Tag: posts

WWYD – What Would You Do?

Knowing the answer to What Would You Do can be difficult

We all have opinions. Some are stronger than others; others, vocalize their opinions louder than others; and yet most, will never change their opinion no matter what the voice of reason/opposition has to say. Playing off the television show, I ask, what would you do?What would you do

Here is the situation:

Recently, I saw a post from a Facebook connection. It was a video and social commentary on a rather sensitive topic. What I saw in the video was a bit different than what the poster had expressed in the written comment. I began to write my response to the post about 5 different times. Eventually, I ended up not typing anything.

Each time I would start thinking I was taking a different tact, but ended up deleting the response because the written word and a post is forever. It is so much more difficult to know the tone and intent of a comment when written than when you are speaking directly to that person because you are able to see the non-verbal communication.

Because of an experience I had years ago on a chat board with trolls who posted to cause a disturbance, I am much more aware of “newbies”, or even someone who has been around a long time, could take the written word out of context and think an innocent comment is a personal attack.

Additionally, I didn’t think that my comment would be taken in the right context as I could be considered on the opposite side of that particular sensitive topic.

Here are some thoughts to help you figure out what you would do:

  1. Do what I did and let the moment pass. I didn’t feel so strongly about the issue that I felt I had to make the comment.
  2. Write your comment and let the “battle” begin. Once I posted a bad review in a “What’s happening in ((You name the town))”. My post garnered a great deal of responses and some were just nasty.
  3. Unfollow the person or shut them out of your feed. ( I have done this before, it can be kind of liberating.)
  4. Try to send a private message to the person with your opinion so as not to take it public.
  5. Make a phone call.

Remember, you will probably not change the opinion of the person to whom you are commenting, so is it worth the angst you might feel when the return comments are heated, pointed or vengeful. (I just had a thought that I wouldn’t be writing about this, if the item or the issue were positive, like beautiful flowers or gorgeous scenery.)

What else would you do?

Using Hootsuite

Hootsuite is a great tool to use for scheduling posts!

I wrote an article a while back about adding a LinkedIn company page to your Hootsuite scheduler. You can take a look here.

Hootsuite keeps adding great options to make it a time-saver when posting to social media.  Their phone app isn’t as robust, but the desktop version is a wonderful tool.

If you want to add company pages to your stream you can view a video of how to do that in the link above, but here are a few still shots for your review:

1. Log into your account

2. Click on your image on the left side

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3. Click on your name

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4. Find your “My Social Networks”

5. Hover over and click to add a social network

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6. Pick the platform that you want to add.

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7. Connect your personal profile

8. Add the group, profile or page that you want to post in or follow.

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9. Once added, go to the streams and modify what appears in a stream!

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Only 10 LinkedIn Company pages or showcase pages are available.

The one challenge to Hootsuite is you cannot add your personal G+ feed, and if you have more than 10 company pages including the showcase pages, you may not be able to see the company page that you want to add. That is something that Hootsuite needs to fix.

 

 

 

 

Let me know if you have any other social media questions! I offer one-on-one consultations or small group classes. Take a look at all of my services here.

LinkedIn Groups Updates

Have you seen the latest LinkedIn Groups Updates

Today in LinkedIn, I clicked on Groups and noticed there has been a significant LinkedIn Groups Update.

See the image below, but to summarize:LinkedIn Groups appearance has changed

  • The groups to which you belong are listed across the top
  • Click “See More” to view all of your groups
  • Check the number of groups to which you belong – remember you can join up to 50 groups
  • Follow the conversations from your groups in a stream below the list.

Now one of the best things that this change has brought about is that if you want to start a discussion in more than one of your groups you don’t have to go from group to group to start the discussion.  For example, this is especially useful if you are sharing a job posting.  Click here to read about how to Share a Post that you see in your updates stream or from company updates.  What is great about the new feature is:LinkedIn Group Discussion

  • you type in your headline,
  • type in your message,
  • pick whether it is “General”, “Promotion”, or “Job” and then
  • Select the “Choose a group” to you see the drop-down list of your groups!

This is a great time saver if you don’t have an update to share from a company. It is a great way to gather information from multiple groups for research or to obtain an answer to a questions for which you just cannot find the answer. Share a workshop or other event to appropriate groups.

As a reminder, some groups moderate their discussions, so your post may not appear automatically. Be careful not to appear spammy so that you are cut out of the loop!

Happy posting!

What is Hootsuite?

Last week my post about adding your LinkedIn company page to Hootsuite turned into a Do you Use Hootsuite? post in the groups to which I belong on LinkedIn.  One group member asked – Please explain the basics and advantages of “Hootsuite” to one that is not familiar with the concept.

Owly says “Hoot – suite”

I thought it might be useful to provide an explanation on my blog.

First let me say that there are other options, but I have found Hootsuite to suit my needs the best.

Hootsuite is a a social media management system for businesses and organizations to collaboratively execute campaigns across multiple social networks from one secure, web-based dashboard. For free you can have up to 5 profiles in one browser window. For each profile you can have multiple streams from that profile – for example from your Twitter account you could include the Tweets of the people you follow, tweets that include a mention of your Twitter handle, and any direct messages to you.  For this purpose it is a great customer service tool.

There are some limitations with a few of the profiles options, but in general this is a good one-stop location to follow most of the platforms on which you would have a profile.  Hootsuite is pretty responsive to the requests from the users and new options become available periodically.

Another major benefit to Hootsuite is the ability to schedule posts.  This is useful if you will be on vacation, in a meeting, on a webinar or otherwise unavailable to post at a particular time.  There is even an auto-post feature that Hootsuite will post at the best time for your fan-base.

Drafts is another feature.  I have found this useful when I was trying to promote a particular program or limited time feature on a product.  To me this would be more beneficial in Twitter than some of the other platforms.  The repetitive nature allows you to say the same thing and perhaps only change a word (a fundraiser would be a good example to use this).

Hootsuite also offers a team option – this is a paid feature.  If you have a team of individuals who would be addressing customer service issues, you can forward a post that you see to that individual for that person to address.

Some of the platforms don’t give as much “credence” to the third party applications like Hootsuite, so your posts may not have the same visibility (in Facebook especially) as if you post directly to the platform, but they are still useful.   If you want to manage your social media yourself, but need to be about the business of your business, sometimes, using a tool like Hootsuite is the best use of your time.  Remember that even though you may schedule a post, you still need to keep an eye on your social media platforms to be able to respond to comments or messages that followers may post that you don’t “see” right away in Hootsuite.

Nothing is perfect, but we need to make use of the tools and products that help us to our best at the time.

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