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

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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Blocking on Facebook Explained

Blocking on Facebook is a skill that all Facebook users need to learn how to do.

For some reason though, when talking about blocking on Facebook, this seems to confuse a lot of users. With so many changes happening on Facebook all at once, this is understandable; however, you still need to learn how to block on Facebook. Today, we’re going to help you get over your fear of blocking on Facebook and learn how to do it right (and quickly).

Blocking on Facebook is really easy to do and it is something you can setup in just a few minutes. Let’s get started.

Blocking on Facebook

Why block on Facebook?

Chances are, at one point or another, you’ve received an unwanted invitation on Facebook. This could be from a user, an app, or an invite.

While you can delete the message you received, it does not get stop someone from sending you the same invitation again. It also does not give you back the time you wasted deleting that invitation.

To solve this problem, you need to use blocking on Facebook. 

The block feature on Facebook let’s you setup five specific areas to block. These include:

  • Users
  • Apps
  • App invites
  • Event invites
  • Restricted list

How to use blocking on Facebook Continue reading Blocking on Facebook Explained

Save Google searches to save time on Google+

If you could save Google searches and improve your workflow and save time in the process, what would you do with the time you saved?

For anyone who has spent time searching for things on Google+, one of the most overlooked features is the ability to save Google searches.

Saving your Google search within Google+ makes it easy to access items you search for a lot on the site. For example, if you’re a social media strategist and you’re always searching for terms such as “Google+ marketing,” instead of having to type this search in each time, you can save it for later.

How to save Google searches on Google+

Saving a Google search in Google+ is very easy to do. You can find instructions, along with a video on how to save Google searches in Google+ below.

How to save Google searches on Google+

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70 time-saving social media shortcuts [Infographic]

Whether it’s figuring out how to squeeze more time out of our daily lives or how to more productive on social media sites like Facebook, Twitter, Google+, and YouTube. We’re always looking for a shortcut. As we share more and more of our personal lives through social media, it’s time that we created social media shortcuts to help us learn how to get more efficient in the limited amount of time that we have.

According to Experian Marketing Services, Americans spend 16 minutes of every hour online on social networks. That’s nearly 25% of every hour being spent on a social media site. While we won’t go into what users do on social media sites. that’s a lot of time to be spending checking updates from others and less time that we can be productive.

The team at Quintly put together this infographic featuring 70 social media shortcuts to help you get more done on Facebook, Twitter, Google+, and YouTube. In addition to the social media shortcuts listed, they’ve also included a few easter eggs (hidden features).

While these shortcuts only work when you’re on your computer and not on your mobile device such as your smartphone or tablet, they’re very handy to learn and can help reduce the amount of time you waste from senseless clicks online.

70 time-saving social media shortcuts

Continue reading 70 time-saving social media shortcuts [Infographic]

How to report Vine comments in 4 quick steps [video]

How to report Vine comments

When someone leaves an inappropriate comment on Vine, do you report Vine comments?

While social media is the #1 activity on the web and we are sharing more of our lives with others, it is important to monitor the comments that you receive and to remove them.

Why report Vine comments?

There is always going to be someone who comes along and wants to bring you down. Remember, it is your content and if someone posts something that is inappropriate, offensive, or mean, you have the ability to remove it – or better yet, report it.

Instead of just removing offensive comments by deleting them, it is much better to report Vine comments. Here are a few reasons why you would want to do this instead.

  • Cleans up your Vine comments – remember, your Vines are public
  • Users may not want to share your Vines if there are offensive comments
  • If your comments are overrun with inappropriate comments, users may not want to follow

How to report Vine comments
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4 steps to leave a LinkedIn group [video]

Have you ever received the following message when you tried to join a group on LinkedIn? While the instructions are not very clear on what you need to do next, the answer is simple. It’s time to leave a LinkedIn group.

Leave a LinkedIn group

Limits on LinkedIn groups

For those of you who are not aware, there is a limit on how many LinkedIn groups you can join. It’s 50.

You can join 50 LinkedIn groups and 50 LinkedIn sub-groups.

While I’m not sure who selected 50 as the limit on LinkedIn groups, once you’ve reached this threshold, the only way you can join any more groups is to either withdraw a request to join a LinkedIn group or leave a LinkedIn group.

This is where things can get frustrating because at no point on this error page does LinkedIn tell you what that number is or even how to fix the issue.

The solution to LinkedIn groups

Having encountered this situation previously, I thought I would share instructions on how to leave a LinkedIn group so that you can spend your time joining more groups and less time looking for instructions on how to fix your issue.

4 steps to leave a LinkedIn group

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3 ways to grow your Facebook presence with Facebook embedded posts

If you could take your Facebook presence and weave it into your blog or website to grow your Facebook presence, would you? With the launch of Facebook embedded posts, you’ll now have that opportunity.

While this doesn’t seem like anything new because Twitter, Instagram and even Vine have all offered the ability to embed posts, I think this could be a game changer for Facebook Pages.

What are Facebook embedded posts?

Facebook embedded posts are the ability to take public posts from Facebook and display this content on your blog or website.

Within Facebook embedded posts, you’ll be able to include the following:

  • Photos
  • Videos
  • Hashtags

As long as your post is set to public, you can now take updates from a Facebook Profile or Facebook Page and embed this content on your blog or website!

Beat the news feed with Facebook embedded posts

As I mentioned, Facebook embedded posts will be a game changer and here’s why.

Previously, nothing could be taken outside of Facebook’s walled-garden unless you took a screenshot. Everything that was shared required being logged in order to view it (in most cases), and you often had to compete against other content in the news feed just to be seen.

Factor in the fact that if you struggled with building engagement with fans, it could be frustrating at times to use Facebook to market your business.

Now assume you’re someone who has a website and you get a lot of traffic there, yet your Facebook Page doesn’t have a whole lot of engagement.

By using Facebook embedded posts, you can now leverage your blog traffic to keep your blog readers aware of things they might have missed on Facebook and beat the news feed in the process.

This in itself can help grow your Facebook presence. This is because more people are able to see your content and you don’t have to worry about not hitting their news feed. Awesome!

Improving engagement with embedded posts

Hopefully you’re as excited about Facebook embedded posts as I am. There’s one last thing though.

When you embed Facebook posts on your blog or website, there are now going to be lots of opportunities for your to build your presence and engage more with your fans and customers. This is because everything you embed from Facebook will offer deep integration. This means each embedded post from Facebook will feature the ability to share, comment, and like a post. Additionally, users can also see how many likes and comments your content has received, which presumably will sync back to Facebook.

Growing your presence using Facebook embedded posts

So how can you grow your presence using embedded posts? Besides all of the great features that Facebook embedded posts will offer, there are also going to be many different types of posts you can share that can help grow your Facebook presence.

Types of Facebook embedded posts

Hashtags

One way to grow your Facebook presence using embedded posts is with hashtags. If you’re new to hashtags, be sure to read the complete guide on using Facebook hashtags because you’re going to want to start including them within your posts.

When you include them in an embedded Facebook post on your website, they are now clickable and will bring up related content that also uses that hashtag so be sure you use them!


Facebook embedded posts

Follow

A second way to grow your Facebook presence using Facebook embedded posts is with the “follow” feature.

This type of embedded post is great if you’re a journalist or analyst and you post a lot of news on Facebook.

Now, you can take this content and share it around the web and it will get linked directly back to the person who posted it!

In addition, users can also follow that person. This let’s them subscribe to a user, which if you’re sharing quality content or breaking news, can help quickly grow your presence on Facebook.

Facebook embedded posts

Like

A third way to grow your Facebook presence using the embedded posts feature is through your Facebook Page.

This type of post offers fans the opportunity to find out about updates they may have missed because they didn’t see your update in their news feed.

I could also see Facebook embedded posts being extremely useful if you run contests on your Facebook Page. For instance, you should be able to take that contest and leverage your blog traffic to increase participation and grow your Facebook presence at the same time.

Similar to the “follow” embedded post, the “like” embedded post let’s fans and customers easily like your Facebook Page from anywhere there is are embedded posts. This means that in order to grow your Facebook presence, you’ll want to post really good content that users will want to embed on their blog or website.

Facebook embedded posts

 

Giving credit where credit is due with Facebook embedded posts

One of the features that hasn’t been covered much yet is accountability on Facebook. Previously, anyone could copy and share content on Facebook and you wouldn’t know who initially shared it. Now, with Facebook embedded posts, anyone can pick-up content and share it with their readers.

Just think – major blogs or news outlets might be embedding your Facebook posts one day on their blog or website. Imagine all of the possibilities if that happens!

How do you get Facebook embedded posts?

Right now, Facebook embedded posts are only available to five media sites. These include Huffington Post, Mashable, CNN, Bleacher Report, and People, but Facebook promises we should see this new feature soon. So stay tuned!

How to embed Facebook embedded posts

Embedding Facebook posts on your blog or website will be very easy. If a post has a globe icon next to it, this means it is public. You can then click the dropdown arrow and select embed post. This will give you a snippet of code that you can copy and paste on your blog or website. That’s really all there is to it!

Facebook embedded posts

Facebook embedded posts

Facebook embedded posts are a game changer

Yes, I said again, I think Facebook embedded posts are going to be a tremendous tool for businesses and even individuals. Imagine the potential leads that you can gain from you embedding your posts on your blog or website or better yet, other blogs or websites embedding your content!

Are you excited about embedded posts as much as I am? Do you think they will be a game changer? Leave a comment below and let me know your thoughts on Facebook embedded posts.