Are you posting Tweets and wondering why they aren't getting liked or shared?  

Here's the reason...

So what is quality?

• unique visuals that tell a story
• useful information, accompanied by great visuals
• helpful infographics
• funny/useful/scary videos
• unique visuals

And although it is not an unbreakable rule there is one common theme in each of these points.

So, when you're planning your content strategy put visuals on your must have list.

• Create them using Canva or Picmonkey
• Take your own photographs or videos
• Photos of images you create: paint, draw, print, cailigraphy you name it!
• You Tube videos of music

What's the anatomy of a well structured post?

• Give it a title
• Find a great quote
• Make an interesting comment
• Share an unusual fact
• 
  
  
  
  
  

Keep it short but readable, then

• use # and keywords so that people can search for your subject.  Make them relevant if you want it to work.

Now put in a link to your website/facebook page/instagram account...where ever you want people to go to see more of your work/business etc

You now have the option of pinning a key Tweet to the top of your feed.

Here's how:

• Post your Tweet
• Click on the body of the text 
• You will now only see this Tweet
• Top right click on 3 lined up dots
• Choose pin to your profile

​

And finally.  If you don't share then why would anyone else share your stuff?  

BE GENEROUS and RT (retweet) stuff that fits with your content strategy.

©Lynn Keddie

So you've signed up to Twitter, or maybe you've been using it for a while.

You have a handful of followers and you follow a bunch of people

How can you really make it work for you?

First up:  

Why are you using Twitter?

Because you want to find potential clients?

Lets suppose you are an engineer and want to find more architects to work with, here's how you go about it...this works on the desktop site as it has more functionality, not the mobile site which is simplified.  

Click on the search bar and type in #architects.

You then have an option to look at 

• top tweets
• live tweets
• accounts
• photos, or
• videos

You want accounts.  But wait, do you want to find architects from all over the world?  Probably not.
So click on 

More options on the far right...

     

...a drop down menu has various options, you want near you. This opens another screen where you can type in your location and a whole lot of other stuff to narrow your search.  Start with location and see what you get.

Scroll through the results, pick on someone you like the look of and 

• take a look at their feed,
  
• Read some of their blogs,
  
• Like or retweet and comment too, do it with honesty-this is where you can learn lots of new stuff about your customers.  
  
• Then follow them.  
  
• You may even want to add them to a list of say 'A list Architects' because everybody likes to get flattered.
  
• Then you hope that they return the favour and follow you back.
  
•  

​Either way, you can still like and retweet interesting architects, just to get your 'face' in front of them.  You have a common talking point and you can work on this relationship. 

You see, Twitter is a soft way of getting yourself noticed.

The key to the success of this strategy is what you post, your voice.

So what do you post?

• Information relevant to your business
• Interesting facts about your business
• retweet useful stuff relating to your business from Twitter
• your blog
• cool images of your work

The point is make it relevant, share, share and share alike.  

How often?


REGULARLY...not once a week or month when you have something interesting to say.  
Several times a day.  
Not all at once, set yourself a shedule.
A tool like Buffer is great for this.  
That way you aren't chained to Twitter.  
You take a little time to work things out then leave the software to work in the background for you.

Now, watch your business grow.
​
©Lynn Keddie

Now visuals are even more important to gain interest and a following on social media it's vital to post the best images possible on Twitter, Instagram, Google+, Facebook, Pinterest and the like.  

​You must stand out and posting great, relevant images has been proven to work over and over again.

Size is important  

Post the correct size for each platform.  You can read about it here or use Canva to create one post and it magically converts the image to every different size.
​

It's not just about size, you need to pick the best orientation for each social platform too so using the right image is important too otherwise a great image may be cropped or not have the best effect.

Here are some guidelines on orientation for some of the main social platforms.

Facebook 

Square or landscape both work.

Twitter

Post landscape shots unless you want most of the image cropped in the feed.  

If that happens there is no incentive for your followers to click on the image unless they are very, very curious.

Instagram

Have introduced  landscape as well as square, although they are cropped to square in your feed. You need to click on the image to get the full shot.

The screenshot of Foundrs feed shows this.  Steve Jobs image (3rd down on the right) has been cropped.

When you click on the image you see the whole story, not great and a bit of a fudge to accommodate both landscape and square format images.

PINTEREST

Portrait wins hands down, landscape images look tiny and lost.  

In the screenshot below, the earrings and Iris pop out, the cake in comparison is tiny.

​Blink and you'll miss it!

Google+  

Both portrait and landscape get an equal share and both look good

Linkedin 

Landscape although like Twitter there is a specific size and if your lead image doesn't fit into it it will automatically be cropped.  ​

With a bit of planning and some help from some really great software like Canva you can make the very best of your visual social media posts.

©Lynn Keddie

As a photographer and a social media coach I am often asked what makes a good profile picture for business social media.  So here goes this is what I would advise everyone.

• Use the same image across all your social media accounts, unless you a selling a different story. For example currently I am using this image for Linkedin, Google+, Twitter and Pinterest

• Pay for a professional to take the shot or, if cash is in short supply
• Ask a friend to take the shot, don't ever use a selfie
• Use a plain background or better still use a background that has context to who you are and blur it.  Here's how 

Which leads me nicely onto another don't.

• Don't use a picture of your pet, your favourite flower, your car, a nice bottle of wine....
• Don't wear sunglasses
• Don't use holiday shots or wedding shots
• Don't use action shots
• Don't use very old photos
• Don't convert to black and white
• Don't use a group shot and crop out the group
• So, don't use a group shot or a shot with someone else in it

This is about YOU, showing YOU in your best light

People want to see what YOU look like NOW, 

They want an open, friendly face so...

SMILE

LOOK STRAIGHT into the camera lens.  

That way you are making eye-contact with people looking at your profile shot.

Don't use a grumpy or angry looking shot. 

I've seen all these, I kid you not.

And finally,

ask some trusted friends if the one you choose fits the criteria.  

Remember trusted.  Ask people who will be honest with you.  If it's not OK they
will tell you.  
​
Here's a handy infographic, share it with your friends and colleagues (unless you don't like them!)

©LynnKeddie

Visual social media is now a hot topic in marketing.

It's not really surprising visuals: photographs and videos have been selling products for years. 

Our brain process images better than text and done well they work.  

These days all social media platforms have got their head round this and provided us with great ways of presenting images.  

Engagement increases by around 30% with a photo and 20% with video.  

That's the great news.  

OK there is some bad news...

Done badly it could really damage your business whether that business is you, a service you sell, or your products.



What are your options to get great photos? 

1. If you have the budget, hire a professional photographer who has the skills to deliver to your brief.
2. Buy from photo library and pay a much smaller sum for the use of an image. You pay for what you use, the more you want to use it the more it costs.
3. Use free stock photos, of which there are lots.  Yes, this could be an option but even free comes with a price...everyone else is using that image

How can you stand out from the crowd?

You must differentiate.

Don't have the budget?

There is one more route you can take, no it's not ripping off photos and hoping nobody will notice as copyright infringement comes with a hefty fine.

You can take your own photographs!

Yes YOU

​

How?
​

1. If you are only using these for web use a good smart phone, Android or iOS produces good enough quality, at around 2-4 mg you can even use these for publishing, so you no longer need a fancy camera.
2. Get familiar with some photo editing software these days you don't have to rely on Photoshop which is still a complex bit of software.  Try Snapseed for Android or for iOS
3. You need to change the way you think when you take the photograph, and I can show you how
4. You need to organise things

Want to find out more?  Read on...

• Dig around in the settings of your smart phone and adjust the resolution to the highest quality.

• Turn off auto flash

Get into the habit of taking photos all the time.

You may have a story/blog/brochure or quote you want to illustrate already in mind so think around the subject, don't always opt for the obvious.
​
Photos can illustrate all sorts of things, here are a selection of mine, most of these are shot with a small compact or my smart phone

• Use the most ordinary things and think of a creative way to represent them.  
  
• Collect props.  
  
• Use natural light here it's filtered ie no direct sunlight.
  
•  
  

This photo could illustrate a food blog,
or be the cover of a brochure about healthcare or,
​inspiration for a colour palette

Be creative with your composition.  We don't need to see the child in the photo but it still tells a story, (you must have written parental consent for publishing shots of under 18's in the UK)

Leave a little bit to the imagination, and there's plenty of space to overlay text that will read.

Look for evocative images.  Everyone likes the sea....Usethe rule of thirds to compost your picture

This image is perfect for a quote which can then be used in Twitter, Pinterest etc
Or it could be used for an invitation, an illustration for a brochure...the list goes on.

I hope I've given you food for thought.

Keeping things tidy...

• Make sure you download all your shots to a hard drive or keep in the cloud.  
• Rename them something sensible, 
• These now belong to you, no-one else can use these without your permission. You may watermark them with your copyright or not, your choice.

​I used Canva to overlay text.  It's a really cool design tool.

In five years time, you will thank me for this advice.  Build your own library, it's valuable and it's yours.

​©Lynn Keddie

Visual images on social media get a lot more engagement than text alone.  On every platform; Twitter see's a massive 35% increase in engagement.  Facebook too, even the platform for professionals Linkedin is driven by visual imagary.

How do you stand out from the crowd?

By posting GREAT images.  

​Not everyone is a professional photographer but there are two errors that lots of people make.  And bad photos don't get noticed.

I'm going to tell you what they are and show you how easy it is to fix them, so you can look like a pro photographer every time.

Wonky horizons

It drives me nuts every time a see a horizon that is sloping off to the left or right.
​Unless it's a deliberate 'artistic' gesture (no I know it isn't) then this is how you fix it.

Go into your picture editing software, if you're on a smart phone then it's right there. Chose rotate image and do just that.  Save it, then post.  It's that simple.

If you're posting to Instagram you can do this in the app.  

Go to the spanner icon and click adjust.  It's easy to get it right because you even have a grid to follow.

Twitter's new in app photo tools are still somewhat rudimentary and don't yet offer this but I'm sure they will be soon.

​Pinterest lives and dies on great imagery so get this right before you post.

The next one is for all you foodies, food bloggers or restaurant owners.  

A yellow cast on pictures of food

Yes, you've seen them, maybe you've even posted them.  The food sitting in front of you looks good enough to eat, so you want to share the moment with your followers and friends, and why not?  

So you take a snap and before you know it a sickly looking image of your gourmet meal is shared forever with the world and it doesn't look appetising, if you're lucky some kind friends will like your post.  And if you're a restaurant owner?  Well, you won't have customers beating down your door.  

Why does this happen?  

It's really simple.  The colour temperature in artificial light is different to daylight. Your brain adjusts to this, we're just clever like that.  But cameras record things faithfully.  The colour of light in restaurants is often warm (more orange to give a cosy feel), in labs and studios it's often colder, more blue.  

You need to adjust this.  Before you post your photograph you need to adjust the colour temperature.   This is so easy.

Look for tone and temperature on your smart phone and adjust it to look more like something you would like to eat, usually introducing a little more blue if it's yellowy and yellow if it looks cold.   

Save your image then post it and wait for the applause! 

Instagram makes this easy. 

Go to the spanner icon  and select warmth, adjust the slider to get the desired colour temperature.  Then post.
​

So, no more excuses.  It's what pro photographers do all the time, it's not difficult or even time consuming and it makes your images shine above the rest.

©Lynn Keddie

Thanks for reading.  If you want any more useful hacks for your social media empire let us have your email and we will remind you what is coming up! No spam.

Social media platforms are developing all the time.
  
Why, because they want their share of the social media apple and in order
to get that they have to stay ahead, or at least (in some cases) keep up!

So here are two Twitter hacks that you may not know about but are really useful.

Pin at tweet to the top of your feed 

Pick a great Tweet, one that you want people to look at and not 
disappear in the great ramble of Twitter feeds...


In other words, it doesn't get lost.

It could be:

• An offer
  
• A link to an important landing page
• Your latest work
• A great joke
• A fantastic picture or quote

And here's how to do it:

1. First up, you can only do this from your desktop site.
2. Click on the 3 little dots at the bottom right of your Tweet
3. Choose pin to profile page
4. Click and there you go-it's pinned right up there until you change it.

Below is an example of one that I pinned to my Twitter feed.  It sits at the top
until I decide to change it.
 
I got a few engagements even though I forgot to hashtag it!  
Yes, I did, so Twitter if you are listening to me, can we have an
edit button next, like Instagram?

That brings me to my next point. 

How did I put that Twitter post onto my website?
 


It's really simple:

1. First up, you can only do this on a desktop not on your mobile app
2. Pick a Tweet you want to post in your website
3. Click on the 3 little dots at the bottom right of the Tweet,
4. Click on embed Tweet
5. Copy the code and enter it into your website via whatever protocol it uses.
6. Your Tweet appears and links directly to Twitter so that anyone can like and retweet from your post and not just from Twitter.  That's pretty cool.
   

You can do it with a video too.

This is Buffy the rat slayer, well, we like to think so!

You can do this with other people's Tweets too. 

Because...

©Lynn Keddie 2015

Instagram is heating up.  

Actually  it's been pretty hot for it's loyal band of followers since its inception in 2010.

Maybe Instagram is on full power because Facebook acquired it, or maybe marketeers are waking up to the fact that...

Social media platforms are finding niches to differentiate themselves from each other. 
 
Businesses are seeing the potential of Instagram as the, lets face it, classy platform and they are  jumping onto the #Instawagon fast.
 
Instagram boasts the highest level of engagement but with only a tiny percentage of the social media marketing cake it is still small.   

But it's growing and that makes it exciting. 

If you were an early adopter and you got it right you really stand out now.

We can't be early adopters but we can get in there before it gets saturated like Facebook. 


So what is Instagram. and what makes it #Instaspecial?
 

• social media platform or is it?  
  
• app based (limited use from your desktop) so real on-the-move photography
• image based
• square format (there are ways around this, I explain later)
• good in-app filters
• owned by Facebook who claim they want to maintain it's unique niche 
• can't copy images (or can you?) great for copyright protection
• ways to sell off the site
• it's an experience

Instagram is an experience


'Instagram provides a space for people to showcase their artwork 
and get instant exposure'

That is powerful

• Photo feeds get lost on Facebook
  
• Twitter images are a jumbled patchwork
  
• Tumblr, well it's not bad, but...

Instagram has simplicity on it's side.  It's well designed and as I said, classy.

Of course everyone wants to break the rules.  

• apps for you to place a rectangular image into the Instagram square
  
• software to download images and 
• the resolution doesn't compete with SLR's ... yet

But the aesthetic quality you an create with just a phone and some clever software is pretty darn amazing.

Instagram is the key to open the door to the professional world of photography. 

There are #Instagrammers out there who make a 6 figure sum. Yep, there are.


  Want to get started read this...

Download the app to your phone, it's a mobile tool and has very limited use on a desktop.

Now that you're all set up you can start posting images.
  
There are two ways to do this:

1. Directly from the app, click the centre icon and choose between photo, or video or gallery
   
2. This takes you to your smart phones gallery you can upload a shot from here.  Note it will be cropped square.   Update!  Instagram introduces landscape and portrait photos to site.  No cropping to fit a square anymore         

There's lots to play with:

• ready made filters
• fine tuning including colour saturation, fading, vignetting, colour changing, straightening and cropping etc

Caption your image 

• give as much relevant information as you can.  
  
• keep your captions similar in style
• Hashtag your image with keywords and popular, relevant hashtags from Instagram.  This is important this is how people find you.  

But wait
. 
If you also want to share your post on Facebook then you have a quandary.
  

• Facebook users typically don't support hashtags and they will make your Facebook feed look messy.  
  
• Twitter users prefer between 2-3 hashtags
  

If you don't hashtag on Instagram you will never be noticed

So do this

• Hashtag a couple of times in the caption  
  
• Post the image, in the comment box add your list of extra hashtags
  
• When you share your post to other sites a couple of hashtags appear with the url of your post but not the full list

• Post by clicking the tick at the top right hand side
  
• Choose to send the image to a specific follower-direct, or to everyone-your followers
• Post 2-3 times a day, at different times

So you want to save your final photo, the one with the fancy filters, to use somewhere else and 
Instagram doesn't offer this option 

Here's what to do:

• Follow all the steps above until the step before you post, then do this
  
• Switch your phone to airplane mode then,
  
• Hit post.  Instagram will say your upload failed - stay on that screen
  
• Switch airplane mode off
  
• Click the retry button on Instagram.  
  
• Your photo will upload and you will also save your final image in your gallery
  

There is also software out there which enables you to download your feed to your desktop.

But images are copyright protected, that means that unless owners say so, or you buy them
it is illegal to use them.  

Just because stuff is on the internet it does not mean it's free.

• Follow people and businesses that you engage with on a lifestyle and emotional level
• Use the search facility to find them
  
• Find people you are interested in look at their followers or who they follow and see if they interest you too
  
• Follow business you connect with direct from their web site
  
• Don't chase followers and don't ever buy followers.  A few loyal customers are valuable, passers by are not.

 

• Develop a strong hashtag strategy, spend time researching hashtags
  
• Identify the essence of your brand, your message
• Identify key customer groups and use similar hashtags
• Use the same hashtags as your competitors

• Check out Instagram a few times a day and hit the like button for images you genuinely like, 
  
• Comment on their work, people love great feedback and it helps to connect like-minded individuals
• Thank people for their comments or start up a dialogue
• Mention other Instagrammers in your comments by using the @ followed by their Instagram handle..

You know how, get started now!

©Lynn Keddie

Next time  

How to sell products on Instagram

Pinterest is growing fast.  Still think it's just a pin board for cupcakes and crochet patterns?  Not any more.  Businesses are waking up to it's
potential. 

Why should you be using Pinterest as part of your marketing profile?

• Create and update your own beautifully crafted boards
  
• Showcase your products the way you want to
  
• Create a vibe that matches your business so people instantly understand you
  
• Sell your products right from the app
  
• Pinterest users have the highest spending power
  

And it's growing...

FAST

Can you afford not to be there?  

Here's how you get the best out of Pinterest for your business.

Sign up to Pinterest as a business not an individual and fill in all the information asked like:

• Your business category
  
• Your business name
  
• Your website - Pinterest will check this out and verify it
  
• What notifications you want to receive
  
• What other social platforms you want to link to
  

Create some boards (you can make them private until you're ready to share).

• Give your board a meaningful name so that when people search they will find it
  
• Put it in a Pinterest category
• Describe your board using relevant keywords
  
• Give it a good front cover-colours work well here
  
• When you're ready make it public
  

Why not give it a go?

And don't forget to follow me here!

I was asked to co-host a live webinar for Enterprise Nation last week.  


Those are the guys who champion start-ups and entrepreneurs in the UK.  They currently have around 70,000 members and its growing fast!  


A couple of weeks ago they asked if I would co-host a live questions and answers sesson about social media.   


It was great fun talking to everyone and I took away this...


lots of people are very confused about social media.


This is one question I am asked over and over again... 



What social media  should I use to promote my business?


Great question!

And here is my answer...


It starts with a few questions you need to answer.

What is my business?
Who are my customers?
What are my business objectives that I want social media can help me with?

If you are new to social media I would say pick one platform, get familiar with it and add others as you get more experienced.  Each one offers something a little different.  Here is my simple infographic to help you decide which route is best to get you started.

The best bit of advice I can give you is to start!

It gets easier when you get used to it and learn about all the cool tools
to help you along and save you time.

©Lynn Keddie

Watch this space, sign up for tips to help you with your social media here...