Now that you have your contact book all set up and you’re getting more familiar with Evernote it’s time to branch out just slightly.
While we’re not necessarily focusing on a new technology this week, we are laying out some more of the groundwork to get to some of the other tasks in the upcoming weeks. This week, we’re focusing on Facebook & Twitter.
Assignment #1
Set-up and/or Clean-up your Facebook and Twitter accounts.
It’s obvious that Facebook and Twitter are each staking their own claims on the social media landscape, and they’re becoming one of the best mediums to do it. Fifteen years ago, you’d be out of the loop if you didn’t have an email account. 10 years ago the same thing would be true if you didn’t have a cell phone. Within the past five years, the same could be said of a decent text messaging allotment in your cell phone plan. Now, it’s Facebook and Twitter.
While I will admit my own personal addiction to Facebook and a need to reduce my time on it, I do believe that having an account is essential to actively participate in our current medium of communication. I am not as active on Twitter, but I still benefit from a membership there.
So for this week, I’d recommend the following:
A) Set up a profile on Facebook and/or Twitter if you haven’t done so already. Spend a few moments thinking about potential usernames as you’ll have that username for quite some time.
B) Clean up your public persona. Go through pictures and posts. Do you feel comfortable with others seeing these posts? More and more, employers are looking at social media accounts in making hiring decisions. Even if you’re still in high school, this makes a huge difference. While I don’t accept student audience members as friends on my Facebook profile, my personal profile remains clean. It may contain a link to a political article or a funny internet view, but all of the content remains clean. I’d feel comfortable letting anyone of you see my personal profile
C) Block as many aps in Facebook as you can. This will save you a bunch of time and clean up your newsfeed. If you don’t play a game, hide it from your newsfeed. I’d even recommending hiding some games you might want to play as they could steal away your time. If they don’t appear in your newsfeed, that temptation will also be reduced.
D) Clean up your friend’s list in Facebook and your following list in Twitter. You want your newsfeed to be as clean as possible to allow maximum contact with people. Assign people to lists in Facebook or groups in Twitter to better distinguish the updates you see.
E) Remove yourself from some groups and pages on Facebook. I’ve removed most of my interests from my profile, not because I don’t like them anymore, but because it was misuse of my time to read updates about them in my newsfeed. I’ve kept a handful that really provide quality content.
Assignment #1.5 (optional)
Set-up and/or Clean-up your Facebook and Twitter accounts for your organizations.
If you are able to manage a page or an organizational Twitter feed, repeat many of the steps from Assignment #1 here. I am a firm believer in Facebook Pages over Facebook Groups (and DEFINITELY over organizational Facebook profiles) if you’re dealing with more than 10-20 people. Be strategic in the naming of the page, the assigning of admins, and the purpose of the page.
When the internet became quite popular in the 1990’s there was a huge increase in organizational websites. Unfortunately, many did not set up a strategy for long-term presence, and the internet became littered with orphan pages. Don’t let the same thing happen to your organizational Facebook page or Twitter account.
Assignment #2 (optional)
Design your post strategy for your organizational account.
I’d recommend rereading one of my earliest Toolbox posts about Facebook accounts. Admittedly, I am more active on Facebook than Twitter–mainly due to the quantity of followers and reaction to posts. I still have my blogs fed to Twitter and will occassionaly interact on that medium. You may find Twitter is the better medium for you.
Whatever you choose, design a posting strategy for your organizational account. Are you going to post daily? weekly? monthly? What will you post? What will use to post?
This is becoming incredibly important on Facebook as the newest algorithm will make your page slowly disappear from newsfeeds of fans if they don’t interact with it.
Here are some examples of my strategy:
Regular Year:
Monday: Toolbox or Regular Blog
Wednesday: Regularly Blog
Thursday: Consider This Video (if possible)
Friday: Friday Finish
Summer School Schedule:
Sunday: New Assignments
Monday: Reposting of New Assignments
Tuesday: Regular Blog
Thursday: Regular Blog
Friday: Friday Finish
I post mainly in the evening between 9-11pm EST with a link to a blog entry on my website or a specific YouTube video. I use hootsuite to feed out posts to twitter. There are exceptions to this time table due to my travel schedule, but this is my basic strategy. I’ll use days where I don’t post a blog to sometimes do customized status updates targeting specific cities or states where I might be speaking.
What will your strategy be?