social media tutorials

We have looked at a LOT of information about Twitter this week, and we’ll finish out the week with our final post on the anatomy of the home page.  

Yesterday, we continued our conversation about the left hand column, which focuses on the tweets in your stream, replies, retweets, searches, and lists (which I’ll cover in a later post). So today, we’re going to take a look at the right hand column.  

The right hand column serves as a sort of Twitter snapshot for the day, from your perspective. Continue Reading Twitter Tutorials – Anatomy of the Home Page Part III

So now we’ve got our profiles set, and we’re building our followers.  I’d like to talk about engagement as we did during the LinkedIn series, but first, I think it’s important to understand the Twitter home page.  Because Twitter does seem to have a strange language all of it’s own, I want to make sure that it’s all understandable as we move through the tutorials.  One of the best recommendations I can give you though, is to play around with Twitter as much as possible – with all of the various social media platforms out there, I’ve found that diving in is one of the best ways to learn what Twitter is all about. 

But along with testing out Twitter on your own, let’s check out the home page now that we have some people we’re following. Continue Reading Twitter Tutorials – Anatomy of the Home Page Part I

Now that we’ve got our Twitter profile ready for it’s debut, it’s time to start following people.  Yes, this sounds a bit stalker-ish, and it is, a little, because you’re subscribing to whatever someone else wants to tweet.

But although there are people out there tweeting about everything they ate for breakfast, you don’t have to do this – there can be some use in tweeting if you’ve eaten out at a great restaurant, but we’ll cover subjects to tweet on in a future post! 

So let’s begin by logging into our home page again.  If you left the box checked yesterday to keep you signed in on Twitter, going to twitter.com will automatically take you to your home page. Otherwise, you may need to sign in again. 

Because we didn’t follow anyone yesterday, we’ve still got a lot of options listed for getting started, thanks to Twitter. Continue Reading Twitter Tutorials – Follow and Be Followed

Happy Halloween everyone! Since Halloween is my second favorite holiday (after Christmas), I had to take a time out to say "enjoy!" and share a photo of my little "spooks." 

But back to the task at hand – let’s get started with Twitter. To create your profile, we’re going to start by going to Twitter.com

As you can see, Twitter says that using their service, will give you "instant updates from your friends, industry experts, favorite celebrities, and what’s happening around the world."  Continue Reading Twitter Tutorials – Creating Your Profile

Don’t worry – I know I haven’t finished my Facebook series yet, or even gotten very far underway.  But because we’re expecting some major changes with Facebook with the rolling out of the new "timeline," it makes sense to wait until it’s out before moving forward.

So in the meantime, I thought I’d get started with our Twitter tutorials, particularly since I had a request from a non-legal family member on behalf of a colleague for some assistance!

Before we get started, I’m sure there are many of you who will roll your eyes at my recommendation to use Twitter.  I mean, what can you really get across in 140-character bursts? 

So very much.

I’ll give you my background on Twitter – several years ago, I launched a very small gifts company, selling designs on tee shirts, etc. through Cafe Press.  As a marketer, I was looking for ways to build buzz around my designs without having to spend any money.  I found a list of suggested ways to do this, which included signing up for Twitter – something I’d never heard of.Continue Reading Twitter Tutorials – Getting Started

So now we’ve created a very basic Facebook profile, and just as we did with LinkedIn, it’s time to expand on that. 

When Facebook welcomes you, they want you to fill in your profile information, activate your mobile phone, find people you know and control what information you share.  We’ll go through each of these steps, as well as the "why" behind them, in the coming days.  Today, we’re going to focus on step one – filling out your profile information.  Continue Reading Facebook Tutorials – Creating a Profile Part II

Now we are on to a new set of tutorials – Facebook! 

You may be wondering why I would choose Facebook as the next social media tool to delve into – isn’t that for kids?

No!

Also, during our LinkedIn tutorial, you may remember that I posed a question in LinkedIn’s Answers feature to illustrate how to do it – and people answered.  My question was whether Facebook or Twitter was more valuable for lawyers.  Of course, the answer is – it depends.  But overwhelmingly, the responses of the group were "Facebook."  So Facebook it is! 

One of the most valuable things on Facebook is pages (and groups), but since we have to have a personal profile in order to use those, we’re going to start there. Continue Reading Facebook Tutorials – Creating a Profile Part I

And here we are – with the exception of possibly one more post on My Travel from TripIt (which is still acting a bit wonky), we are at the end of our series on LinkedIn! I hope that you’ve gotten some useful tips, and you feel as though you’re starting to use LinkedIn to its full potential.

This morning, Cordell Parvin asked me to share with him what my top LinkedIn tips would be, and I think these would be a good starting point for our final how-to.  They are: 

  • Have a full and complete profile so that people can get to know you. 
  • Make LinkedIn one of the pages that automatically opens when you open your browser – then you don’t have to remember to check it.
  • Reach out to someone in some way every day – comment on a status, recommend an article, "like" someone’s post. 
  • Participate actively in groups – ask questions, post relevant articles (not just your own), engage with other participants.
  • Take the relationships offline – offer to meet someone in your network who is local for coffee or lunch and look to meet up with those in other cities when you’re traveling. 

Continue Reading LinkedIn Tutorials – The Wrap Up

Last week, we talked about how you can follow companies on LinkedIn (and why you would want to!). Today, we’ll chat about creating and maintaining a company page. Attorneys, your firm may already have a company page, so make sure to check this out first – this may be something that your marketing department is handling.

We already have a company page for the ILN, so I won’t be creating a new one of those.  But I am in the process of launching a new website for my photographic services, so now is a good time to start a company page for that. Continue Reading LinkedIn Tutorials – Companies – How to Create a Profile