Blog It: June 2014

Wednesday, June 25, 2014

How To Write a Perfect Status on Facebook

Source: http://dendritepark.com/perfect-status-on-facebook/#ixzz35hUfEmjq

Writing a perfect status on Facebook is not as hard as it seems. Everybody wants their statuses to be seen, shared and commented on. It can help to understand how the Edgerank algorithm works and then follow these helpful tips from Shorstack.

1. Be interesting, be intriguing, be awesome. Often easier said than done but try to attract your readers’ attention. You are competing with hundreds of other posts and it takes them a split second to decide whether to click on your link or not. Don’t waste it.

2. HOT TIP! People love tips – why not share some? It’s an easy way to get their attention – and eyeballs.

3. Instead of just sharing a link add something from yourself. “Check this awesome infographic” goes a long way, provided it’s really awesome.

4. Ask fewer questions and give more answers. It is very frustrating to ask your fans a question and then receive no or very little feedback. Manage your expectations and keep posting great content. You’ll get there!

5. Suggest and inspire action. Sometimes you can ask your fans to share something but don’t overdo it. Begging rarely works.

6. Prepare your fans for what’s coming next. Whether it’s 20 minutes with Seth Godin or something else be specific in letting your fans know what to expect.

7. Add a brief P.S. at the end of the status update and the chances are it will receive more clicks than the other ones. It does wonders when it comes to catching your readers’ attention.

8. Keep your posts between 100 and 250 characters. These get 60% more likes than posts with more than 250 characters. Use a link shortener – we like Bitly.

9. Use images as they have a bigger chance of making it to the newsfeed. Postrocket will let you post a link as a photo and then publish it at a perfect time. Pretty awesome.

10. Ask for comments. They are worth more than likes and help you win the competition to your fans’ newsfeeds.

The Basics Of Social Media Strategy

Source: http://dendritepark.com/basics-social-media-strategy/#ixzz35hSEZ5KA

1. Publish valuable posts and tips regularly.

2. Be acquainted with your audience.

3. Pick the best images and footages.

4. Give your content a human voice.

5. Underline and promote events.

6. Be informal, colloquial, conversational.

7. End your blog posts with questions.

8. Be coherent with your brand’s image.

9. Set up profiles on all social platforms.

10. Subcontract content generation.

11. Be active, not merely responsive.

12. Use a mobile-friendly website design.

13. Post infographics more often.

14. Increase your post frequency.

15. Examine social data trends.

16. Use Google Analytics’ Social Reports.

17. Always aim for success in your venture.

18. Talk to your customers.

19. Keep your social media team engaged and encouraged.

20. Stop overthinking, start acting.

Curation: Creatively Filtering Content

BY SUE WATERS · JUNE 12, 2014

Source: http://theedublogger.com/2014/06/12/curation/

We are living in an era of information overload. So much content is shared online that curation is needed as a way to get value out of the information flood.

Content curation is the process of shifting through the vast abundance of content on the Internet to select the best, most relevant resource, on a specific topic or theme, so that we can organize, manage and collate the content for ourselves and share with others.

Content curation is about working smarter and not harder. Content curation is also a reflective process; as you curate resources you reflect on their value. Reflection makes new information stick in your brain.

Why is curation important?

Curation is a life skill and an important part of being digitally literate. Educators need to know how to curate information so they can teach students how they can curate content for research, their interests and passion. As part of this process educators need to encourage students to curate information using techniques that address their own personal learning needs.

While at the Edutech National Congress & Expo I curated the best resources shared from the Edutech conference into a Flipboard magazine. An important lesson I learnt from curating the Flipboard magazine is curation is a very personal process. As individual we have our own different learning styles and techniques; and this can be reflected strongly in how we curate and share content.

The purpose of this post is to showcase all the different ways content was curated at the Edutech National Congress & Expo to:

Provide a deeper understanding of curation.
Provide inspiration to try alternative curation methods.
Make you appreciate the importance of curation

The curation process

The curation process includes the following types of tools:

News discovery tools – used select and aggregate the content. All about saving time by feeding you the most relevant content. Examples of news discovery tools include Feedly, Flipboard and following a hashtag in Twitter.

Curation tools - used to display your content with context with organisation, annotation and presentation. Check out these examples of content curation tools.

At a conference you might also use note taking tools such as Google Docs or Evernote to document information from each session, then supplement your information by finding additional content using news discovery tools and finally share the most relevant resources with your network using curation tools.

Curation tools

There are a gazilion tools you can use.; and which tools you use, and how you curate, is a personal as the tools you use to build your personal learning network (PLN).

Curation is as simple as:

Find the tool(s) that you prefer to use for news discovery and for curation.
Curate the content that helps you, and is helpful for others.
Make it part of your routine to curate and share content.
Popular Curation tools

Here is a summary of popular curation tools from our survey of 190 educators.

Monday, June 2, 2014

Social Media Privacy

Always type your social networking website address into your browser.
Never use the same password that you use for your bank or email accounts. Have a different password for each social networking site so that if one password is stolen, not all of your accounts will be at risk.
Don't automatically click on links in 'friend request' emails you receive. Genuine friend requests will appear on your home page on your social networking site.
Be careful about how much personal information you post online. Use privacy settings to control who has access to your information.
Be careful about the amount of information that you reveal to people you don't know. It is easy to create a fake profile online and people are not always who they say they are.
Stop and think before you write a message or post pictures. Ask yourself if the information you are sharing is something you want your future employers, friends or family to see. Even items you delete can remain on the Internet for years.