Thursday 26 April 2012

Facebook Are To Increase The Size Of Your Profile Photo On Timeline Pages


Facebook have announced that they will be changing the size of your profile photo on timeline profiles. The size will change from 125px by 125px to 160px by 160px. This increase will mean that companies who have designed their cover photo to integrate their profile picture will have to be changed.

Images will still need to be uploaded with a minimum image size of 180px by 180px



So make sure you keep ahead of the game and re-design your profile ready for the change and let us know your comments in the box below!


The socialjamm team.
www.socialjamm.com
www.twitter.com/socialjamm

Monday 16 April 2012

Kony 2012 - 2nd Video Attracts 98% Less Viewings

We, just like most other social media Blogs out there covered the phenomenon of the Kony 2012 video that went massivley viral overnight. The video now has over 170 million views, however the 2nd part Kony 2012 Part 2 has had only 1.2 million views in the week following its release.




The charity got a lot of negative press following the initial video, which left us wondering if this was the reason the follow up video hasn’t had such an impact. Or is it the simply fact that social media is so fast moving and something else has caught the masses attention?

What do you think could have impacted the video’s v iewing numbers? Let us know in the comment section/


The socialjamm team.
www.socialjamm.com
www.twitter.com/socialjamm

Friday 13 April 2012

How to Gain More Relevant Followers On Twitter - My Experience

LinkWith the popularity of our posts about how to optimise your pages to gain twitter followers (found here) I have been requested to post further tips to enhance your twitter experience. This post will be a general overview of my experience with twitter and what I have learned from using it.

I signed up to twitter 3 years ago and like everybody (maybe not celebrities) when they start Twitter, I found it a struggle to gain followers. I had basically signed up to it to see what it was all about. I didn’t really understand the potential it had, and like most people I would tweet randomly and hope that people would find my musings interesting and follow me. It wasn’t surprising that I didn’t get many followers and if I did they weren’t relevant to what I wanted, I hadn’t found my purpose or voice….

At the time I was primarily a web and graphic designer and I was starting to get requests to design social media pages for businesses and naturally my interest in social media marketing took off. (I now work as a professional social media manager and obviously run this blog)

Twitter for me, now had a purpose, it could be used as a platform to gain and share knowledge, to market myself and engage with other social media enthusiasts. So following this I set up my own twitter page again.

My original aim was to gain as many RELEVANT followers as I could in one month.. The first thing I decided to do was follow people in the same industry as myself who have an abundance of followers and see what they were doing that made their pages so successful.

My first realisation was at how often they tweeted. Power users tend to tweet and re-tweet up-to-date content regularly, engage with a high percentage of their new followers (My guess was that they didn’t engage with everybody as not every person who adds you would be relevant to yourself) and inject sparks of their personality into their tweets.

Following these observations I started to implement these behaviours into my own tweets and subsequently saw the amount of followers I had double in the space of one month. This correlation is no accident, twitter is a platform that you have to work at to gain the results you want, you have to post smart and often, engage with users and re-tweet relevant content to capture your audiences attention and gain that all important follow.

So basically in a nutshell in order for twitter to work for you to gain relevant followers you should do the following:

1. Have a purpose and a voice.

2. Think about your audience and what they what knowledge they would like to gain.

3. Write and post your own content (A blog is a great way to do this)

4. Engage with people (It is a social platform after all)

5. Don’t use it to only promote yourself (80% content 20% promotion is the tested and proven amount)

6. Be yourself.

If you follow these steps you will see that your twitter following will increase, with relevant followers, giving you more business opportunities, a wider circle of people in your industry to engage with and an opportunity to gain increased knowledge on your industry through research for content to share and other peoples shared content.


What have your experiences been with twitter? Do you have any other tips for success? Let me know in the comment box!


The socialjamm team.
www.socialjamm.com
www.twitter.com/socialjamm

Thursday 12 April 2012

Google Announce Google+ Makeover









The good people at Google have announced that they are rolling out an updated redesign of their social network Google+. The main aims of the redesign are to make it a more customised and aesthetically pleasing user experience.

Google Senior Vice President Vic Gundotra had this to say - “It accelerates our efforts to create a simpler, more beautiful Google”

Naturally they are also hoping that the new features will take an extra slice out of Facebook and Twitters vast social media empires, as a few of changes such as the large cover photo at the top of the page, and the ‘trending topics’ (Explore) feature mimic Facebook’s Timeline design and twitters primary function

The other prominent feature that comes with the new profile is the customisable navigation ribbon, featured on the left hand side of your profile. The ribbon gives Google the space to add more features (which they have hinted at doing in the next few days) and the user more freedom to pick and chose which apps they use.

So far the change has been deemed positive by the experts in the social media world, but is it enough for Google to really try and challenge Facebook? Or is it just an improved version for their 170million+ users?

Let us know what you think in the comments!


The socialjamm team.
www.socialjamm.com
www.twitter.com/socialjamm

Tuesday 10 April 2012

Creating custom tab images for your Facebook Timeline brand page


Facebook timeline for brand pages has been in place for a few weeks now, and some fantastically designed pages have been taking advantage of the new features.

We have already covered the importance of a great ‘cover photo' in a previous blog post (found here), but another feature that can make your page more aesthetically pleasing and also tie in line with your brands colours and style is to customise your tabs. The tabs are much more visible to a user located at the top of your page with a larger image size dedicated to them.

Tab guidelines:

Facebook allows you to have 4 visible tabs when you land on your page,. These tabs will always include the photos tab.(The photos tab can not be re-positioned, or its cover image edited).

For a user to view the rest of your tabs (maximum of 12) they would click the arrow next to them.

The new tab sizes are 111px by 74px as opposed to the old 16px by 16px.

Facebook allows you to have up to four visible tabs once you land on a page and displays the rest of them once a user clicks on the arrow next to them.

The about section will cover the area if you decide to only display 2-3 tab images.

Creating your own graphics:

You can create your own graphics for any tab apart from the standard facebook apps such as photos, notes, events etc.

Your tabs could look something similar to what the designers at Fanta have implemented. Keeping in with the brand colours, and products they offer.



To edit the graphics hover over the image you wish to change and then click on the he pencil icon and then click 'edit setting's so get directed to this menu:



Upload your image and change the custom tab name to match and entice your viewers to click on it.

And that’s it. A really simple way to make your brand page stand-out, fit in with your brand and entice users to use your Apps.

Now it’s your turn, let us know how you get on with updating your Facebook Timeline page and ask any questions you have in the comment box below.


The socialjamm team.
www.socialjamm.com
www.twitter.com/socialjamm

Tuesday 3 April 2012

Instagram Announced For Download On Android

The day has finally come where you can download Instagram for your android.

The photo sharing app popularised by Iphone currently has 430k people on their waiting list to download it since it was announced in March.

The press team for Instagram had this to say:

"We have exciting news to share: We've launched Instagram for Android as a public download on the Google Play store. You can download the app here: https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.instagram.android.

We're excited for this launch because it is one of the most anticipated releases on the Android platform to date

We've put an incredible amount of effort into this app to make a first-class experience for Android users everywhere – we hope you'll take a moment to download the app, review the press center and reach out with any questions you might have.

The free download can be found at google Play and You can run Instagram on any camera phone with Android 2.2 or above with support for OpenGL ES 2*."

We look forward to hearing about your experiences with it.



The socialjamm team.
www.socialjamm.com
www.twitter.com/socialjamm

Monday 2 April 2012

4 Facebook timelime tips for your brand page


Timeline has now officially rolled out for brand pages and many administrators have still not realised the potential flaws of not having been ready for the switchover. To ensure your brand page is ready for the viewing public and potential customers you should ensure you should implement the following 4 tips.

Revisit your past:

Timeline allows users to easily search through your facebook history, so a post from a year ago was unlikely to be seen by a user on the old version of facebook. The first thing you should do is go through your profile and delete any unwanted posts that do not add any value or anything that does not reperesent your brand as it stands today,

Add important moments of your brands history to your timeline:

Timeline for brand pages is basically the story of your brand, so you should give your viewers key moments (milestones) of your history such as when your business opened, office moves, key expansions etc. This gives a user an insight to how your business has grown and developed through time.

Draw attention to offers, key posts:

Timeline allows you to highlight posts, which means that a post will be full width of your page covering both columns. This works great with graphics, drawing users towards them. A great tip is to match the artwork to your cover image, keeping a continuous theme throughout your page and strengthening your brand. Naturally you want highlighted posts to stand out, so ensure that you do not over use them throughout your page.

Fanta does this extremely well:


Pin special offers:

Similar to the highlighting feature you can also ‘pin’ posts to the top of your page for 7 days. The post will remain at the top of your page regardless of anything g else that you post. This is extremely useful when you are promoting a special offer or alternatively looking to hire new staff!

The socialjamm team.
http://www.socialjamm.com/
www.twitter.com/socialjamm
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