 Hi everybody. So the first time I gave this presentation was about a year ago, and I've tweaked it a little bit since then. And when I gave it the first time, it was how to win friends and influence people in a 140 character count. And two days before I had to give the presentation, Twitter changed to 280. And it was changing everything on the fly. So I am hoping that Twitter has not done out in the last like 10 minutes and done something. So if they have, I can't adapt that quickly on the fly. So introduction was fantastic. My name is Laura Bern Cristiano, and I'm here because I really like to help people demystify social media. A lot of times people can feel overwhelmed by it. They're not sure how they should be using it or what's the right social media for them. And I really like to help people figure that one out. And before I get into it, I just wanna say a big thank you to the people who organized the camp, the volunteers, the sponsors without them. This just wouldn't be happening on any level. So just thank you to them. They put in a lot of work to make this go. The first thing I'd like to start out with is people very frequently will say to me, well, what social media should I be on? And that's a really loaded question. The answer is going to differ for every single person in this room and will differ for every single type of site that you're dealing with. There's no one-size-fits-all. I'm mostly gonna concentrate talking about Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, YouTube, but there are all other platforms out there and they all have their usages. I'm just picking the most popular ones here. And if you wanna continue the conversation into other types, I'd be totally happy to do that outside later, not a problem. In fact, one of the jokes I was telling people recently is sometimes businesses get on this kick of, we have to be on every single social media platform out there because we just do. And for reasons best known to them, the New York Times Stock Exchange decided they needed a Pinterest page. I don't know if they're doing Bull and Bear Brownie recipes on it. I'm not sure, but I'm not quite clear what kind of mileage they're getting out of that one. So not everything is right for everybody in every circumstance. So let's start out with a couple of basics. Number one is you have to have a picture. Even if the platform you're using is an Instagram, which frankly is the picture capital of social media, you still need to have a picture and I'll show you some reasons why. So these are coming from just industry experts. When people hear or read information, they're only likely to remember 10% of that information three days later. However, if that information is paired with a relevant image, people retain much of that information, 65% of that information three days later. Think about it yourself. If you see a commercial, you see an advertisement, you're much more likely to remember it versus hearing it on radio. There's a big difference. It's also on radio, why everybody puts something to a jingle is because people can remember a song better than they can just remember the words coming at them. So pictures are way, way more important. Secondly, your content, no matter what category you're putting it on, whether it's Twitter, whether it's Facebook, whether it's Instagram, whatever platform you're on, if there's an image, people are far more likely to share that with a friend because the image captivates. We've all heard that phrase if a picture paints a thousand words, it's absolutely true. So make sure that you're using those photos. And one of the biggies, and I'll show you a situation with this in a minute, is without a photo on Facebook, your content is seen by almost no one. But let's backtrack for a minute here and show you how this works. So here's a tweet set out by Publishers Weekly, industry expert in the publishing field, massive journal that lots of people read, huge Twitter following. So they put out a tweet that said Kamala Harris, the senator, was going to be publishing a memoir. 24 hours after they published it, eight people had retweeted it and 18 had hearted it. Same content on the San Francisco Chronicle, 15 minutes after it published, using a photo of Senator Harris. And guess where there a link went? Publishers Weekly article. So huge differentiation. People want to engage more when they see the photo. It's really easy just to go right on by it. If there's no photo there, that photo draws me in. Super, super, super important. It gets even more important when we're talking about Facebook. If you have a Facebook page and you put content up without a photo, it goes to almost none of your followers. Also super important on Facebook, order of operations is really important. Put up the photo, then do your text, then do your link. Order of operations, majorly, majorly important there. Because if you do it in a different order, what frequently happens is Facebook, their software basically thinks it's smarter than you are. And it will start hauling in photos from the link, which may or may not be what you want. It's also Facebook loves photos in their algorithm that people post natively to its site. Even if it's the same photo that's in the featured image of your article, Facebook really likes that photo to start off on their site. And you can see some of the differentiations. There are some really great tools on your WordPress site, plugins that you can use that will integrate social media and it'll post it on all sorts of platforms for you at the same time. There's some really great tools like that. One of the ones that I love is the plugin called the Social Network Autoposter, SNAP, is it's acronym. Great tool, but there is something extra you have to do on Facebook. I love it auto posting everywhere. It's great. The problem is is Facebook really likes content posted natively to Facebook. So what I usually do is I let it do its auto posting thing and then I go back maybe three hours later and say, in case you missed it and then I'll put up almost the exact same content. And you'll see a huge difference in engagement because Facebook really prefers things that are posted natively to Facebook. I have a really good example of it using the Facebook page for the viral website that I created called Twilight Lexicon. We had some information about San Diego Comic Con and things that were available at San Diego Comic Con. Over on the right side where the Funko Pop is we just let that article post up using just like I said, the plugin we were using at the time. And if you look down the bottom you can see it's engaged 32,000 people and it had 112 shares. And people are saying, glory be 32,000 people engaged with this, how are you not happy? Except three hours later when I posted pretty much the exact same content 84,000 people engaged with it with over one K shares. Huge difference. So definitely like I said that order of operations super important and there's ways of doing it both auto posting and then following up later. Sorry. What was the order again? Order of operations is picture first, then your text, then your link. Okay, so let's talk about our friend Twitter and our 280 character universe. Save that character count. There's a couple of ways that you can do it that are really ingenious. Number one is you can tag the photo with people's IDs rather than putting those ads in your tweet. And you can do it for up to 10. It can be people, it can be organizations. It is a huge character count saver and those people, those organizations all get a message that you have referenced to them. So super, super helpful. For example, I picked WordCamp US. Last year I was on the marketing team for WordCamp US and you can see we were trying to talk about all sorts of things. Here we had a Google Hangout that we were talking about featuring five speakers. Well, if I was trying to feature five speakers some of which have really long speaker names not like I don't love Raquel Langdonfield she has the world's longest Twitter name. It eats up a considerable amount of your character count and you couldn't get anything out there. Well, if you tagged the photo, you saved that problem. Another really good way of doing it is when you're thinking about your graphic put some of your information in your graphic put some of your details in there. You know, you still want it when you're writing it but that image can even give you more mileage. So think about how you can make it work in the long run for you. Here's another one. I think we're probably all heard this quote a million times, right? Brevity is the soul of wit. Well, here's some ways you can save character counts. So, whoopsie, am I in the wrong order? I am in the wrong, wait, I will go back, sorry. That's not my keyboard, I'm not as used to it. Here we go. So there are a couple ways, believe it or not you can save character counts. There are ways you can do it if you're on a Mac there are ways you can do it if you're on a Windows machine and if you're on a smartphone you can save these things over in like a notes app something like that to use in copy and paste. What happens is for example ellipses dot, dot, dot. If you actually type dot, dot, dot those are three characters. However, if you use the Mac the plus option semicolon or in Windows what's called an ASCII code which is alt and a series of numbers. Instead of going three characters, that's one character. And there's all other kinds of things too. An M dash which sometimes is three dashes it's one dash if you do it this way. These are all just a couple of really quick character counts and there's a link at the bottom where I got them and there's even more on there. My slides will be available after if you want all these resources. So I'll show you how this can come in really handy. So for example here let's take a quote from Matt Mullenweg who is the founder of WordPress. So here's a really good quote that Matt Mullenweg had about the WordPress project and how he feels about the software that he created and where he sees himself in this world. Great quote, right? I wonder if we can put that on Twitter. Ouch, we're over by one character. What are we going to do? However, if I use ellipses on an ASCII count and if I use an M dash instead of the three dashes now instead of being over by one, I'm under by two. So good, good character count savers. Okay, here's a big one. We're all getting older. I know that comes as a shock to every single human being in this room. One of these days we are very likely to need screen readers. I don't know about you all but I'm definitely wearing these glasses not just for up close but for far away. My name tag is a good example of this. I can't get it farther away from my neck to read the schedule. I have to take it off, I can't see this. We're all getting to a point where we're going to need help reading lots of things and that's going to include the internet. There are millions of people out there who access the internet using a screen reader and there are some ways that we can help those folks out and let's face it, like I said, we're all going to be there one day. So here's a couple ways we can do that. Number one, fill out the alt text. Now this can be true whether your image is on social media or you're posting it on your WordPress site. When you upload an image, you'll see a little box that hovers that says alt text. What that does is it lets you write in a description of the picture. So if somebody has trouble with their visions, they now have a couple of sentences that describe what's happening in the photo that's illustrating your point and their screen reader will read that out loud to them. Speaking of those screen readers, when you use hashtags, and this is one that I learned only a year ago, if it's lowercase, the screen reader tries to pronounce it versus if it's uppercase, it will say, for example, it will say hashtag WCUS versus the other one, it will say hashtag wookus. Do you know how dumb the screen reader sounds after it's talked about hashtag wookus for the second or third or fourth time? Think about it. The other one is camel case and that's when some of it's capitalized, some of it's lowercase and it's strung together by a big long word, that's what camel casing is. So for example, 21st century problems. A screen reader will read that hashtag as 21st century problems, which is a combination of different words in there. I don't even want to know what it would think of saying if it was strung altogether in lowercase. I'm not even sure I could come up with something pronounceable out of that. So definitely use camel case in your hashtags when possible, very, very helpful to the folks on the screen readers. The next one is don't go hashtag crazy in the middle of your text. Save your hashtags for the end or use your hashtags judiciously. I've started to see people get into this habit of going what I call hashtag happy. Suddenly it's all over the place. Only use the hashtag that are gonna get you mileage. So for example, I did a quote of myself using really bad hashtag usage and you can see, for example, it says unsolicited marketing advice, not everything in your tweet needs a hashtag, especially common nouns, it muddles your message, is rough to read. For more tips like this on effective social media, come to my presentations at and I labeled a couple places. Something like this, probably marketing might have had a benefit of a hashtag, but like tips didn't, hashtag didn't, advice didn't. Sometimes I've seen people hashtag the word blog. Do you know how many people have blogs? It's probably not gonna help you. So think about when you're hashtagging what is really gonna help people find you and as a generality, save it for the end. Sometimes you can throw it in the middle but as a generality, save it to the end, especially with the new 280 character count, you think more or less you can probably get there. The other one, and the contrast is so bad, I almost forgot about it, down the bottom, think about color contrast. I can't even really read that little pink. I see a lot of people typing things that aren't really great on the eyes. Think about it when you type it. If it's a dark background, you always want light letters and then vice versa. So always think about that when you have a site, what does it look like in an image? What does it look like on your own websites because it's not accessible to people to be able to read it? Okay, here's the next one. Be a good storyteller. This is super important for Instagram. Don't lose the future for a moment in the present. The biggest thing that's popular right now on Instagram is what they call Instagram stories where you can pop up like six or seven photos, they go across, they're cute, they're wonderful and then they go away. They go away. Here's a problem. So these are pictures of the rail park in my neighborhood in Philadelphia. They've just repurposed these old train tracks to a park kind of like the High Line in New York if any of you have ever been to the High Line in New York City. So these old commercial rail yards, they've elevated it and they've turned it into bushes and cool benches and great places for people to hang out. Opening day, a part of the park weaves through Chinatown and they had kids from Chinatown using one of those like really big dragons. They led the opening parade followed by people in really colorful costumes from that community. And then also there was this award winning high school marching band that also was in the area. They came up behind. Then there's also an Afro-Caribbean community in the area and they were on their own drums leading the parade. And do you see any visual evidence of that anywhere on Instagram? You wanna know why? They did it all in stories. It's gone. They've lost their grand opening moment in history other than one photo, which wasn't the best photo ever, the best video ever of them cutting the ribbon. That's all that remains of that day in history on their social media. So Instagram stories are great, but balance it with what you wanna have last. You gotta think about that. Okay, so here's a great one. How do you look good on Instagram? For those of you who are my age, you understand the parody of I am not a designer, nor do I play one on TV. Everybody who's over 40 is laughing, everybody other 40 is going, what is she talking about? So here's the thing. I love Photoshop. I kind of know what looks good. If you wanted me to create something in scratch from Photoshop, that is the worst idea ever. However, there are some really good tools out there that can make you look like you're a whiz at Photoshop and that you have all these fabulous artistic tools at your hand. One of my favorites is a website called Canva, canva.com. What it contains are these amazing templates for every social media platform known out there to mankind, whether it's Facebook, Twitter, Tumblr, Pinterest, you name it, it's got a template that sizes for that. It has infographics, everything, and it's all drag drop technology. It's all right click and you can change the colors. It's fantastic stuff. And it is free, which is fantastic. They give you access to the site for free. They give you a bunch of free templates. Over here on the, well, left or right, depending on your perspective. Is the Bonjour Paris? That's one of their free templates. It took me about five seconds to change dates down at the bottom and I had this gorgeous graphic that we used last year to congratulate WordCamp Europe on having their event in Paris. I look like I spent all day designing this. I spent 30 seconds changing a date. Right now on the WordCamp US Twitter, we're announcing who is speaking this year at the event. That template is literally made right on Canva and we just drag and drop people's photos into it. If I didn't have their grids, I would be like, oh gosh, I got to size this. I got to crop this. Is this the same size as this thing? I mean, I would be at this all day. This is maybe 45 seconds worth of work for us. Another company that I was helping out on their Facebook page is a company that makes hand knit stockings up in Vermont. Really cute little hand knit stockings. Those little adorable baby feet. I'm not a photographer. I can't photograph little adorable baby feet like that. They give you free photographs that you're allowed to have and you can utilize for your social media posting. It's a nice little grid. I drag and dropped items in there and I'm all set. Like I said, most of their images are for free. Most of their designs are for free, but they do have some that are paid. And if you want to use one of their paid items, they will charge you the overwhelming fee of one dollar per item that you want to use. So it's a great, great resource. Another great resource is a site called Pixabay, which is free photos for non-commercial use. So by non-commercial, in other words, you can't go put the photo on a coffee mug and go out and sell the coffee mug. All right, you can't put the image on a t-shirt and go out and sell the t-shirts up on Zazzle or something, but you can use them on your social media accounts. You can use them on your blogs. Really great resource. And then another great resource, if you're wanting to find graphics and you're like, no, I really need to pay a little bit of money for something different. A site that I really like is 123RF, which stands for 123 Royalty Free. And it's a credit system. You pay so much money and you get X number of credits and then you apply them to different items that you want. And the credits are really great because what they do is any picture that's on there, the credits go up by the quality you need. So if you need to, I don't know, shrink wrap a bus or something, you're gonna pay a lot more than if you need a little 72 DPI photo to go on your website. A community theater that I work with each year, we usually buy $100 in credits just to get our graphics for the season. And most of the time we use maybe $50 worth. And then we have extra and they let you keep them. You don't lose them, so it's good. Okay, here's the thing that's really, really important. Branding across all your accounts. A lot of times people will maybe start on Facebook and then they'll get Twitter and then they'll wander over to Instagram or maybe they started their Facebook page 10 years ago and then five years into it they got Twitter and so on and so on. And what happens is that the names on all of those platforms are different. Also, over time, naving conventions and lengths have changed. So go back across all your accounts and try to make the match. The only account that annoyingly will not let you change and carry your followers is Instagram which is really, really frustrating. Every other account will let you change your name and you get all your followers to continue following you automatically. There's no problem that it's very seamless. Not sure why Instagram wants to be annoying with it. So if you have to match Instagram and work from there. When you're able, camel case, it helps with readability of those accounts. Also try to keep your imagery as similar as possible across all of those accounts. So you're like, oh, I know this is them. This is their logo. These are their colors. I know who this is. So try to keep it really, really similar. I usually recommend that in the smaller circular or square photos on accounts, that's where your logo goes and then the bigger sweeping top image, you can be a little more creative with something that's on brand. But that tiny image, keep that to your logo across all platforms. Get rid of the extra characters on Facebook. If people had their Facebook pages created years ago, they used to throw this like number string out on the side of the Facebook page name and you had to get 50 followers and then after you got 50 followers, you could get rid of the gigantic number string. They stopped doing that about six years ago but a lot of people haven't gone back and gotten rid of like customized their names. So if you have one of those older pages, go back in and customize your name. You can do it. And if you don't know how, I will show you how out the hall afterwards. Also avoid confusing names. I won the t-shirt on this. The first time I used Twitter, it was Laura underscore underscore BC because Laura BC was taken, Laura single underscore BC was taken. So I thought I'd do two underscores. What happened? Nobody could find me because they were all tweeting the Laura BC single underscore person. So don't do that. The second name was the screen name that I had used when I first started the internet and everybody had screen names and Pelle Roja LJC seemed just perfectly sane to me except once again, nobody could find it. So I finally came up with what I have now which is New York or Laura, which everyone can remember. So come up with something memorable and if you need to change it, you can change it. I'll give you an example of a person who's incredibly hard to find on social media. Norman Reedus who plays Daryl on The Walking Dead any Walking Dead fans out there. His name on Twitter is Big Bald Head. It's super hard to find him because he created a website back in like 1999 to display his artwork when he was a starving struggling artist in New York. That was www Big Bald Head and he's kept it. He is the hardest human to find ever on social media platforms. So think about updating that look and keeping that branding the same. Here's another one that's a really cool idea and people don't think about this. Most of the time on your website you'll have like the little icons at the top and it'll be like Facebook, Twitter, whatever accounts you're on. Make sure that that information is in more than one place. Definitely across the top is awesome. On your contact page, aside from having your email or your contact form, whatever you have, also mention where you can be found on social media on your contact page. Also very helpful in the footer of your website and occasionally think about embedding your social media into one of your website posts. So here's an example from, as I said, a community theater that I work with. We're doing a show that is the sequel to Willy Wonka. How many of you have tried to upload like 20 something photos into a WordPress photo gallery? Have you wanted to go out for like coffee? Because it takes forever and then they're the wrong size and then you have to optimize them and it takes forever. Or you could just upload them to Facebook in about 35 seconds and then embed your Facebook gallery. And it's a good way then to get people, oh wait, they're on social media too. Let me follow them over there. It's a great way of doing that. You can also do this with Twitter. You can do this with Instagram. I mean, pick your platform. You can do this with just about anything. And it's a great way to get followers over there and you don't feel like you've wasted an entire morning uploading and sizing photos. Here's another good one. Get yourself a YouTube account. They're super easy to deal with, super, super easy. It's gotten way better over the last couple of years. If a picture paints a thousand words, a video paints 10K. What is the number one search engine? Google. What's the number two search engine? YouTube. Who owns YouTube? Google. They like each other. Get a YouTube channel. It helps Google find you. And again, that branding thing, keep the name consistent across everything. It works out well. Lots of people do short little videos for Facebook. If you're recording it on your smartphone, upload it to YouTube too. Just cross-platform it. Upload it in more than one location. It has lots and lots of benefits for you. Keep it short, keep it sweet, unless you're doing some sort of like top 10 countdown video, like three minutes. You don't want more than three minutes. People don't wanna be around for more than three minutes. Or unless it's like a live broadcast product reveal that's a different whole other kennel of fish. But keep it brief, keep it short. It really, really, really has benefits. People consume media on different channels, different ways. This is one way of helping people to find you. Here's another one. So like I said, I was gonna hit some highlights of places. Own it everywhere. Just about every other site there is that's out there will let you claim a space on that site if you're the business owner. And it depends business by business. Yelp, TripAdvisor, Foursquare, whatever is relevant to the business you're in. Go and claim your space. The one that absolutely everybody should claim is Google. And they have done so much in the last four months of changing that platform. You can do so many things right now. I just grabbed a screen cap of the Philadelphia Art Museums, the real famous one that Rocky ran up in, you know, beginning of the movie. They now have things aside from just being able to find your website, get directions. You can save it if you wanna save it to your, you know, Google Plus, what have you. You also now get calls to action. You can buy tickets. You can learn more. You can sign up now right before they even get to your page. You can just click an immediate call to action which is super, super relevant because we're all walking around with these things. So think about going out there, claiming your page. Literally all you have to do to claim it is either be at your place of business and they'll send you a robo call and you punch in like a four digit code they give you where you just need an email address that is associated with the URL of your business and you have them send an email there and one, two, three, it's super easy. Yes. Literally just like Google, yes. And it is attached into the Google My Business now. Yes, it all interfaces into that. Yes, correct. Here's the other thing that I always tell people. Social media overall is never, ever, ever, ever, ever a place for now hear this. If you feel yourself going to do caps locks of rage on the keyboard, put it down, walk around the block, go away. It's a place to celebrate, congratulate and inform. I don't know anybody who ever felt good about doing now hear this on social media four hours later. Usually it's groveling that ensued four hours later. Controversies happen. Better to be out there and make a mistake and own that mistake than not to have the say in the conversation, okay? If you make a mistake, just apologize and not like a wimpy apology. Not like I'm sorry if I offended anybody, no. I am sorry, period. Stop it, I am sorry, okay? There's all sorts of ways of apologizing and I think the best way to do it usually is having a self-deprecating sense of humor unless it's something really, really serious and then just I am sorry we were wrong. That's easiest. As you can see, there's Cathay Pacific who had a typo on their plane. They on social media just had a very self-deprecating sense of humor about the fact that they typoed the name of their plane and they were now fixing it. So there's lots of ways of just, like I said, coming around it, humor and a self-deprecating sense of humor is probably the best way to go out it. And there you have it. So thank you for listening to me. You can find the slides. Give me 15 minutes after we're done and I'll upload these. I have an old version up there right now. You can find them on my website which is NewYorkerLaura.com and you can find me on pretty much any of the social media platforms that I participate on at New Yorker Laura. You'll find me there. So thank you very much. Anybody have any questions? Yes. You didn't mention Google Plus and I know nobody uses it. Yes. Google Plus, I actually kind of think it's funny. Google every so often creates something, do we remember Google Wave, anybody? Google gets on a kick of creating different things at different times that thinks it's gonna be the next best thing and sometimes it is and sometimes it isn't. I will tell you what, the best thing that came out of Google Plus was Google Hangouts on Air which then morphed over to YouTube once they bought it and it's now very seamless to go live on YouTube then this convoluted mess that was Google Plus and Google Hangouts on Air. It's, Google is still there as Google. I mean there's, I don't think people use Google Plus like I said, other than maybe Google employees and even that is dying. There's like a whole set of internet memes out there on who uses Google Plus and it's very funny like that. I mean, you can but here's the thing, if your SEO is good enough in your articles anyway you should be getting it without doing that. I mean there's just generic, really good SEO of what writing your content is which is like a whole other topic in of itself. I mean you could have put it over there but at the end of the day how people Google you and what you Google for is more on your in-depth content and is it a 500 count article? Is it 1200, is it 1500 and then using keywords and having really good original content. So it does have use but you can post it there. I'm just not sure it has as much benefit of having your really good content to begin with. Yes, LinkedIn is awesome. LinkedIn is actually very business appropriate. I'll give you a really good example. I'll throw these slides up on SlideShare on LinkedIn and it will get a lot of traction when I put the right hashtagging and everything on it. So if you're talking very much business and focusing it on business. Yes, I mean it's definitely not a place to share your cookie recipes unless you're a baker. But it's yeah, no, if you're trying to connect business to business and particularly I would say like service industries, things like that, nonprofits also. I think there's a lot of traction to be had over on LinkedIn. That's like a whole other business plan in of itself over on LinkedIn. Absolutely, yes. Oh, it absolutely is, without question. The impermanence level. So as Snapchat has it all starts to react to each other. Right. You didn't really come in Snapchat as this. You know, it's interesting too. I mean if anybody who tells you that they know what social media platform is gonna stick like five years from now. I think Facebook probably has legs but we're all still out there on Myspace, right? So anybody who tells you they know what the thing that's gonna be top of the charts five years from now. Yeah, I don't think so. I don't think anybody's really got that kind of foresight. But you are right, it is coming as very much so a reaction to Snapchat. And I'm kind of wondering what kind of legs Snapchat has. I think at a certain point people kind of get tired of the filters and what have you. I mean it's fun, it's great but I'm just wondering it's cute for a moment but I think people kind of grow out of it. So that's my two cents on it. But who knows what it'll be, what it will morph into. There were, if you go back and look at things like Vine, Vine was really popular. I mean, are people still doing Vines? Not really, there's all kinds of things. So who knows? Yeah, I mean I've certainly used it as an extension of an event when I've done an event and I've had it to extend that brand at the event. I've used it as something fun for the people on site. I haven't seen it give traction for them to wanna come back to it like the next year. Like it's been a fun bonus perk for the people who are there. So that's, like I said, my own two cents on that one. Anybody else, yes? That would have been a grace use of them now. They just, and find it and repurpose it which would be great, yeah. Yeah, but you're right. You have to do the one extra step, you're right. And it is, yeah, well and the other option of it too is now people have to be willing to wait. I have to like go scroll up and go find that and go like it's not as organic as it could be. People have to be willing to like really take that extra step versus oh I could just flip, you know, scroll back quick. So yeah, that's a good point. Anybody else with a question? Okay, well thank you very much.