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Oversharing on Social Media

14
Oct

posted by Guest Blogger filed under Facebook, Social Networking, Twitter

This is A Guest post by Chrisite Kane, see below for her Bio.

As soon as something – anything – happens it’s pretty common to hear someone say “AH I can’t wait to post that to Facebook!” Since the birth of Facebook in 2004 and its rapid expansion over the past few years, we’ve responded with an overwhelming fervor to the pull of social media and adapted an attitude that screams that we fully believe and embrace blasting our whole lives across the Internet under the pretense of “staying connected”.

So when is it too much? Where do we draw the line with what we’re sharing online and what falls into the category of oversharing? We’ve seen how police are monitoring social media to aid in identifying and solving crimes and how people have been targeted for crimes like burglaries based on their status updates indicating that they aren’t at home or are on vacation. Now, according to a new study sponsored by the National Institute on Alcohol Abuse and Alcoholism, social media sites such as Facebook can help to identify people (namely underagecollege students) who have a serious drinking problem. How, you ask (though do you really need to ask)?
The objective of the study was simply stated as: “To examine the associations between displayed alcohol use and intoxication/problem drinking (I/PD) references on Facebook and self-reported problem drinking using a clinical scale.”
300 different public Facebook profiles of undergraduate students who attended the University of Wisconsin-Madison and the University of Washington, Seattle were analyzed to see how many Facebook sites and statuses never mentioned alcohol, how many mentioned alcohol casually but not in reference to being “wasted” and the likes, and how many referenced alcohol in a manner that indicated excessive drinking (read: problem drinking). After examining these profiles, they then asked the people behind the profiles to take an online version of AUDIT – the Alcohol Use Disorders Identification Test. Anyone who scored over an 8 had a drinking problem. The group who fell into the “no alcohol” category scored a 4.7 on the test, the group who fell into the “some alcohol” category scored a 6.7 on the test, and the group who fell into the “excessive alcohol” category scored a 9.5 on the test. And all of this from information originally gathered off our Facebook pages.
“Results suggest that clinical criteria for problem drinking can be applied to Facebook alcohol references,” Researcher Megan Moreno, who led the study, and her colleagues identified in their study.
Which brings me back to the original question: how much is too much? When do we learn to draw the line about what we share with social media sites? Because the truth is, we may upload photos or update our statuses so our friends know what’s going on, but we’re putting it out there on the internet where anyone can access that information.

This Guest post is by Christine Kane from internet providers, she is a graduate of Communication and Journalism. She enjoys writing about a wide-variety of subjects for different blogs. She can be reached via email at: Christi.Kane00 @ gmail.com.

Tags: oversharing on social media

Comments (7)

5 Reasons For Twitter Users To Follow You

31
Jul

posted by Adam Smith filed under Social Networking, Twitter

I, like many other tweeters have found it hard to think of a good reason, a USP if you like, for twitter users to follow me. That’s not to say I haven’t come up with a some great USPs for someone to follow you.

1.Offer Followers An Ebook

Think the ebook is dead? Well I don’t – It’s helped me to gain many great lists in the past and even at this moment in time. Now when I say ebook, I don’t mean a book you’d read on a say Kindle or an iPad, I mean a tutorial style e-book that your followers will be able to learn something from, here’s a few things to think of when attempting to write an ebook:

What’s your niche?
What do people want to learn in your niche that is of value to them?
How can you advertise your offer?

For that last one I’d recommend you create a banner for your twitter background, or hire someone to make one that simply states what they will receive from following you.

So how can I set this up for people who follow me? I hear you ask! It’s very simple, once you’ve uploaded your ebook to your own website or to a file sharing site such as Media Fire copy the url and paste it into a automatic DM Twitter app such as Social Oomph, here’s a tutorial on how to send an automatic DM on twitter if you run into any bother.

Quick Tip: Remember to say in your twitter background that the followers will receive their download link via DM as I’ve noticed DM’s in general aren’t as prominent on the new Twitter.

2.Offer Followers A Coupon Code

Coupon codes are back! they’re in use all over Youtube and Facebook, so why not Twitter? using the same method as earlier you can give your readers a coupon code via DM.

So for example if you Twitter account was all about websites you could offer them a coupon from a large domain registration company such as GoDaddy, I would advice you talk to companies that are very closely related to your niche and who already have a coupon system installed on their website.

3.Offer To Retweet Follower’s Tweets

I’ve used this one before and it has helped people to follow back although it’s not the most natural of ways to gain more followers as you may get a few spammers, but it does work quite well if you have nothing else to offer your readers.

Obviously you’ll need to tell them how long you’ll be retweeting their tweets for or you’ll defiantly get spammers following you.

This one is not the easiest to automate with the Twitter API but if you find a method then leave a comment and I’ll update the post.

4.Answer Follower’s Questions

I was hesitant to add this to my list as it isn’t the most innovative of reasons for someone to follow you back, in fact it’s one of the most common things people do on twitter, but don’t worry I’m going to put an innovative twist on it.

So if your a clever user you will have cough on to the fact that most questions that need answering on Twitter start with ‘Does anybody know…?‘ followed by (‘…‘) their question. Well some clever guy called Arnold Varona did. He created a website called TweetQA that simply uses the Twitter API to search for the phrase ’Does anybody know…?‘ and let’s you search for key words on top of that (although you do eed to add ‘does anybody know‘ before or after your keyword.)

There are also many other Twitter websites the do clever things around the idea of Q&A.

5.Set Up A Paper For Your Followers

Paper.li is a really cool new online paper editor, it’s specifically for Twitter and Facebook and it’s so simple and easy to set up.

Basicly the idea of this paper is that you add posts, tweets etc. of Twitter users and place it into a paper, then you tweet your paper mentioning all the people in your paper.

This reason is great because it makes the Twitter user feel proud to be in your paper and, hopefully, they will want to follow you!

So there have it – 5 innovative reasons for people to follow you back!

I’ve used these reasons throughout my time on Twitter and I’ve managed to get quite a large twitter following of 2700. But I still think there’s much more reasons for someone to follow you, so if you can think of anything, leave a comment!

Tags: how to get people to follow you, reasons for people to follow you back, reasons for twitter followers to follow you back

Comments (12)

SEO Your Blog Naturally Through Social Networking

22
May

posted by Adam Smith filed under Digg, Facebook, Social Networking, Twitter

In todays blogosphere, we se that blogging has turned from google traffic orientated blogs to Google, Twitter, Facebook, Youtube etc orientated blogs.

Now-a-days theres many more ways of driving traffic to your site than just through google, but the good thing is that the majority of ways you drive traffic to your site (guest blogging, blog networks, commenting, social networking etc.) all add to your SEO link value which gets you more traffic from Google!

Although my blog gets most of it’s real readers, with real comments through social networking, more than 80% of my traffic comes from high ranked Google blog posts.

Though there is a downside to this – You feel you don’t need to work as hard on getting traffic and (at times) you stop writing posts entirely as your getting hundreds of views a day without doing anything. That is a terrible way to look at it (as I was looking at it for about 2 months last year.)

Just remember that 99.999% of blogs will still grow 99.999% bigger if you put the effort in!

So How Did I (Accidentally) SEO My Blog Though Social Networking?

I started off taking some advice from some very high trustworthy and wise bloggers and started writing guest blogs, I only wrote around 10 in total but I made everyone count, spending at least 4-6 hours on each of them in the space of about 4 months, I was featured on some very small sites to start with that were around PR2-4 and then I went on to Pr6 and I believe my highest guest blog was featured on a Pr7/8 site.

I followed the advice of ShoeMoney.com’s Jeremy Schoemaker on how to get the chance of writing a guest post (although it’s not every blog or news site is the best place to write a guest blog as I found out with ReadWriteWeb after I had a chance to write for them I found although they talk about similar things to my blog, I just couldn’t write anything worthwhile for them because they had such specific guidelines on what I had to write about.)

And I then followed the advice of a IWTYTBR.com’s Ramit Sethi on how to write a guest post that will blow their minds basically, even if you do half the work of what he suggests you will still have a post worth more than most! He is incredibly hard working and spends days on single posts, creating graphs, getting quotes, researching the subject etc. (although he is a New York Time’s Best Selling Author!) this post will help you a lot!

Here’s a little tip that I use myself when I write guest blogs:

Write a better post than you would for your own blog

Social Networking Part 1

I found that Digg (a DoFollow social bookmarking site) had the best SEO value yet the worst traffic value.

After working hard to get 500 (genuine) followers on two accounts (my personal account and my Social Puma account) I still found it hard to get traffic or just digg’s from any of them, after giving up on Digg and leaving it for a few weeks, but still spending 2 minuets to Digg each of my posts due to the fact I had a Digg This(/It) button on my blog post template I found that my posts would almost automatically be added onto Google in a matter of seconds! (in terms of searching for the exact title or something similar) and the next day it would be ranked properly for it’s keyword.

Social Networking Part 2

Using sites like Facebook, BlogEngage and on the odd occasion Twitter would bring my a lot of comments after befriending other fellow bloggers and other fellow social networking enthusiasts and that would get me a few comments in the first few hours getting me more SEO value from Google that I would immagine I’d not get if the comments woul have come in, for example, within days of posting. But the fact I can get comments within hours of posting a blog post really helped me out with my SEO.

I hope this helps you and if it dose be sure to leave a comment and I’ll write another similar post with a few more tips on how I’m managing to get over 400 views per day just from google (although I could easily get more!) Also if you’ve had a similar acidental SEO experience – how did it happen? What social networking sites did you use?

Tags: natural seo, seo social networking, seo through social networking, seo with social networking

Comments (15)

From Blogger To Youtuber

13
May

posted by Adam Smith filed under Social Networking, Youtube

Youtube, unlike blogging, is still very much in it’s early stages, we’re still finding new and interesting ways of attracting peoples attention using Youtube videos, granted, most of these methods involve small cats and babies – but there’s more to it than just that.

Although there is a very low percentage of blogger’s that also have a youtube channel, the majority of these youtube bloggers have been very successful, here’s some examples…

1.2 Create A Website

Lisa Irby is a Affiliate Marketeer turned blogger turned Youtuber, and she’s been working online since 2006. (2 Create A Website)

I myself found a lot of her videos very helpful when I was starting up my own blog, although a lot of her videos are based on affiliate marketing, there’s also a lot of other videos that could help a lot of new bloggers and generally internet-orientated work.

Her videos get thousands to tens of thousands of views, and with a total of 5,750,000 total views (she also has 2 other spin-off channels that have gotten another 100,000 views together.) – it’s hard to argue that youtube wouldn’t be able to pay-off.

2.Shoe Money

Jeremy Schoemaker, founder of ShoeMoney.com also has his own youtube channel, but it is not directly linked with his main site/blog so it’s only there really for people who are looking for it or have stumbled across it on youtube, it’s very much a personal vlog, which I think is the best thing to use Youtube for, he has over 1,000,000 views and 10 thousands subscribers.

There we had two very different examples:

(Lisa) got traffic from Youtube.
(Jeremy) used Youtube as a way off connecting with his existing readers and viewers.

I’m sure most of you will be looking at driving traffic like Lisa’s has been doing, but if you already have a community/fan base then Jeremy’s approach to should be better.

The Pros and Cons of Having a Youtube Channel

Reach A Different Audience.

Reach A Different Audience – they might not be as you’d expect.

Good Comments – can make you enthusiastic about making more videos.

Bad Comments – can really get you down if you let them.

Less Competition – Youtube is still undiscovered, in many respects.

Time Consuming.

If You Get Thousands of Views You Get Paid by Youtube (Youtube Partnership) – learn more…

You Need to Find Your Own Traffic on Youtube.

There’s just a few Pros and Cons for an average Youtuber to take into account.

What do you think? – Is Youtube a good platform for bloggers? Leave your comments below…

Tags: pros and cons of youtube, the pros and cons of having a youtube channel, youtube bloggers, youtube for bloggers

Comments (4)

How To Change Your Facebook ‘Theme’

24
Feb

posted by Adam Smith filed under Facebook, Social Networking

Facebook is a great platform for many things, such as keeping in touch with family and friends, lowering your usage on costly phones and just having a good time going through Facebook’s many, many features. But in many people’s opinions Facebook is lacking something that many, if not all, major social networks have – themes/skins.

Maybe they didn’t think it was relevant to add a feature like this, after all it is the biggest social network in the world.

Luckily the internet, as it usually dose has found a compromise, and to Facebook’s satisfaction – it’s a third party application.

That application is called ‘Stylish’ and it’s a Firefox plug-in so it will work on anything that supports Firefox, it’s been around for a while now, and has been used for many other websites as well such as Google, in-fact it can be used on almost all websites.

How Do You Install It?

First off we’ll need to get out of our current browser.
If you haven’t already – download and install firefox.
Now we go to the firefox ad-ons page and download the add-on called Stylish, here…
Once downloaded make sure you install it by making Firefox restart when prompted.
Head over to Facebook.com and log-in (assuming you’ve already signed-up to Facebook, if not sign-up on the front page)
Now go down to the bottom right hand corner and you should see a little ‘S’ icon…

If you cannot see this icon make sure you have ‘Status Bar’ on, (find this in the settings area – may vary for different Operating Systems eg. Mac, Windows, Linux etc.)
Click on ‘Find styles for this site…’ (and it should open a new tab with a list of Facebook themes)
Select a theme and it will take you to an install page.
Hit install, and refresh your Facebook homepage…

And that’s how you install your Facebook theme, if you have any problems i’ll be happy to help.

Tags: change facebook theme, how to change your facebook theme

Comments (22)

5 iPhone and Android Apps For Webmasters

3
Jan

posted by Adam Smith filed under Facebook, Social Networking, Twitter

With smartphones becoming more powerful and apps becoming more diverse and useful, it’s a wonder that more people don’t use their phones to their full potential. I myself use my smartphone when I’m out and about to check messages, write posts and check on my social networking accounts, but even i’m under-using my Android powered phones capabilities.

A recent study shows that 42% of mobile owners in the US use a smartphone and the figure is though to grow to nearly 50% by 2011.

So grab your Android power phone or iPhone and get your app store loaded and ready.

1. WordPress

As I mentioned above, I use my smartphone to write notes, and sometimes full posts, which my android phone can choose to store in it’s memory (offline) and upload as either a draft or a published post (online) using an internet connection.

The app is incredibly easy to set up, just your blog URL, username and password, I was shocked at how quick I was able to start writing posts.

Obviously it’s a watered down version of WordPress so you’ll be loosing a few of the features, but for the general stuff like checking comments, writing and editing posts and checking analytical data (requires setup) it’s perfect.

The official WordPress app can be downloaded from the Android Market and also on the iPhone (the iPhone version has more features.)

2. Google Analytics

GA is an important tool for any webmaster and, mixing it’s capabilities with the WordPress app, it can really help you check your stats on your latest posts or pages.

There are many GA apps for both the iPhone and Android powered phones.

I personally use ‘GAnalyticz‘ which is an free Android app, it gives you all the information you’d need except from the well-known blue graph which other paid apps can give you.

Again, it’s very easy to set-up, much like the WordPress plugin, although you must be online to use it.

For iPhone theres ‘BAM Analytics‘ which costs $1.99, which is the best price I could find for a GA app with full features.

If you want an iPhone GA substitute that won’t cost you anything try chartbeat – a similar app that can tell you other analytical data on top of the general stuff. It doesn’t have full features unfortunately.

3. FTP

This is a must have for all webmasters, unfortunately the iPhone doesn’t have a free app for FTPing:

‘FTP on the Go‘ is quite an expensive iPhone app which, at the time of writing costs $6.99 (which dropped from $9.99.)

For Android however the app is just as capable and useful, not to mention free:

‘AndFTP‘ is a really cleanly set out android app which gives you clear instructions as to how to set up your FTP with your website.

4. Domain Search

An obviously useful app for those times when you thick of a great domain name, rush to your computer only to find you’ve forgotten your domain name, or if you aren’t able to access your computer when you think of it.

For Android there’s ‘Domain Name Checker‘ a small and simple app that includes just a search feature to tell you weather or not it is available – very time (and cost) effective.

For the iPhone there’s ‘DomainStorm‘ which is also free but has more features including search facilities for .com, .net, .org etc. and the ability to buy it directly from your iPhone.

5. Adsense

‘DroidSense for Android is a great app, the only downside is the fact that it costs $0.99, it’s a very small downside. The free version only gives you data on the last free days, but the full version gives you everything you need to keep up to date with AdSense.

This app is even more relevant if your using phone ads on your site.

Unfortunately there doesn’t seem to be an app available for the iPhone.

These apps are really increasing efficiency for my websites and webmaster needs, I’m sure they will help you too.

Tags: android apps for webmasters, apps for webmasters, iphone apps for webmasters

Comments (8)

What Can We Learn From The World’s Largest Social Network?

18
Dec

posted by Adam Smith filed under Facebook, Social Networking

Facebook is the largest social network with over 500 million users and it’s everywhere at the moment. Mark Zuckerberg, founder of Facebook, made $28 million in the US box office alone with ‘The Social Network’ which some critics are calling ‘the movie of the year’. He’s creating his own comic book, and Facebook is planning to buy up to 15 small companies in 2011. I think it’s ok for me to say he hasn’t done too badly with Facebook!

So how can we learn from Mark Zuckerberg’s world renowned success?..

If At First You Don’t Succeed… Try And Try Again

Facemash was Mark’s first known website, if you haven’t heard the story of Facemash your in for a treat!

Facemash (which was recently sold in an online auction for $30,201) was created whilst Mark was attending Harvard as a sophomore – it used photos of other university houses (9 in total) which he compiled from hacking into the protected areas of Harvard’s computer network to place two people next to each other at a time and asked users to choose the ‘hotter’ person.

The site gained over 450 visitors and 22,000 photo views in the first 4 hours alone.

The site was later shut down and Mark faced expulsion due to several violation charges which were later dropped.

The following semester, Zuckerberg began writing code for a new website in January 2004. He was inspired, he said, by an editorial in The Harvard Crimson about the Facemash incident.[16] On February 4, 2004, Zuckerberg launched “Thefacebook”, originally located at thefacebook.com

The website was said to help contribute towards making a social netowrk for Harvard called HarvardConnection.com.

Which was found to be misleading users into helping Mark build a competing product and he was later filed with a lawsuit.

Then other undergraduates came to Zuckerberg to help towards making Facebook what it is today.

(more information can be found at Wikipedia.)

So what can we learn from this? I hear you ask, well we can learn several things:

If at first you don’t succeed… try and try again
Don’t be afraid to get your hands dirty
Work with other people who have the right skills to be able to contribute

Thanks for reading, post a comment if you think you’ve learn something from Facebook that hasn’t been listed.

Comments (2)

Top 3 Twitter Name Generators

16
Dec

posted by Adam Smith filed under Social Networking, Twitter

Ever seen a great twitter name and felt jealous of the user? I know I did, but I’m now pretty happy with @SocialPuma. But if your not happy with your user name you will be less inspired to keep it going, right? The Twitter name generators I will be listing have the capabilities to add sufixes, prefixes etc.

You can have up to 15 letters in your new Twitter name, remember to keep that in mind when using these twitter name generator programs.

1.My Username Generator

Myusernamegenerator.com is a great twitter generator, you can specify the length, weather or not it’s vowel heavy, Japanese, Chinese or fantasy and it doesn’t disappoint if your looking for something unique, here’s the first 3 username’s I generated on the ‘Short Length Usernames‘ setting:

Oneoqi

Agohu

Owuuki

Obviously I can’t say for definite that they will not already be taken on Twitter, and they are a little too fantasy-style for people, but I quite like them.

2.The Mormon Name Generator

Rumandmonkey.com’s mormon name generator is a clever name generator for use with Twitter that creates a name out of your first and last name in ‘Morman’ traditional name creation?:

They’re a funny old bunch, those latter day saints. Rather than picking names from their heritage, or the Bible, the Utah Mormons tend to make them up. Sometimes they’ll combine the parents’ names into one (BenDonna, for example). Other times it’s impossible to quite understand what their parents were thinking; names like Zestpool and Zon’tl aren’t uncommon.

Here’s what I came up with, with my name – Adam Smith:

Caramon Clemouth

Uwarda Vadna-Janmarie Aleith

They’re pretty strange, but I guess you could use it for creating a twitter name.

3. Dotomaster’s Web 2.0

Dotomaster’s Web 2.0 is probably my favorite name generator because it’s such a simple one! simply hit the ‘Generate Name!‘ button and you’ll get some awesome names that are usually a good enough length for twitter 15 char username rule, here’s the first 5 I came up with:

Quimia

Demidel

Oolith

Realfly

Brightster

even if you don’t like those names it’s easy and quick enough to just keep clicking till you do! it will give your brain a rest, let your clicking finger do the thinking!

Tags: twitter name generator, twitter name generators

Comments (19)