As part of The Best Job Evah, I use a huge range of social media platforms every day. Hands down, two of my favourites are Instagram and Pinterest. As it turns out, both of these faves made some changes this week that have users clapping and smiling.
Instagram is quickly becoming one of the world’s most popular photo-sharing platforms on social media. It’s free, it’s easy to use, it allows you to be creative even when you’re not and honestly, it’s a lot of fun. I've tried a few different types of photo-sharing programs and Instagram won my heart when I saw how easily it integrated into my other social media streams, and honestly...when I saw how dang awesome it made my photos look.
Additionally, there are some very cool add-on apps which can be integrated with Instagram, making the whole creative & sharing process that much more fabulous.
The only drawback to Instagram was that there was no “web profile” per say. You could only see users photos if you had an Instagram account and were logged in. This frustrated many users who wanted to have a simple way of sharing photos online and also wanted a way to discover more users to follow.
So, Instagram listened and voila, web profiles are now available. If the layout looks familiar, that’s because Instagram is now owned by Facebook, so there’s a bit of similarity there.
Note: With this new update, ALL of your photos can be seen by anyone who views your page. If you are concerned about your photo privacy, you can set your Instagram profile to “private,” and then only your Instagram followers will be able to see them.
Pinterest totally made Santa’s elves across the world happy today with the announcement that users would be able to now have “secret” boards. As with Instagram, this is a feature that was requested by Pinterest users and luckily for us, Pinterest was listening. The great thing about having a board on Pinterest that’s invisible is that, hello, you can now find awesome things for kids, decide on variations of a new hairstyle or plot out that dream kitchen you’ve always wanted without having all of your followers know what you’re up to.
It doesn’t always take a lot for a brand to make users and fans happy. It’s nice to see brands like Instagram and Pinterest actually listening to their users, and it furthers my belief that like Mama always said, if you don’t ask, you don’t get.
I do love Facebook, for many reasons. However, as a community manager, sometimes Facebook really annoys me. It seems that over the past little while, they like to implement changes, but then leave it up to the user to discover what changes have been made and figure out how the changes affect them and potentially their brands.
It’s like they never tell us anything.
Case in point: Last year I discovered that fans on our Facebook page could directly send us messages. Facebook didn’t tell me about it, I actually heard about it on Twitter first. Odd.
More recently, Facebook has made changes to their edgerank algorithum, which has resulted in reduced visibility of fan pages in a user's main newsfeed. So while it's awesome that a user has clicked "like" on a whole bunch of pages so they can read posts, chances are they're not seeing a large percentage of them. Unless the brand or fan page pays to "promote" a post, of course.
If I do say so myself, we put some awesome stuff up on our Facebook page and the sucky thing is that with the changes Facebook has made recently, not everyone is seeing it.
Really? Really.
*Stomps foot*
You might miss things like this photo of something truly cool that made a child smile, or this contest we are running with a $750 prize, or this conversation where parents gave us their opinion about kids walking to school by themselves.
We want you to see us, and we want to see you.
So, as I switch my hat here from Facebook Page Manager to Facebook User, I'm going to share with you the trick I use to keep my sanity.
Lists.
So here’s how it's done. Listmaking skills are involved but there’s nothing like “milk, butter, bread” involved with this list.
1) Go to this link to see what lists of interests you already have, and to create a new one
2) Click “Add Interests”
3) Click “Create List"
4) A window will popup asking you to select people and pages to add to this list. This is where your organizational skills REALLY come into play. I prefer to organize my pages by interest, like ones that are local, ones that are all about food, or tech stuff, or kids stuff. You get the idea.
5) Name your list. Give your new list a fabulous name. I’ve used “Fab Mom Sites” in this example. This list is to help you organize all of the Facebook feeds that you want to keep connected with - including ours, right? Right
.
6) On the same window, select the privacy level for the list: “Public,” “Friends,” or “Only Me." Pretty self-explanatory and worth the while to give it some thought. I’m a little nutso about privacy on Facebook, so I have all my lists visible to only me.
DONE! Now you’ll see on your main feed page, down at the bottom on the left-hand side your list is now showing under “Interests." If you want to bump it up and add it to your Favourites feed, hover over the name until the pencil shows up to the left of the name. Click it and then select “Add to favourites.” Voila. A perfected newsfeed of your favourites.
Now when you’re on Facebook every day, you’ll see your interest list get updated and can read of the latest updates without worrying that you’ve missed something.
And just to make sure, this is the url for the YMC Facebook page—if you’re not already a fan, we’d love to have you join our page and join in the conversation! And of course, make sure you add us to one of your fabulous new lists. :)
Let’s save Hide and Seek for the kids to play outside, not when parents need to connect online.
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