Tag Archives: social media

Last month we wrote a piece about when to promote a facebook post which included a case study, and we mentioned that we would post a follow up with the results.

For starters let’s just say the results were….. successful to a degree but also a little mixed and confusing. We spent $15 and it did seem to reach a lot of people. From that standpoint we feel like we got what we paid for, but there are plenty of discrepancies in the numbers. Sure there is a chance I’m just not understanding them completely but I think I’m a bright guy and if I can’t figure them out then I’m guessing I’m not the only one. The engagement level was not quite what I’d expected either but I think there is a learning opportunity there.

Total Reach

First let’s look purely at the number of people the post reached. Above is the graph that breaks it down into three categories. When we selected the $15 dollar (highest) option it indicated that the reach we were paying for would be in the 2.5k – 3.5k range. When I hover my cursor over each category the organic (people who like the page and either clicked on it themselves or had it appear in their news feed before I started the promotion) shows 372, the paid shows 1637, and the viral (people who saw it as a result of a friend liking, commenting on, or sharing the post) shows 76. By my math that adds up to 2085 – not 1894 and still way short of the estimate I was given. However….

They also provide a promotion summary where I’m told that the paid reach of the post is 3215. Uh…. okay…. so which is it? 1637 or 3215? If 3215 is the number then I’m pleased with the reach. We had about 940 people following our page at the time and we promoted this to our followers and their friends so if $15 bought me 3215 people seeing this post I’m good with that. Side note: I have since found out from a friend who manages a page with a much larger following than ours that it would cost them much more to promote a post – facebook charges considerably more to a page with 100,000 followers than they do to a page with 1000 – like hundreds of dollars instead of $15.

Engagement

So far we’ve looked at the pure mass numbers of people reached. Now let’s dig into how the people who saw the post responded to it. First we’ll look at engaged users:

There were 33 engaged users (number of unique people who clicked on the post), 50 other clicks, so there were people in that group of 33 who came back to the post and clicked on it more than once. There were 10 link clicks – this was a little disappointing since I thought that the thumbnail of the damaged photo of the tent in Vietnam would compel people to check out the link. 14 stories were generated (likes, comments, shares) and only 3 out of thousands hid the link (negative feedback) which is nice – it didn’t turn people off. Overall not huge numbers of engagement. This also doesn’t tell me what kind of collective impact the post had by showing up in thousands of news feeds, but I suspect that there was some impact that I can’t measure immediately. We don’t typically advertise and I’m not an expert in open / click through rates etc. but I do know that when I promoted this our engagement level was over 1.5% and it ended up at .63% When I promoted the post it had met the criteria for Jay Baer’s STIR strategy for when to promote a post which includes waiting 6 hours to promote and only if the post has over 1% engagement. I may raise that to 3% going forward especially if it proves to be true that there will be a natural drop off in the percentage engagement once you send it out to people who may not be familiar with your brand. The last graph of data they give you is the break down of the “stories generated” or people “talking about this”:

11 likes (even though the earlier summary says 14), 2 comments, and 1 share. I think it’s great when someone shares a post because the post then reaches a whole new audience. One share isn’t much, but it’s better than a sharp stick in the eye.

Conclusions

So as I mentioned before I would say the results on this one were mixed. The confusing numbers are a little troubling – even if it’s only $15 dollars I at least want accurate numbers. Facebook is a public company now and these tools are part of the ways they are trying to generate revenue to show Wall Street they can be profitable, but they should clean up the data if this is so critical to their future. As for whether we would promote again? I would say yes but still very selectively. This one while not a complete flop was not a home run but that’s okay – they aren’t all going to be home runs. That’s on us to make sure we learn what content has the most value and appeal for our followers.

Have you paid to sponsor or promote a facebook post? What kind of results have you seen?

When Should You Promote A Facebook Post? A Case Study

January 18, 2013

by Doug Cohen

3 Comments

This is really a follow up post to “Restoring History” which focused on photo restoration. Here is a little social media strategy discussion – as of this writing the strategy for the “Restoring History” post is in a test mode as we speak, and hopefully we can get some results we can learn from as we go along….

The Option To Promote A Facebook Post

For those who may not know, Facebook rolled out a new tool a few months ago where you can pay to promote your status updates so that they will reach more users. They also changed their algorithms so that posts don’t automatically reach as many folks as they used to without paying. If you post something that people love, comment and share then you can still get good results but it’s not a gimme like it was before. Many people became very upset about this when they saw their reach suddenly dwindle unannounced. I’ve written in the past about staying the course and not freaking out about it – in a way it’s a good thing because now boring lame content doesn’t get the free ride it used to get and good content that is useful and interesting still gets rewarded. Meanwhile if you want to give your content a boost you can pay to have it promoted.

Identifying A Guru For Some Guidance

Jay Baer is a social media strategist and author whom I follow and he posted a great article with the criteria he uses for determining How To Know When To Promote A Facebook Post back on 10/27/12. If you manage a facebook business page it’s worth reading and bookmarking. In short he discusses a 4 part “STIR” criteria that includes a waiting period to figure out first if your post is engagement worthy on its own, and the suggestion to promote a post that has a link to click on or some call to action.

Other Factors To Consider

Before yesterday we only promoted twice. Each time we did the minimum level and we only promoted to people who already like our page. There is also the option of promoting to people who like your page and their friends. Depending on your product, your overall Facebook strategy, and the post you are promoting there are a few factors to consider in addition to “STIR” when promoting:

Organic vs. paid approach. We’ve been fiercely committed to earning Facebook likes one at a time without gimmicks to inflate our numbers. We want our content to be entertaining and useful. Being “salesy” is spammy and boring. We want people to like our page because it’s likeable – not because we beg for it or flood their news feeds (they’ll shut us off if we do that anyway). Too many promoted posts can threaten that aesthetic which is why we had only done it twice before.
First impression if you go outside your likes. If you promote a post to your likes and their friends keep in mind that this post may be for many their first exposure to your brand. Is this post focused on a topic that is more tightly focused on current clients? Make sure the post serves as a good first impression and consider whether it has broad appeal.
Geography and goal of the post. Make sure you are going to get the proper bang for your buck. If you are a local business that can only serve local clients then you may want to be careful about promoting to your likes and their friends. You may spend money reaching too many folks who are out of state and may never be your client. Then again word of mouth can travel out of state and then back into your neighborhood from afar so it’s not that black and white, but just be sure to consider what are you trying to accomplish with the additional exposure you are paying for.

The Case Study

So we’ll let you in on the strategy we used yesterday when we promoted the post “Restoring History”. We did the maximum amount with the option of promoting to our likes and their friends for a three day period. First off the post met all 4 of Jay Baer’s STIR criteria before we promoted it. We also considered the 3 additional factors outlined above:

Even though it’s a promoted post which by definition isn’t exactly an organic approach, we feel it is interesting and useful content which keeps with the spirit of how we attract folks to our page. I’m not promoting a BIG SALE! or running a cheesy contest to just gain empty likes. If people follow us as a result they’ll likely do it because they appreciate the content – it will expose them to our blog and maybe they’ll see there is real value here. Like we mentioned before, we do NOT promote often and that won’t change.
Even though photo restoration is NOT our core business by any means, I don’t mind this post creating a first impression of our studio to people who don’t know us. It’s a thoughtful post that will show we have something worthwhile to say and we think it has broad appeal. Not a bad way to discover Frameable Faces.
This is one service and maybe the ONLY service that we offer that we can offer to people out of state without them ever visiting our studio. While I don’t anticipate a ton of out of state photo restoration business, in theory as long as someone can scan the damaged photo and send it to us we can do the rest – have it restored, print it, ship it. Therefore if going outside of our likes takes us out of our local geography here and there in the process that’s okay.

We will post an update to share the results good and bad. Let us know if you’ve had experiences with promoted posts and if you have anything to add!

Facebook First Aid For Brands – How To Survive The New Changes

November 7, 2012

by Doug Cohen

No Comments

I wrote a guest post back in May for The Collective where I echoed the predominant thinking about how your blog (and website) should be the center of your online universe since you own them, as opposed to your pages on Facebook and Twitter that you don’t own. You don’t know what might happen with those sites and you can’t control it. Well something indeed happened to Facebook…

Money changes everything.

The short version is Facebook went public, it didn’t go well, and now they are scrambling to make more money – fast. They have Wall Street investors to answer to now and everything has changed. I get it – they are a business. The problem is how they went about this. Now stay with me here… They encouraged brands to build a following by engaging with their fans, and then once the brands acquired the fans Facebook took away the ability to reach the fans unless the brand pays to “promote” posts to the fans who were already following the posts. A major bait and switch.

The dilemma…

Keep in mind that our philosophy at Frameable Faces like many others has been to grow our likes and our reach on Facebook in a totally organic way – steadily building relationships fan by fan without contests and cheesy promotions. This suddenly has become more difficult and it raises a two part dilemma:

I’m not in love with the idea of my peeps seeing my posts because I paid for them to see them. I want them to see our content because they like it and the posts are worthy of being seen. Facebook used to ensure your posts would show up in the news feed of people who regularly interacted with your brand. Your reach was largely a result of successful engaging posts. Not sure if that’s happening at all anymore…
Even though we’ve had some success with diversifying on sites like Instagram, Pinterest, YouTube and Twitter to name a few, we haven’t been able to ween ourselves completely from Facebook for reaching our peeps or driving traffic to this blog for example.

So what next? First what NOT to do…

I read a great article by Ken Mueller on 10/22 that stated in part to “stop trying to game Facebook’s Edgerank” – in other words don’t try to cheat the system because shortcuts are not the answer. People are trying to find ways to do this like moving brand content to their personal pages for example. While I have used my personal page to promote our studio from time to time I’ve done it in a very limited fashion, and with a couple exceptions it’s usually when I’ve written a blog post that is more universal like tips on social media that I know everyone can use. If you start doubling up your content on both your business and personal pages your message can start to get lost. Think of it as making a social call on your personal friends to market your studio to them – this isn’t the exact same thing but it’s similar – in real life it’s a little awkward, in online life it’s a little spammy. The people who subscribe to our page (personal friends or not) subscribe there to follow our studio, the people who friend me want to be my friend – not necessarily my prospect.

So What Next? What TO Do…

The best bet seems to stay the course and focus on creating great content, and make sure all your eggs are never in one basket – especially a basket you don’t own like Facebook. However Facebook isn’t going anywhere and it’s critical to be able to adapt to these changes. One way to adapt unfortunately is to yes, spend a little money to promote a post here or there to make sure you continue to reach your audience. Which leads me to the following tip.

A Specific Tip I Learned From Trial and Error

I paid my first 5 dollars to sponsor a status update to see what kind of result I would get. The number of people it reached was a little disappointing, but here’s the tip – this was a post that no one commented on or liked (pretty pathetic I know). But misfires happen once in a while to the best of us, and these posts are NOT the ones you want to promote. Afterwards I came across an article by Jay Baer about when to sponsor posts and one of the things he mentioned was to only promote a post if after waiting 6 hours it’s exceeded a 1% engagement rate. Then give it a boost. Don’t try to boost a dog that no one is responding to in the first place. Promote a status update that is already proving to be engagement worthy.

Hope this helps! Please comment with any feedback or helpful tips on this topic!

The 6 Best Photography Blogs on the Web

September 21, 2012

by Doug Cohen

8 Comments

I spend a lot of time blogging and reading blogs and I want to highlight the photography blogs which I enjoy and/or learn the most from so you can bookmark them whether you are a professional photographer, a hobbyist, or just an enjoyist. Yes I think it’s fun to make up the occasional word now and then…. after all, I still want to make sure you have good organic reasons to visit our blog.

Without further adieu and in no particular order…

Photofocus. This is Scott Bourne’s online magazine (they don’t consider themselves a blog per se which means they focus on creating content and do not allow comments on the site). Ally and I were first exposed to Scott when we saw him speak in Nashville at Imaging USA (a huge photography convention) a couple years ago. What impressed us about Scott was that unlike most of the speakers there he didn’t have anything to sell in his presentation. He just imparts knowledge and there is a lot of good information at Photofocus from new product reviews, info on the industry, stunning images (he has done some amazing wildlife work), and tips and inspiration. Highly recommended.
Rosh Sillars. Rosh is based here in Michigan and his blog has become a go to for me for great information on the photography business. Lots of great info on social media for studios with practical tips and ideas.
Hair Of The Dog. The Hair Of The Dog Blog is pretty much guaranteed to make you smile. Centered on pet photography, the “Session Spotlights” are awesome – such fun images of pets – dogs flying through the air with their tongues out – even the occasional mouse. We love to photograph pets here at Frameable Faces and we get a lot of inspiration from this site.
The Collective. This blog is run by Andy Bondurant and focuses on photography, business, and life in general. His wife Kia is a photographer as well and she contributes to the blog along with many other voices from around the industry. I’ve guest posted on this blog before and I’ve learned a lot here. Andy and I even debated on a topic with a point/counterpoint before and I think I even almost got him to see my side (haha). The Collective pretty much became my Instagram manual once I upgraded to a Droid.
PetaPixel. I love this site. Described as “a blog about photography geared towards tech-savvy photo-enthusiasts” there is much to enjoy here. You will find a lot of incredible images here as well as plenty of industry news and photography tips.
MCP Actions. This blog is run by Jodi Friedman who is based locally in Metro Detroit. The primary focus here is Photoshop actions and workshops and if you use Photoshop and/or Lightroom you need to bookmark this site now. The blog is not limited to photo editing however, with plenty of other topics covered and I have had the honor of guest posting here twice. The first time included the debate between Andy Bondurant and me in the comments which I referred to above!

So there you have it – my top 6. We are always looking for recommendations for other blogs – please share with us! What are your favorites?

7 Tips For Getting The Most From Professional Headshots

September 18, 2012

by Doug Cohen

3 Comments

In today’s world of social media and with the opportunities available for online networking and marketing, great professional headshots are more important than ever. So where do you start? How should you go about it?

7 Tips For Getting The Most From Professional Headshots:

Go to a pro. Okay so we’ll admit that this tip is a little self serving – this is a blog for a professional photography studio after all… But whether you live in Metro Detroit and come to us, live in Metro Detroit and don’t come to us, or wherever you might be reading this, the point is do NOT leave your professional reputation and image to a friend with a camera phone, and choose your studio carefully. Headshots are not that expensive and you need to make a good impression – it’s worth spending the extra 100 or even 200 dollars to have a high quality photo. A good headshot by itself is not likely to land you a million dollar deal, but a crappy unprofessional headshot could potentially lose you one.
Have your headshot match the type of business you are in and your approach to that business. For example, if you are an attorney you will want a different headshot if you are in the business of putting away the bad guys or enforcing non-competes for corporations than if you are an amicable divorce attorney. If your job requires you to be tough and serious than you may want to look serious in your photo. If your job requires you to be helpful and understanding than you may want to look caring and inviting – with a nice smile.
Try to stand out a little. Depending on your business it helps to not be boring. If you are in a creative business and you are trying to increase sales based on your ability to come up with a wow factor then it’s okay to be edgy. A cool hat, an unconventional expression, a different color background – if you are an artist be true to your style.
Be careful in trying to stand out. Don’t go overboard. If you are trying to stand out and it comes off as silly or unprofessional it can backfire. If you find yourself asking if your idea is a little too cheesy than it probably is. Use the advice of your pro who is in the business.
Be prepared. This would seem to go without saying, but think about your clothing ahead of time. Make sure your hair is done/combed properly, and if you are a woman a good rule of thumb is 30% more makeup than usual.
Make sure you update often enough to match how you look. If you gain or lose a considerable amount of weight, if you have decided to shave your head or shave your beard after wearing one for 5 years, if you have gone grey since your last headshot, it’s time for a new one.
Update your profiles. Once you get your headshot make sure you update every profile you use online – especially the personal profiles you use for business. This includes your website as well as your LinkedIn, twitter, and others for example. As an extra tip within a tip, consider how you use your different profiles. For example you may use facebook purely for personal purposes and therefore you may not want to use your professional headshot for your facebook profile. That’s fine, but be aware that just because you’ve distinguished your personal profile as personal that doesn’t mean that how you conduct yourself there may not impact your professional reputation. It can – absolutely.

We hope this helps and we wish you success! What other tips do you have that have helped you for getting great professional headshots as a client or taking them as a photographer?

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Frameable Faces Photography
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Frameable Faces Photography is a small biz retail mom & pop shop of Doug&Ally Cohen located in the Orchard Mall in West Bloomfield, Michigan, United States Of America!
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Ally & Doug can be reached at the studio at tel:248-790-7317 or emailed at mailto:info@frameablefaces.com
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What Pulp Fiction Can Teach Us About Internet “Trolls”

June 9, 2012

by Doug Cohen

1 Comment

I am all about practicing proper etiquette online. I am also all about being truthful. Somewhere in between I find it can get a little blurry.

Trolls

There has been much written about “trolls” – the Wikipedia definition of a troll is as follows:

In Internet slang, a troll is someone who posts inflammatory,^[2] extraneous, or off-topic messages in an online community, such as an online discussion forum, chat room, or blog, with the primary intent of provoking readers into an emotional response^[3] or of otherwise disrupting normal on-topic discussion.

I have yet to see any trolls on this blog (hope I didn’t just jinx it), but I find the above description to be a little subjective. “Extraneous or off-topic messages” intended to provoke are obviously inappropriate, but I wonder about the “inflammatory” messages. Is posting a different opinion automatically a bad thing as long as you aren’t being mean or blatantly offensive? Certainly people could view that as inflammatory, but can’t debate be healthy as opposed to everyone just agreeing and patting each other on the back? Besides, intent is hard to measure and someone could get upset and have an emotional response even though no offense was intended or expected… People blog, post, and tweet expecting and hoping for responses, so shouldn’t they be prepared for different viewpoints? It reminds me of a scene in Pulp Fiction where Mia Wallace and Vincent Vega are having dinner at Jack Rabbit Slim’s (you can actually read the entire script here– pretty cool):

                                  VINCENT
                       Actually, there's something I've
                       wanted to ask you about, but you
                       seem like a nice person, and I
                       didn't want to offend you.

                                  MIA
                       Oooohhhh, this doesn't sound like
                       mindless, boring, getting-to-know-
                       you chit-chat.  This sounds like
                       you actually have something to say.

                                  VINCENT
                       Only if you promise not to get
                       offended.

                                  MIA
                       You can't promise something like
                       that.  I have no idea what you're
                       gonna ask.  You could ask me what
                       you're gonna ask me, and my natural
                       response could be to be offended.
                       Then, through no fault of my own, I
                       woulda broken my promise.

Who is really the troll?

As far as I’m concerned just follow a few rules and use discretion and you should generally be okay. I’ve gotten better at this as I’ve gotten older – I’ve grown up (a little) and owning a business that is really a people business has given me new and varied perspectives. Besides, representing a brand online forces you to exercise restraint and diplomacy.

1) Be nice to people

2) Choose your words carefully knowing that a typed message can be interpreted differently than when you say it out loud.

3) Be careful talking about religion or politics and maybe think twice about bringing it up at all in a public forum – strangers will likely attack you.

4) Remember 1,2, and 3 but – don’t be scared to share your thoughts. If someone attacks you for a thoughtful comment that doesn’t fall exactly into line with the opinion of the blogger and his/her minions then who is really the troll? A blogger who bullies people into fear of reprisals if they disagree is a blogger you may not want to follow.

What about you? Have you been attacked by a troll? Have you been accused of being one?

The Frameable Faces Blog “Quest for Guests”!

May 31, 2012

by Doug Cohen

No Comments

One of the themes we’ve tried to instill in our studio is that of community. We see Frameable Faces not just as the studio you can visit at the Orchard Mall, but as all of us – especially our clients who really are the Frameable Faces (or #Frameables as we like to tweet them). As our blog evolves and grows we thought it would be a splendid idea to get more of you involved and so the “Quest for Guests” idea was born! We would like to open this up just to Frameables (our clients) for starters and see where it goes, but the idea is to have someone write a guest post for our blog. There are a couple of basic parameters involved:

1. The article does not have to be about Frameable Faces nor does it need to be photography related – it can be but it doesn’t have to be.

2. The article should provide some value whether it’s informative, or simply entertaining. We prefer not to go overly heavy or serious. If you have your own blog or business we definitely want to highlight that! But here’s the key – don’t make the post a commercial or sales pitch for your business. Write an article that will help people – demonstrate your expertise with some helpful tips. If you have a blog of your own which is simply your outlet for your thoughts then give us a couple of your thoughts or even a good story. If you are a fan of our blog, don’t have a business of your own or a blog but feel you have something to add to the conversation feel free to do that too!

3. The article should ideally be 500-800 words and include at least one related image (if you are struggling with the image part let us know and we can help you). Also include a short 2-3 sentence bio, a bio image (125×125 pixels is a good guide but we can help you with that too), a good title for your post, and links you want us to include (website, fb, twitter etc.).

4. Send your article in an email to doug@frameablefaces.com. We’ll scan it for typos etc. and let you know if there are any minor changes before we post it. Keep in mind that dependent on the number of posts we receive and/or the subject matter we can’t guarantee that your post will be published. We hope you understand.

We are excited to see where this goes and we hope the Frameables will get to know each other a little better! We hope you will enjoy reading a guest post and that you will comment and join in!

5 Ways to Use Social Media to Your Advantage…… as a Person!

April 10, 2012

by Doug Cohen

4 Comments

At Frameable Faces we spend a lot of time on social media and facebook in particular. Sure it’s primarily how we market our business and I personally spend a ton of time on the various platforms because I consult on on the side, but it also dominates much of the conversation with our clients in general because we post sneak peaks and/or video clips from the sessions on facebook, this blog, YouTube, even Google + a little, and we tweet as well so it’s just naturally a popular topic. We also pin, use LinkedIn (although frankly we have a ways to go on LinkedIn as a brand) and a few of the others. Based on my own observations I’m not sure the typical casual end user knows where to go for help to get more out of social media for themselves. The social media “gurus” focus much of their content on how brands can build and engage with their peeps, but who is helping the customers to get the most out of social media? People still seem to get frustrated with facebook or don’t quite get twitter for example. So while this is by no means a comprehensive list I thought I’d provide a few of my own tips to help you manage and benefit from the information available on social media platforms.

1. “Like” and more importantly interact with your favorite brands on facebook. More and more companies are dedicating resources to maintaining a presence on facebook and interacting with their customers there. The company website will have information sure, but you can usually interact with your favorite store, restaurant or TV show in daily discussions if you like on facebook. Keep in mind that hitting the “like” button, adding a comment to the conversation or even sharing something you find really worthwhile with your facebook friends will help ensure that future posts from that brand continue to show up prominently in your news feed. This is why the interact part is so key. Plus by liking, commenting and sharing you are putting your own stamp of approval on things that are important to you for others to see (which is one of the social aspects of social media). So as you can see you can essentially craft your own personal flow of the information you care about on facebook.

2. The “unsubscribe” button is your friend. If that annoying acquaintance from high school finds you and insists on telling the world that it’s cold outside every time it’s, uh….well…. cold outside, or that they didn’t sleep well, or who you should vote for, you can just hover over their status update and unsubscribe from their updates. This goes for all of your settings when it comes to customizing your content and your privacy. I still hear a lot of people say they don’t want to be on facebook or don’t like facebook because they don’t want people to know a bunch of information about them, they don’t want to be in contact with a bunch of people from high school they don’t care about, or they don’t care what people ate for breakfast. Facebook has evolved a lot over the last couple of years and you don’t have to share anything you don’t want to share, you can select who sees what, and you can unsubscribe from annoying status updates without potentially hurting someone’s feelings by de-friending them. These are all easy and intuitive tools and if you don’t understand them then ask someone who does. It’s very easy to tailor facebook to your interests so that it becomes a valuable source of information while still filtering all the noise.

3. Follow your favorite brands, news outlets, blogs and teams on twitter. If facebook can function as a good flow of information and interaction with friends and brands, twitter can positively be your personal AP wire. I remember when the first smartphones came out and were shortly followed by sports scores apps where you could pick the teams you cared about to get updated scores. Cool right? Except they never worked, you had to launch the app to get the updates and then they were barely ever updated. Now many sports teams will tweet frequent updates during a game beyond just the score, including stats and even brief mentions about how rowdy the crowd is or if the momentum has shifted. If you want to follow the Detroit News you’ll get breaking news throughout the day. If you follow local blogs you can get updates on what’s happening around town. If you follow your favorite brands you can get updates on their products and content related to those products. You can tweet and retweet as well and build relationships but you don’t necessarily have to to get a lot out of twitter.

4. Make use of lists on twitter. If you start to really dig twitter and find that it’s a great way to stay up to speed on the things you like you may start to find that following too many tweets becomes a little overwhelming. Unlike facebook where your interaction and/or unsubscribing can help shape your news feed, on twitter you are either following or unfollowing a tweeter and that’s pretty much it. You might miss some tweets you may have cared more about because they quickly made their way down the wire behind a slew of other tweets from all the tweeters you are following. That’s where the use of lists can come in handy. You can create lists within twitter and name them by category, slot all the different feeds into the categories and then view the feed for each category. Some of our lists (most of which I’ve left as publicly viewable if you’re interested – you can even subscribe to them) are “Social Media focused”, “Local Detroit / Michigan”, “Photography” and “Bloggers”.

5. Have fun and be smart about it. This is general advice but people often talk about how each new platform is just a new “time suck” – a way to keep themselves from being less productive. Pinterest for example can certainly be that way, but if you think about it as the virtual pinboard that it was designed to be then it can be useful – as if you were pinning things up on a board in your kitchen for use later. YouTube? Subscribe to the official channels of brands, people, teams, things that are of interest to you instead of just aimlessly searching for the new fun popular videos.

What are your favorite tips? Now it’s your turn to interact – remember?

Blogging Revisited

November 14, 2011

by Doug Cohen

2 Comments

So….. we had a meeting with my friend and new guru Melissa Brodsky this morning and I am very excited! You see, Missy is an incredible and very accomplished writer and blogger and she knows her way around social media. I’ve mentioned her blog www.rockanddrool.com before and if you don’t follow it then you can’t be my friend anymore. Okay maybe that was a little strong. But you really should check it out – it’s fantabulous.

As most of you know I spend a lot of time updating our facebook pages and scouring the web for cool content that I think y’all will enjoy and get some use from. I tweet, I set us up with a page on LinkedIn and connect with people there, I’ve got Frameable Faces going on Foursquare, Yelp, YouTube……

It’s now time to revisit and take our blog seriously.

Little by little our online presence has morphed and grown quite a bit and this blog will once again become an important piece to the puzzle that should allow us a more robust platform and outlet for our creative energies (read – Doug can write and post more stuff), help us expand our reach, and help tie the strategy together.

All of those details might not mean a ton to all of you, but I know there are a decent number of frameables who are into this subject and regardless we just like to let you know what we’re doing and why. The blog gives us some additional flexibility and another way to build relationships online. We will continue to post on facebook and we will let you know when there is something to see here (which will be often) and we will ask you to continue to leave your comments, feedback, questions and come along for the ride! Feel free to leave a comment below and let us know what you think! The frameables are the reason we are here and we look forward to giving back to you!