active users.

And finally….a photo taken by Mikal Ludlow tweeted by @GlosEcho showiing the extent of flooding in Tewkesbury.

Echo photographer Mikal Ludlow has taken stunning aerial shots of our flooded county http://t.co/0JHh5Z7D8H pic.twitter.com/MA5F6Lanpg

— Gloucestershire Echo (@GlosEcho) February 18, 2014

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Happy 10th Birthday Facebook!

Love it or hate it, it’s been around for 10 years now. Happy Birthday Facebook! To mark the occasion here’s a milestone for each of the world’s largest social network’s first 10 years.

2004 - On 4 February, Facebook launched as “thefacebook”

2005 - Photos introduced

2006 - Facebook opened to everyone

2007 - Facebook Ads launched

2008 - Number of active users reaches 100 million

2009 - Status updates added to Business Pages

2010 - The Like button is introduced

2011 - Facebook becomes the world’s most visited website

2012 - Facebook is floated on the NASDAQ with shares traded publicly

2013 - Facebook launches Graph Search

2014 - On 3 February, Paper is launched

Have Facebook helped you in your business? Let me know in the Comments below. 

Take back control of LinkedIn

Are you getting too many emails and notifications from LinkedIn? Do you want to decide who gets to see your amendments and updates? Here’s how to take back control.

1. Stop others being notified of your profile updates - Generally, it’s a good idea that your network are notified when you update your profile, but it can be irritating for people if you are doing a major revamp over a couple of days and every few minutes they’re notified of a change to your profile. If you’re doing some major updating then go to Privacy and Settings/Profile then Turn on/off your activity broadcasts and uncheck “Let people know when you change your profile, make recommendations, or follow companies”. Don’t forget to turn it back on once you’ve completed your amendments. This setting is also useful if you are making changes to your an existing job title and you want to avoid LinkedIn incorrectly notifying people that you have changed your job.

2. Reduce the amount of emails from Groups - If you belong to several LinkedIn Groups, you can end up with a notification nightmare if you leave on the default settings which result in a Daily Digest Email from each Group. So if you belong to 25 Groups, which isn’t uncommon, that’s 175 emails a week! To switch to Weekly Digests go to Privacy and Settings, then select Groups, Companies and Notifications then for each Group you can select Daily or Weekly Digests or you can stop them altogether.

3. Keep your connections private - The default setting is that all of your first degree connections, or immediate network, can see your other first degree connections. In most cases, this can be really useful when it comes to networking as LinkedIn members can ask a connection to make an introduction to one of their first degree connections. However, you might have a good reason for keeping your Connections private. For example, if you work in sales and don’t want to reveal your customers to a competitor. To do this go to Privacy and Settings/Profile then select “Who can see your connections” and change from “Your connections” to “Only you”. It’s a shame that this is an ‘all or nothing’ setting as it would be more helpful if you could just block selected people.

4. Block a connection’s status updates - If you wish to remain connected with someone but their status updates irritate you, you can prevent their updates from appearing in your News Feed. Go to Home and then hover over the top right hand corner of the update, then select Hide. You can also remove offending Sponsored Updates in the way.

5. How to remove a LinkedIn connection - There may be occasions when you want to take the ultimate sanction of removing a LinkedIn connection from your network. This used to be really difficult and I’ve bemoaned the fact that it wasn’t possible to remove a Connection from their Profile but you can now do this. Just go to their Profile and select the down arrow to the right of the buttons underneath their name, then select “Remove connection”.

6. Browse people’s profiles without them knowing - (or ‘professional stalking’) - If you work in recruitment, are looking for a job or are involved in research, you might not want LinkedIn members to be alerted to the fact you’ve looked at their profile. If for any reason you don’t wish to show up in “Who’s viewed your profile”, go to Privacy and Settings/Profile then select “You will be totally anonymous”. There’s also a middle-ground setting that will display “Anonymous profile characteristics such as industry and title” rather than your full name and headline, which is the default.

Make sure that you are the one in control and not LinkedIn by ensuring that the settings above are how you want them to be. You’ll save time and become more effective when using LinkedIn for business.

Racing UK fail its customers on Twitter

According to a November survey by NMIncite, customers who receive a quick and effective response on social media are three times (71%) more likely to recommend the brand, compared to just 19% who will still recommend the brand if they don’t receive a response. Yet, there are businesses who don’t respond to customers at all. My latest example of poor use of Twitter comes from my own experience with @Racing_UK, although I’m not the only viewer whose issues have been ignored by the UK Horse Racing TV Broadcaster.

As a subscriber to Racing UK, you can watch the channel on 3 devices (more, if you pay a supplement) with the Anywhere service. I choose to watch on TV, mobile phone and iPad. For some reason, the iPad wouldn’t broadcast RUK, as it’s also known, and displayed an error message stating it wasn’t a authorised device, even though the website confirmed it was.

So, I tweeted:

@racing_uk Hi there. Trying to view Live TV on iPad which I setup at Christmas but App states device not registered. Advice please?

— JP (@JPFestival) January 22, 2014

I’ve since resolved the issue following great helpful advice from Mike Webb @cretangift. whose requests for help were ignored by RUK. Mike’s requests for help were also ignored but we weren’t the only ones.

@JPFestival @Racing_UK I’ve had same issue. Phoned CS last week and was promised a call back from IT or some such, which hasn’t happened!

— Brian Cruickshank (@bricruickshank) January 22, 2014

@JPFestival @Racing_UK same here. Did free trial at end November and seen nothing yet but debited each month. 2 emails and a call and nowt

— Joe Chambers (@chambers2_joe) January 22, 2014

@JPFestival @bricruickshank @Racing_UK I have the same issue! Emailed yesterday.

— Cathryn Fry (@CathrynFry) January 22, 2014

It’s good social media and customer services practice for a business to listen on Twitter to answer questions and help resolve any issues. In this case, Racing UK were listening but choose to ignore its customers, which has to fall into the category of a Twitter and customer services ‘fail’.

Whilst seemingly not having the time or resources to respond to customers, @Racing_UK did find the time to publicise itself to potential new ones by retweeting a message mentioning its Everywhere service.

Wonder how many funny looks i’ll get at the gym by watching Kempton on my phone using @Racing_UK anywhere whilst on the treadmill…

— ‘Little’ Sammy B (@SportMadTwit) January 23, 2014

The above experience would suggest that it’s Racing UK policy to use Twitter for Social Media Marketing  but not for customer services but the two are closely linked and this policy could well affect their acquisition and retention of customers. Social Media is a two way communication channel; shouting and not listening is not to be recommended.

To add salt to the wound, @Gregor31, another customer with the same issue, informs me that monthly subscriptions are going up by £1.70 from March.

Have you experienced poor customer services on social media? Let me know in the Comments below.

Update on 27/1/2014: Great to hear the following in an email from RUK today:  ”Going forward we will look into replying to tweets in a more timely fashion.”