Author: Christian Karasiewicz

Get organized with the Facebook organize tool

Is your Facebook news feed overrun with updates from people you no longer interact with? Did you know you can use the Facebook organize tool to clean-up your news feed.

What is the Facebook organize tool?

The Facebook organize tool is a way to remove updates from your news feed from people you don’t interact with very often.

When you use the organize tool to remove people, you are telling Facebook that you don’t want to see updates from those individuals in your news feed – you’re not actually disconnecting your friendship with those people.

Instead, what this does is it reduces the number of updates you see in your news feed from them.

This is very helpful if there are people you haven’t interacted with someone in quite some time.

Using the organize tool is very easy. Follow the instructions below to start cleaning up your news feed with the Facebook organize tool.

Using the Facebook organize tool

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Facebook shared photo albums – collaborate and consolidate [video]

If you’ve ever attended a conference or gone on vacation with friends or family, you know how frustrating it can be to collect all of the photos that everyone took. With Facebook shared photo albums, you can now easily share photos and consolidate them into one album.

Facebook shared photo albums

What are Facebook shared photo albums?

Facebook shared photo albums are photo albums that multiple people can contribute to. This means they can view, edit, and add photos to an album.

Creating Facebook shared photo albums is very easy (and beneficial). To create shared albums, follow these instructions.

How to create Facebook shared photo albums Continue reading Facebook shared photo albums – collaborate and consolidate

13 Mind-blowing Facebook stats

Facebook recently released their second quarter earnings for 2013. With a lot riding on Facebook’s quarterly earnings report, they released a number of Facebook stats to go along with it.

Fortunately, they didn’t need all of the stats that they provided to demonstrate how well Facebook is doing. For those of you interested in seeing which Facebook stats were shared, Craig Smith at Digital Marketing Ramblings compiled a comprehensive list.

So what Facebook stats did they talk about? Obviously, mobile usage was a big one. Others covered the growth of Facebook’s users.

Overall, they were interesting stats that provided good insight into the health of Facebook – which is very good at the moment.

Here’s a rundown on some of the Facebook stats that I found interesting.

  • There are 1.15 billion total Facebook users [tweet this]
  • Facebook has 699 million daily active users [tweet this]
  • On average, users are connected to 89 pages and groups [tweet this]
  • Users spend 20 minutes on average per day on Facebook [tweet this]
  • The average Facebook user has 141.5 friends [tweet this]
  • Checking Facebook is what 48% of users between the age of 18-34 do first in the morning [tweet this]

If you like these Facebook stats, keep reading, as there are more (and an infographic).

13 mind-blowing Facebook stats

Continue reading 13 Mind-blowing Facebook stats

How to Embed Facebook Posts From Profiles and Pages

Facebook embedded posts are finally now available to everyone on Facebook. When you embed Facebook posts, this doesn’t just mean you’re now able to post Facebook updates to your website or blog.

You now have more opportunities to leverage your blog or website as a way to build and grow your Facebook presence.

Learning how to embed Facebook posts is very easy to do and takes just a couple of minutes.

Follow these three steps to learn how to embed Facebook posts on your blog or website.

How to embed Facebook posts

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10 Tips for performing a Facebook operation [Infographic]

Everyone remembers the game, Operation, right? In a recent study, 82% of social media users think Facebook is a good place to interact with brands (tweet this stat). If your Facebook presence isn’t where you want it to be, it might be time to consider performing a Facebook operation.

What exactly is a Facebook operation?

While operations are usually permanent, a Facebook operation is where you tweak certain areas of your Facebook Page and can always go back and change them as the times change.

For example, you may have a great cover photo on your Facebook Page; however, maybe the only areas you need to operate on are to make your landing pages mobile friendly.

By performing an operation on your Facebook Page, you can greatly improve your Facebook presence and make your page more appealing to fans.

Remember, the more appealing and inviting your Facebook presence is, the more your fans will want to share the great content, photos, and more that you post.

Is a Facebook operation necessary?

52% of social media users find a business’s Facebook Page more valuable than their website (tweet this stat). I expect that number to continue to grow as more businesses are using their Facebook Page for leads.

If you’re ready to go under the knife and perform a Facebook operation on your Facebook Page, the team at ShortStack put together this great infographic with tips on different areas you should consider operating on.

10 tips on performing a Facebook operation

Continue reading 10 Tips for performing a Facebook operation [Infographic]

5 free services to schedule tweets

5 ways to schedule tweets

Image via: Firebrandmedia

Twitter is a social media tool where things happen in real-time and it’s almost expected that you’re tweeting at a given moment. So what happens when you’re not going to be available and need to tweet? It’s time to schedule tweets!

By scheduling tweets, you can be in two places at once. For example, you could be sending out tweets, while you are meeting with business partners or attending an event.

Is scheduling tweets bad?

When you schedule tweets, it isn’t a bad thing, provided it’s not something you are doing all of the time. Successful Twitter users schedule tweets for those times when they are not going to be available. When they are available, they take the time to respond in real-time to tweets and engage with their followers.

If you plan to schedule tweets just so you can say that are on another network, I would reconsider why you are using Twitter to begin with.

Tools to schedule tweets

There are literally hundreds of tools you can use to schedule tweets. Today, we’re focusing on free services you can use to schedule tweets.

What we’re focusing on today are Twitter tools that are free and have a good track record, meaning they won’t close up shop next week.

Note: some of the tools we recommend to schedule tweets offer both a free and a paid version. Depending on how much you use Twitter and the features you want, such as analytics or being able to incorporate all of your social media channels into one tool.

Remember, while there are hundreds of tools, we have selected our favorites. If you have another Twitter tool you use to schedule out tweets, please leave in the comments below.

5 free services to schedule tweets

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Vine ghost tool – stop-motion animation videos like a pro – Video

Are you frustrated with shooting poor stop-motion animation videos using Vine? With the Vine ghost tool, you can now make better videos.

For those of you unfamiliar with stop-motion animation, it’s where you make an object move by itself. Here’s an example of a stop-motion animation video on Vine.

As you can see, this requires you to shoot the objects in one place, stop your Vine video, reposition the objects, and shoot more scenes for the Vine video. Without alignment tools, this can be challenging to shoot.

Fortunately, Vine has added the Vine ghost tool, which now makes it easier to position objects when you are shooting stop-motion animation videos. For example, without the Vine ghost tool, you had to remember how you aligned an object in frame. Now, using the Vine ghost tool, when you record a Vine video, it saves the last frame.

This way when you need to stop shooting and move your object, you can easily realign the objects in your Vine videos.

Making better videos with the Vine ghost tool

Vine ghost tool

To use the Vine ghost tool, follow the instructions below.

Continue reading Vine ghost tool – stop-motion animation videos like a pro – Video

10 SEO tips for writing content that ranks

To write good SEO content that ranks well, you don’t need a Ph.D in English. Instead, there are lots of great SEO tips that you can incorporate into your next blog post that can help you improve your writing and your rankings.

The great thing is that these are SEO tips that anyone can do, it just takes some practice and to remember to use them when you are writing your next blog post.

Advice on writing for SEO

When writing for SEO, the best piece of advice I can offer is to be human. Sure, you can write a blog post and use the same keywords over and over, but that makes your post boring. It also means people probably won’t want to share your content because it lacks personality.

Some of my favorite seo tips include:

Writing for humans and not robots

Do you speak robot? If you want to communicate with your audience, write something that is thought provoking and something they will want to read.

Write for SEO, but use your words

Search engines can find variations in your text. Be sure you include them! This way your content isn’t boring and repetitive.

Write thorough blog posts

The more your write about a particular topic, the more search engines can crawl and index it. If you only write 300 words, you could be leaving out valuable information for your readers – and for search engines.

Use long tail keywords

If you think you’re going to write a blog post on a generic keyword, think again. Chances are it is very competitive so writing one blog post will not help you rank for SEO for that keyword. Instead, you want to focus on long tail keywords. These are terms that people are searching for. For example, how to get started with SEO.

Answering questions

Have you ever looked up a keyword on Google and noticed lots of discussion forums? If you happen to know the answer (and you have a blog post that answers the question), you’ll want to make sure you post it within the community. This is a valuable tip where you can be helpful and benefit from at the same time!

For example, the keywords rank well for SEO, which brings up the discussion forum. If you have a blog post answering that question, because this keyword ranks so well, you can share a link to your post and should see a decent amount of traffic from readers looking for this answer.

Overall, this is one of my favorite SEO tips (and most overlooked). Be sure you’re taking advantage of this one. Remember, if you are directing someone to the answer, make sure the content on your site is thorough. If you have good content, they may want to share it with others.

In addition to the SEO tips mentioned above, there are plenty more so keep reading.

10 SEO tips for writing content that ranks

Continue reading 10 SEO tips for writing content that ranks

Growing your connections by tagging on Vine

Do you take advantage of tagging on Vine to help spread the word about your Vines?

Anyone who posts videos on Vine needs to be using the tagging feature on the Vine app. This is because tagging is important in helping you grow your presence on Vine. 

Tagging on Vine

Tagging users on Vine can occur within the description of a Vine video or within comments. This is a great way to notify other Vine users when they have been featured in a Vine. You can also tag Vine users if you want to notify them about a Vine video that they should check out.

If you post a Vine video featuring a user and do not notify them that they are in it, how can you expect them to view your Vine and share it with their followers?

To tag on Vine, follow the instructions below.

Tagging on Vine

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4 ways to format Google+ posts and standout

Learn how to format Google+ posts and add appeal to your posts so that you stand-out. 

While current social trends  suggest that Google+ is still in second place behind Facebook in terms of growth, one area where Google+ beats Facebook is in the ability to add different types of formatting to your Google+ posts.

On Google+, you can add four types of formatting to your posts.

  1. Bold
  2. Italics
  3. Strikethrough
  4. Combination

Learning how to format takes just a couple of minutes and can come in handy when you’re sharing something important and you want to add emphasis to it.

To format Google+ posts, follow the instructions listed below.

4 ways to format Google+ posts

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