So you have signed up for a twitter profile for your business. What next I hear you ask? Follow these 5 steps and you will have a profile that looks great, encourages people to follow you and a place where you can engage with customers and potential customers alike. If you are happy with your brand page you and would like to find out how I used twitter to gain more followers you can read that article here -  http://socialjamm.blogspot.co.uk/2012/04/how-to-gain-more-relevant-followers-on.html

Twitter name:

You should pick a twitter name that represents your brand, ideally this should be your company however this isn’t always possible as there are so many users on twitter. For a more detailed overview of picking the perfect name for your brand profile visit a previous blog I have posted. - http://socialjamm.blogspot.co.uk/2012/01/6-things-to-consider-when-choosing-and.html

Bio:

Your Bio should be optimised for search and give users of twitter a good indicator of what your business is about, after all this will be one of the first things a user will see on your profile and in search results. You can find a more detailed over view here -  http://socialjamm.blogspot.co.uk/2012/02/how-to-optimise-your-twitter-bio-to.html

Profile Photo:

Your profile photo should be something that is instantly recognisable to your brand, a company logo is your best bet, If you don’t have one of these then you could also use a photograph of the head of your company. This will give your profile a personal touch, although it may seem tempting to upload an animated icon to stand out from other users, this shouldn’t be done as it tends to annoy twitter users. You can find the results of my research into this subject here http://socialjamm.blogspot.co.uk/2012/05/does-having-animated-twitter-icon.html

Background:

Your background should be designed to be synonymous with your brand, you should look at it as your shop window, a space where you can advertise your website, special offers and products / services. For a more detailed overview of this topic you can visit one of my other blog posts here. http://socialjamm.blogspot.co.uk/2012/03/6-reasons-that-custom-twitter.html

Tip* Do not set up an automatic message to anybody that follows you. It has become apparent through research and conversations that people find this to be a real turn off. 

You can find results of a discussion about this topic here - http://socialjamm.blogspot.co.uk/2012/05/sending-automatic-direct-message-on.html

We hope you find this information useful. You can gain a free socialjamm.com profile for your business by visiting socialjamm.com – It will help you gain followers, appear higher in searches and ultimately improve your online web presence.

The socialjamm Team

www.socialjamm.com
www.twitter.com/socialjamm

It's a free service where you can create a profile to promote you or your business through social networking.

It lets you:

• Connect all of your social networks and share status updates
• Tell the world what you do through your online profile
• Get free promotion through our online directory

Why sign up?

You can:

• list all of your social network profiles in one easy-to-find place
• improve your searchability - Automatic listing on our online directory means your business is easy to search for.
• Improve your Search engine rankings – A page on our directory will help you climb google by pooling all of your social network activity into one place
• manage your links with ease – We have designed socialjamm with you in mind, making it as easy as possible for you to change and share your social network information

The Olympic Torch will be passing through my small City of Chester today, with thousands of spectators set to flock to see it, it got me wondering how many people will be taking photos and uploading them to social networking sites.

There is no doubt about it the Olympics is a huge event, and it’s the first time that anybody from almost anywhere in the world can see what its like to experience the passing of the torch from a spectators viewpoint, thanks to the people who are utilising social networks to share their experience.

This you would think would be a very exciting time to see the Olympics stars from the Olympic stadium in London, from the viewpoint of a fan, however this will not be the case, as fans and volunteers will not be allowed to tweet, post videos to YouTube or use any other form of social networking to share their experience at the games. The Olympic committee issued this statement “Visitors to London 2012 will be forbidden from posting photos and videos on social media networks.” – So much for calling it the ‘twitter games’,

The rules for volunteers are as follows:

Not to disclose their location :

So using sites like 4square will be out of the question.

Not to get involved in detailed discussion about the Games Online

Basically the 70,000 volunteers are unable to voice their own opinion of the games on social networks

The only way they can share Olympic information is by re-tweeting or passing on official London 2012 postings.

Personally I think this is a great shame, as the Olympics in my mind is about unifying everybody giving people a chance to support their countries with friendly sporting rivalry.

However with all of this being said, I still think that this will be the first time where we see the whole world turned in to their TV’s AND their social media devices sharing their opinions and and voicing their support.

 I will also make a prediction that twitter interaction will peak when Usain Bolt runs the 100meter sprint.

What are your feelings about the Olympics and Social media, and do you have any of your own predictions? I’d love to know so please post in the comment box below!

The socialjamm team.

www.socialjamm.com

www.twitter.com/socialjamm

To follow my debate about ‘having an animated icon on twitter’ and whether it benefits you, I decided to ask people on twitter about their feeling on recieveing an automated direct message once you follow someone.

Personally I don’t like them, I don’t think they fit in with twitter and the people that use them, this is because I find them to be robotic, short sales pitch with generally no real value.

When I follow somebody on twitter it’s because I find their tweets interesting, I want to contribute to a conversation or they are person behind them has similar interests to myself, I don’t follow them in hope of them forcing sales pitches down my throat from the get go, I want engagement and to speak to a human. The following reasons are why I believe they shouldn’t be used:

• They are impersonal and intrusive, I see them as being quite similar to receiving junk mail once you sign up to something you are generally interested about.
• 
  
• It cheapens your brand. People are increasingly becoming savvier, and find it quite insulting to receive a direct sales pitch so soon after interacting with somebody.
• 
  
• They don’t have the desired impact for a marketer. If people are interested in you and what they have to offer they will research you further themselves, they don’t need to be spoon fed information.
• 
  

Here are some of the tweets I recieved in response to the posed question:

@AirConTechLtd wrote - '@tim_eem It's a little arrogant really that they have to little time to care about their followers!!'

@pinkspiderweb wrote - '@tim_eem #debate No. I don't like automatic DMs, they're too impersonal '

@nimuesnestgifts Wrote – ‘@tim_eem annoys me so I usually unfollow immediately! May as well be a bot if using auto DMs as far as I'm concerned’

It’s not really come to any surprise but using automated Direct Messages are not popular, my advice would be to switch them off and communicate to your new followers personally, as this will get you a higher response rate and adds a personal touch which twitter users crave. If you don’t have time to do this then don’t do it, no Direct message is better than having one which irritates people

How do you feel about them? Have you had any success in using them? Comments are appreciated!

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

I personally believe that having an animated twitter icon is a bad idea, and many people on twitter agreed with me. I can see the logic behind a company or person having one, and why they think it would make their tweets stand out in search results and a twitter feed, which it does, but I strongly recommended that you change it to a standard image if you do have one, the reasons for this are as follows:

• It looks cheap. Web design has moved on from the days of the '< marquee >' tag which would make your text scroll across your webpage, as this was seen to be more of a distraction from the copy on the page, which as we all know is the reason why people have visited the page in the first place.

• It’s intrusive, a bit like an advert on TV its very flashy and loud, to gain your attention, but it’s not what the viewer has tuned into view, again strengthening the the fact that it shoud be your tweets that gain your page attention.

There are some of the responses I received: to the question this question I tweeted ‘Do animated #twitter profile pictures attract or distract you?’:

@almalbon – Wrote: @tim_eem Animated profile pics are cheap and gimmicky. Let your tweets do the talking. Quality content is king

@Bizitalk Wrote - @tim_eem Come down on the side of distraction and slightly annoying I think!

In short, you should allow your tweets to gain you more followers, rather than employing a cheap, loud tactic to get your profile noticed. Great copy is always key

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

Web link-shortening giant, Bit.ly has released data about the best times to post on the top social networks.

Optimum Times to post on twitter:

The best time to post on twitter is between 1:00pm and 3:00pm ET (10am to 1pm PT) in the early days of the working week, as this is the period of time that garners the highest click rate. The absolute optimum time is 1:00pm on a Monday, the reason for this being, one can only speculate is that most people tend to check their twitter updates on the first day back to work on their lunch breaks.

Optimum times to post on Facebook:

Facebook differs to Twitter with the optimum time to post being Wednesday at 3:00pm ET. The general rule for Facebook is to post after lunch, (1pm Onwards) as this is the time that will get the most click through rates. These results could be due to office workers looking distraction in the afternoon, to get over the post lunch lull.

When not to post on Facebook and Twitter:

The statistics have shown for both Facebook and Twitter that the worst times to post, in order to get interaction with your followers are in the evening after 8:00pm up until the next working day.

*Twitter Tip – Although you may be tempted to post on twitter first thing in the morning, it would be wise to post at around 11:00am to catch the traffic at lunch time.

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

The people behind the service that allows you to share photos on twitter before twitter did, have released their first app. The app allows users to edit photos and add filters before sharing them to twitter. It is currently only available for Iphone users, with an android version proposed for release in the coming months.

The popular service started in 2008 has over 35 million users, only 15 million users less Instagram, the photo editing and sharing tool acquired by Facebook early this month for $1 Billion.

It is widely known that twitter wanted to acquire Instagram before Facebook made their incredible bid, so is this the reason that Twitpic have decided to release an app? According to Everet, this is not the case; he commented “Our goal is just to provide the best possible product for our users. As far as trying to position ourselves for acquisition by any particular service, that’s not our focus.”

We will have to watch this spacer in the coming months to see if twitpic’s audience grows to the heights of their previous 45.7% share of photos uploaded to twitter (2.25 million daily image) back in May 2011, before Twitter struck a deal with photobucket to have users upload directly without using a 3^rd party service, and if this does indeed prompt twitter to make a bid for this service.

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

The past few weeks have been an exciting time for Football in terms of Twitter engagement. The Manchester Derby (Manchester City Vs Manchester United) on Monday night recorded over 1 million tweets about the game in the space of 3 hours, with 3000 tweets per minute still rolling in 45 minutes after the final whistle.

An almost even amount of tweets for each team where recorded with Man City’s mentions clocking up 360,000, beating Manchester United by a total of 3000.

Although this is a fantastic amount of interaction on twitter for a sporting event it wasn’t enough to beat the Chelsea – Barcelona tie this week before. This game clocked up a record amount of tweets with 3.4 million being recorded, with the peak of engagement seeing 13,684 tweets a second!

The only reasons I can see why the engagement was so high for the Chelsea game was that it was set upon a European stage whereas the Manchester Derby had more of an impact solely on the UK, that and an unexpected late goal for Chelsea and Barcelona being the fond favourites.

This year will most definitely become the digital age for sports and we can only expect to see more of these levels of engagement once the Olympics and Euro 2012 Football Tournament kick off!

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

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

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 2^nd 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

With 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

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

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

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

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

Sean Parker's latest venture is called Airtime; penned as a social video service similar to that of http://chatroulette.com/, the website is offering up several web development roles at their San Fransicso office.

Although the site doesn't offer up too much information on exactly what the service will offer, I'm sure there will be something innovative and groundbreaking here...

Well..with the likes of will.i.am and Ashton Kutcher listed as investors and a current total investment exceeding $8m,  I would hope that they have some tricks up their sleeve and aren't trying to reinvent the already spinning chat-wheel.

More to come...

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

As you may know Facebook are rolling out the timeline feature for brand pages in the coming weeks, which means that you will need one for your brand page.

One of the main new features is the large photo/image that can be displayed at the top of your brand page, known as the ‘cover photo’

The maximum size for a cover photo is 851 x 399 pixels. Ensure that when you design your cover photo that you leave enough room for your logo image which hovers above your cover photo.

The following images are some of our favourite cover photos from brands already using timeline.

With over 175 million twitter users it can be hard getting people to follow you,half of the battle if getting people to your page, the other half is keeping them interested and getting them to follow you. A great way to gain instant interest (and hopefully a follow) from viewer of your page is to design and implement a custom twitter background.

A custom twitter background allows you to:

1. Stand out from the crowd:

A custom Twitter design separates you from every other standard twitter background.

2. Strengthen your brand:

It can tie in with and strengthen your brand, as long as you use the same brand colours and logo. This means that viewers will find it instantly recognisable with your other branded marketing materials.

3. Add more contact information:

You can take advantage of the extra space available to you to include contact information which you couldn’t fit into the 160 characters twitter limits you to in your bio. (see this post to optimise your bio http://socialjamm.blogspot.co.uk/2012/02/how-to-optimise-your-twitter-bio-to.html)

4.Market Social Media and Blogs:

You can also use the space to market your other social media channels such as linkedin / Facebook / Youtube / Pinterest or your Blog if you have one, driving more traffic to those sites too.

5.Promote a Special offer:

The space can also be used to promote a specific offer that you are offering, a good call to action can entice people to buy your products or visit certain websites etc

6.Show off Your Personality:

Using images is one of the best ways to convey your personality, and this is an opportunity to let your personality to shine through.

The following 2 profiles have been designed by myself for my own profile @tim_eem and @socialjamm:

We will show you how to design a custom twitter brackground in our next post. So take these reasons and brainstorm what you would like to include on yours!

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

We would just like to thank all of our readers as we obtained our 1000^th read this morning! Thank you for all of the support and great feedback!

We will continue to social media post tips and answer your questions via our twitter page,so if you have any burning questions or just need a little bit of help head over to @socialjamm.

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

Sometimes a video that you watch can capture your attention and make you want to share it with everybody you know. ‘Kony2012 – Invisible Children’ is one of those videos and has been shared by millions of people all over the world in under 24 hours.

A video like this for such a worthy cause being shared virally shows the true potential of social networking and the change the human race can make by sharing content.

Who is Joseph Kony?

Joseph Kony is the world’s worst war criminal. In 1987 he took over leadership of an existing rebel group and renamed it the Lord’s Resistance Army (LRA).

The LRA has earned a reputation for its cruel and brutal tactics. When Joseph Kony found himself running out of fighters, he started abducting children to be soldiers in his army or “wives” for his officers. The LRA is encouraged to rape, mutilate, and kill civilians–often with blunt weapons.

What is Kony2012 – Invisible children?

Invisible Children has been working for 9 years to end Africa’s longest-running armed conflict. U.S. military advisers are currently deployed in Central Africa on a “time-limited” mission to stop Kony and disarm the LRA. If Kony isn’t captured this year, the window will be gone.

You can learn more about The Kony2012 campaign by visiting the website:

http://www.kony2012.com

or watch the following video.

KONY 2012 from INVISIBLE CHILDREN on Vimeo.

The video and the number of people who have watched it and shared it speak for themselves and show the true potential and power of social networking and how it can change the world by giving us all the strength and outlet to speak in one unified voice.

The team at socialjamm will be supporting and we hope you do too.

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