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Social Media for Seniors: Find The News You Want

Every so often, I will feature guest posts from writers who actually have important and interesting things to say. My friend, Daniel Bell, is an up-and-coming copywriter based in Orlando and has written a few blog articles I’ll include on this site.

You can do a lot of things on the Internet. Play games with strangers around the world, check e-mail, take an online class, laugh at funny videos. But most seniors do not want t get wrapped in all of that. They’re keeping up with family on Facebook, but that’s about it.

So what if you wanted to get your favorite news, whenever and wherever you chose, in the places you want it?

Here are a few tips on how to make that happen:

1. Open A Social Media Account

The first thing is to learn is what a social network is: It’s basically a site where you can share, read and search public information. You can also interact with people both privately and publicly. You’ll have the ability to do this once you have created your own profile with your own information about yourself.

According to Elise Moreau, a social media expert and contributor to Lifewire.com, the top 5 social networks that people use are Facebook, Twitter, Youtube, LinkedIn, and Instagram. Every one of these can be accessed through a laptop or a mobile device. You can use a website or even the network’s own mobile application.

Every site is easy to join and they have help right there to help you get started. Just follow along and you’ll be fine.

2. Follow Your Favorite News Stations

News stations are constantly sharing breaking and slower news online. And because people love to use social media, news stations have created their own profiles that people can follow. It’s a great way for people to see what news they have first before anything else. And you can build your entire social media stream to contain nothing but news.

For example, let’s say you wanted to follow your favorite news station on Facebook. I live in Orlando so I might want to look for the local FOX station.

On Facebook, you would need to search in the Facebook search bar, like this:

Facebook search bar, looking for WOFL Fox 35

After you press enter, you will see the top results. More than likely, the top one will be the news station you’re looking for, like this:


To actually get the content the station posts on their Facebook page, you need to click on the “Like” button.

Repeat this for as many news sites as you would like to receive the news from, and any time they post news stories, you’ll see them.

You can do the same thing on Twitter, although you would click the Follow button instead of the Like button. Search for your terms in the Twitter search bar, and visit the profiles that come up.

Understand What Trends Are

A trend is something that is widely mentioned or discussed on the Internet, especially in posts on social networks. Basically, a trend is a topic that is popular on the Internet at the present time. It could be a sporting event like March Madness or the World Series, or a particular political event or current event.

Breaking news is a good trend to follow, because random stations will post their own #BreakingNews hashtags. You can get news from all over, and you don’t have to follow any particular stations to do it.

If you put #breakingnews (don’t forget the #) in the search bar of your favorite social media sites, different profiles that post breaking news with that hashtag will appear. You can search for it occasionally and see what new news is coming up, and it’s like having your own 24-hour breaking news newspaper at your fingertips.

There’s a lot more to the Internet than just searching for news, but this is a good way to get started, to keep up with what’s happening in the world, and to learn how you’re going to use it all so you can navigate it and see what it has to offer.

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Stop Selling to Me on LinkedIn

Are you married? When you first met, did you walk up to your prospective spouse and just pop the question?

Or are you in a long-term relationship? How did you start it? Did you say, “How would you like to form a long-term relationship? My strengths are that I have good manners, love my mother, and am kind to dogs?” And then did you follow that up with a list of past significant others who can vouch for your good character?

Of course not! That’s clearly no way to enter into any kind of relationship.

But when people connect with me on LinkedIn, it turns me off when the very first thing they do is ask if I need their web services, followed by a 500 word explanation of everything they can do, the companies and projects they’ve worked on, and a request to hop on the phone for a 15 – 30 minute conversation about what they just sent me.

(Not to mention that every message looks nearly identical. They’re either all copy-pasting each other’s sales pitch, or it’s just one company creating thousands of profiles with the same message.)

Oh, I know, I know. Some of you are saying: “Hey, it works. We get clients this way.”

I’m sure you do. And there are stories where people agreed to get married after just one date. In fact, there’s a TV show where people agree to get married the moment they meet. That doesn’t make it a sound strategy for building a long-term relationship.

And neither does you hitting me up about your services the very instant I accept your connection request. It’s rude, presumptuous, and desperate. I ignore the people who send me those messages. Maybe I’ll tell them “no thanks,” but usually only if they insist on repeating the same request a couple weeks later — you know, in case I missed it the first time.

The practice is so pervasive that I get at least two of these a week with the same copy-pasted sales pitch all asking for my hand in business marriage.

Part of my problem is that I can’t just refuse to accept people’s connection requests. I’ve written a few social media books, and people often connect with me after reading them. So I don’t want to be a jerk and snub a reader, but it’s getting harder to accept a request because I just know I’m going to get burned.

I can usually spot most LinkedIn spammers though. They tend to have a title that says “Business Development.” They live in a city or country that I have never been to or rarely visit, and yet they’re connected to 5 – 30 of my friends. And they usually work for some sort of web, SEO, or marketing agency.

I stopped accepting connection requests from people who fit that profile because I know what will be cluttering up my inbox 24 hours later.

More importantly, I’ve begun disconnecting from people who spammed me with their first message.

LinkedIn is for serious business connections, not a way for lazy salespeople to spam other people they’ve never met. And that’s what you’re doing: spamming people.

The only difference is you’re calling it business development and you’re (hopefully) doing it by clicking on the mouse yourself, instead of using the automation software that’s infected Twitter. I don’t care if you think it’s not spamming, or you tell yourself that you’re special and you’re not doing what those other people are doing, because you totally are.

You’re sending the same unwanted, unasked-for crap we get in our email inboxes. The only difference is you’re doing it on LinkedIn as if that somehow makes it okay.

Not only do I disconnect with these people, I will also occasionally report them to LinkedIn by clicking the “I don’t know this person” link or marking them as spam. If enough people do it, their account will be suspended or even terminated. And then maybe they’ll get the hint that this isn’t acceptable.

If you’re one of those people who uses LinkedIn instead of the phone to place your unwanted cold calls, why don’t you try some relationship building first? Start a conversation with people. Find out about them first. Don’t try to close the deal on the first date, don’t try to propose entering into a business relationship the moment you meet someone.

And I’ll make you another deal. If you buy a copy of my book and email me a photo of you holding it, I’ll agree to a 15-minute phone call with you about your company. Because if you’re going to make demands of my time without actually investing anything into the relationship, then I’m going to make a demand of my own.

Put your money where your mouth is. Invest in the relationship first, and then we’ll talk about what your company does.

(And then read the book. Maybe you’ll learn a better alternative to the “Married At First Sight” strategy.)

Photo credit: Qwertyxp2000 (Wikimedia Commons, Creative Commons 4.0)

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Twitter Verified Self-Proclaimed White Supremacist

Twitter verified a Nazi yesterday.

You know those little blue checkmarks some people have next to their Twitter handles? That basically “verifies” that yes, this person is at least semi-famous. Or is someone of “public interest.”

A few years ago, when the Verified symbol first showed up, only celebrities had them. Movie stars had them. Rock stars had them. Professional athletes had them. Big-time authors had them.

Basically if you had a little blue checkmark next to your name, it meant you were someone famous.

Then, less famous people started getting them. Journalists of national publications got them. Radio DJs got them. Local TV anchors got them.

And soon after that, not-really-famous-but-you’ve-maybe-kind-of-heard-of-them people started getting them. Scott Monty (@ScottMonty) got one, partly because he’s been a big name in social media for years, partly because he’s a well-known Sherlock Holmes podcaster, but mostly because he was in the public eye as Ford’s social media manager for years. Other local journalists got them, novel authors, and small business owners.

Even people who have over 100,000 followers (that they most likely got through cheating) but haven’t even published 10,000 tweets are Verified. (I know, because one of them followed me yesterday.)

I, however, am not.

I’ve struggled with whether I even want the little blue checkmark. On the one hand, it seems rather needy and high school-ish, like jumping on the latest fashion trends because all the cool kids are wearing them. On the other hand, I never did what the so-called “cool kids” did in high school because I thought they were morons.

My good friend and book co-author Jason Falls (@JasonFalls) is not Verified. He thinks it’s stupid. And I mostly agree. It just seems so needy and insecure to try to fit in with the cool kids, because the cool kids are by and large insufferable asshats.

Still, it would be nice to have. There’s still a small part of me that wants that little blue checkmark, because it would be so validating. Like what I did was important. And in the public interest.

But I don’t have it.

Oh, it’s not for lack of trying. I applied for it a few weeks ago. I cited the four books I co-authored — including Branding Yourself (which has a whole chapter on Twitter), No Bullshit Social Media (which mentions Twitter constantly, and was a groundbreaking social media book in 2011), The Owned Media Doctrine, and of course, Twitter Marketing for Dummies (which I “ghost co-authored” in 2009).

I also mentioned my newspaper humor column, which I have written every week for the last 21+ years.

And I mentioned that I was the 2016 Jack Kerouac House writer-in-residence.

But it wasn’t good enough. I received a rejection email that didn’t actually explain why I didn’t get it. That’s fine. I can deal with that. Maybe my books aren’t famous enough. Or they were all written more than four years ago (although the third edition of Branding Yourself dropped this month). Or that nearly all the 10 Indiana newspapers that publish my column are weeklies.

Or maybe it’s because I’m not a white supremacist.

Because Twitter verified Jason Kessler, the self-professed white supremacist who organized the Charlottesville white supremacist rally that left one protestor dead.

They verified him, and Twitter went nuts and started tweeting to Twitter’s CEO @Jack Dorsey in protest.

Am I bitter that I wasn’t verified? No. Am I angry? No. Am I annoyed that a Nazi was verified before I was?

Sure, a little bit.

I write books that help people find jobs. I write books that help businesses be more successful. I write newspaper columns that make people laugh. I don’t try to oppress people, denigrate minority groups, organize violent rallies, or joke about the death of a protestor and call her “a fat, disgusting Communist.”

I mean, if you were to ask people who should be verified I would hope “four-time non-fiction book author” would rank somewhere above “white supremacist Nazi dirtbag.”

Doesn’t that make sense? That someone who contributes to the betterment of society would be slightly more worthy of verification than someone who calls for the wholesale genocide of an entire race of people?

I mean, I know I’m old-fashioned, but I figured helping people succeed was more noble than joking about their deaths.

At the very least, Twitter, don’t verify this guy. Remove the verification. I don’t have to have it. In fact, I don’t think I want it anymore. If you’ve granted it to something you find on the bottom of your shoe, I don’t want it.

But for God’s sake, don’t give it to someone who promotes hate and genocide. I thought you were better than that.

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Why I’m Decimating My Twitter Account

Last year, my friend and co-author, Kyle Lacy, pissed off thousands of people when he blew up his entire Twitter account, unfollowed nearly everyone he was following, and then slowly started following back the essential people.

I never noticed.

My Twitter was so full of junk and noise that I never noticed that he re-followed me. (He did! I checked. Shut up.)

Kyle’s problem, he told me, was that he was following so many people — close to 60,000 — who weren’t saying anything useful, it was clogging up his Twitter feed. He also admitted — reluctantly — that he hadn’t properly used Twitter lists to keep track of different groups of people.

So his only option was the nuclear one.

Thousands of people unfollowed him, upset that he unfollowed them, and he’s only following 1,500+ people right now. But he’s got a better handle on his Twitter feed than he’s had since he joined in 2008. He had over 50,000 followers, and he’s now down to 36,000+.

I’ve been thinking about Kyle’s nuclear option lately, especially as I’ve been looking at my general Twitter feed each morning, and it’s filled with noise, chatter, and completely useless garbage.

It’s motivational quotes, reminders to download a new ebook, more motivational quotes, invitations to webinars, articles about how high achievers who are not me achieve greatness, a #hashtag #filled #tweet, the latest Mashable article, and more motivational quotes.

The signal-to-noise ratio on Twitter is terrible. It’s like trying to find a radio station in the middle of the desert. There’s a lot of static, but no music.

It’s gotten worse as Twitter changed its algorithm, expanding on their “While You Were Away” feature. They want you to see the tweets they think you will appreciate.

I don’t. These new tweets are all terrible. All of them. (Except for @VeryLonelyLuke. That guy’s hilarious.)

So how can I reduce the noise? How can I restore some semblance of usefulness to my general Twitter stream?

Checking under the hood: I think I see your problem

I plugged my Twitter account into ManageFlitter to see if I could figure out the problem.

The problem was a whole bunch of people with between 50,0000 – 1 million followers, evenly split between people who were following me and not following me. There were about 3,000 people out of the 14,000 people I was following.

I even hid verified accounts from the mix, so I wasn’t including celebrities or news organizations.

What I was left with were the self-published authors and social media “experts” who yo-yo follow others to artificially inflate their accounts.

“Filthy rotten spammers” (FRS), as I like to call them.

FRSes will follow thousands of people, get a few thousand follow-backs, then unfollow everyone, and start all over. They do this to get past Twitter’s follower limit and grow their accounts by leaps and bounds.

You can easily spot an FRS: they have 50,000+ followers and have written a surprisingly small number of tweets.

This is how you can spot a Filthy Rotten Spammer on Twitter.

The worst are the ones with more than 100,000 followers, and 150,000 tweets. These are the people who spend a few hours every day retweeting all the crap they find in their own Twitter feeds.

Seriously, some of these people send nearly 100 tweets in a day! When I checked their stream, it was retweet after retweet, with the occasional “You’re welcome!” sent to someone who thanked them for the RT. As if the FRS had done them a huge favor.

Pruning and trimming: Seeing some progress

With ManageFlitter’s help, I started unfollowing the people in the 50K-1M range who weren’t following me back.

I realized I had followed those people because they followed me first. I could tell, because as I moused over each name on ManageFlitter, their bio popped up, and I could see they weren’t someone I would normally reach out to first.

(Trust me, I don’t eagerly follow people offering yoga and vegetarian-eating tips unless we’re already friends.)

I unfollowed nearly 1200 people in an hour. I could have gone faster, but I did want to make sure I wasn’t unfollowing people I actually found interesting.

However, this wasn’t all the FRSes. I checked my Twitter feed again, and there was still a lot of crap in my stream. It was better, but not great.

I showed all the people who were following me, sorted by number of followers in descending order, and excluded all the verified accounts. This hid accounts for CNN, the New York Times, and Alyssa Milano er, I mean, Colts punter Pat McAfee. (Alyssa Milano loves baseball. Shut up.)

You can use these filters on ManageFlitter to hide people you may actually want to keep.

With this new list, I found another 500 or so people I could eliminate. Problem is, I hit ManageFlitter’s 1700-unfollowers-in-a-day limit, and have to wait for 24 hours to finish the job.

For $12/month, I get unlimited following, plus all kinds of other features, including creating white lists of high-value accounts, integrate and manage my Twitter lists, and various analytics capabilities. But I’m going finish this experiment first before I commit to it.

Initial results: Prognosis good

After my initial pruning, which took about 90 minutes, I could already see a difference in my Twitter stream. I rediscovered some old Twitter accounts that I hadn’t seen in months, including Doug Bursch, Cathy Day, and a few others.

While I’m not exploding my Twitter feed like Kyle did last year, I am going after large chunks of it and pruning off a lot of deadwood in the hopes that my network will yield a whole lot more signal than noise.

While Twitter will no longer be the conversational tool that it once was — thanks a lot, marketers and filthy rotten spammers! — it will at least be a whole lot more useful to me than it was just a few days ago.

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How to Get Discovered by Brands (GUEST POST)

This is a guest post written by Tamar Weinberg, VP of Customer Success of influencer marketing platform The Shelf, a tool that ensures that brands connect with the most relevant influencers. The Shelf’s technology includes patent pending brand and ecommerce indicators.

Are you a blogger looking to be discovered by a brand for collaboration opportunities? We totally understand the challenges you’re facing.

I’ve worked with a sizable number of bloggers in the past, having written a book on social media marketing with an entire chapter dedicated to blogging. Many people start their blog and come to me immediately after two or three posts, thinking that money and recognition will come immediately.

It won’t.

There are over 200 million blogs—and that’s just one platform. However, even though the space is extremely competitive, there’s a lot of noise and not enough signal. For you as a blogger, that’s a great thing. Discovery will take time but it is doable.

My key piece of advice for all people trying to start a blog: keep at it. Work really hard and post consistently.

But more so, network! Let other people discover you by engaging on their content. And above all, keep your attitude positive and your head held up high. These days, engagement on blog posts is low. Blogs in 2015 don’t get as many comments as blogs in 2010. However, as you keep up on blogging, your social proof as a personal brand will go up. Your Twitter follower numbers will rise. Your Facebook Likes will increase. You will be recognized by people who will be interested in who you are and what you do.

Now you have an established following and brands are taking notice. A few have reached out to you and want to work with you–but you may want to work with others. One of the biggest challenges you will have is how to effectively pitch and collaborate with brands. I totally recommend making the first move.

As long as you have the social proof, you’re in a position to effectively pitch and build upon these brand relationships that benefit both you and your brand. Here’s how we suggest that you build the relationships:

Do Your Research

Look at what other bloggers in your niche are covering. Are they working with other brands that may be interested in your audience as well? If so, take a look at how they’re collaborating with these other brands and feel them out. Was it a giveaway? Affiliate offer? Sponsored post? Once you have a solid understanding of what type of collaboration they are working with, you’ll have a solid foundation for formulating your pitch.

Take a look into the brand’s marketing initiatives. Are they working on any existing campaigns it may be helpful to align with? It may help to check out the brand’s social media channels where you may find promotional materials that help you learn about current campaigns that are worth participating in.

Develop Your Pitch

On top of your research, you may already have a few brands in mind that you want to work with. They could be products/services that totally jive with your audience and your interest level. By now, with both of these, you should have a pretty solid understanding of the types of collaborations that have been done before with the brand and other bloggers, if at all. (And if not, just make the first move and ask!)

Why does your blog align so well with their brand personality? It’s helpful to communicate this particular point in your pitch. To stand above the crowd, you may wish to get creative and offer some other ideas on other types of collaborations.

After you’ve jotted down your thoughts, create the pitch: include a short overview of who you are, how the campaign benefits the brand, and any deliverables you’ll give them. Make your email short and sweet, and if you’d like, include a media kit so that the brand knows about your audience, your social followings, and your positioning in the marketplace.

Be in constant contact

Assuming your pitch is good, those brands should be able to get in touch with you quickly. If they schedule a meeting or phone call to discuss the scope of the project further, take it. Be open to hearing as much as possible from them so that you fully understand their objectives so you know exactly what they’d expect from you and how you could realistically help them. By having this meeting, you should be able to get all the information you need to craft a formal proposal with requested compensation.

If they didn’t get back to you, try again. I hate to say how many times I’ve dealt with people who are good people but are just bad at responding to emails. Maybe they were reading your initial contact while under the covers at 11pm. Maybe they were in a meeting. (Maybe they suck.) But don’t be afraid to try again and be politely persistent until they respond. In fact, if you’re passionate about them, show them you’re already engaged with the content. Feature their brand in an article. Tag them on social media. Engage with their posts and show them your love of the product.

And if you’re already in communications with them, that’s a tipping point! Your blog has now become a professional medium, and it is important to be professional with your communications with these brands to keep these collaborations coming. This is the best step toward a long term relationship that benefits everyone and puts you in a great light.

Initially, it will feel like quite an intimidating process to be involved in this next step with brands. But at the end of the day, the brand gets visibility and you get some benefit through product, payment, and affiliation as well. After all, you’re an influencer. It would be silly not to interact with people who had the If you don’t have the courage to reach out, the opportunity may never present itself.

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5 Social Media Trends All Writers Should Follow in 2015

This is a special guest post written by Hilary Smith, a recent graduate of Medill School of Journalism. Always one to help young writers, I’m pleased to offer this on her behalf.

As we approach the holiday season, we also come to the end of another amazing year of technology and the continued growth of social media. The year 2014 brought us the iPhone 6, but more importantly gave us new technological advances in brain mapping, better mobile collaboration and more agile robots.

Writers need social media. It may be a distraction, but it’s also the only way you’re going to build your readership. Unless you’re John Grisham or Stephen King.

Entering 2015, we need to pay closer attention to the hottest new trends that are forecasted to affect the Internet, especially authors, bloggers and other online writers. The death of Google Authorship can mean the rebirth of other new social media strategies that we can embrace to pump up our readership.

Here are five important trends that wordsmiths should follow for 2015:

1. Go Mobile or Go Home

Long ago, author and famed environmentalist Roger Tory Peterson wrote: “Birds have wings, they’re free, they can fly where they want, when they want, they have the kind of mobility many people envy.”

Today we have mobility that can surpass our feathered friends when we can circumnavigate the globe in mere seconds with our hand-held mobile devices. Practically everyone today is carrying a tablet or smartphone so make sure all of your material is mobile friendly.

2. Million Dollar Eye Candy

Okay, I just made this one up but I’ve also seen it paraphrased online, “If a picture is worth a thousand words, then a video offers a million more.”

All of your posts should include a visually stunning, attention grabbing picture or embedded video to capture your audience’s attention. Social media traffic is heavy and it always seems like rush hour, so to get your reader to stop at your piece by giving them something appealing to look a first. If anyone still uses the Yellow Pages or reads a newspaper, it is the difference between trying to find a small amount of text or viewing a full page advertisement.

3. Don’t Be a Show-Off

French Philosopher Henri Bergson stated, “The only cure for vanity is laughter and the only fault that is laughable is vanity.”

Don’t over-promote yourself or your material. Sure, it’s okay to be excited when your book first launches, but then you need to back off. Learn to become a teacher and advisor rather than a salesperson by giving free webinars and chatting it up in HangOuts.

4. Respond – But Stay Positive or Stay Silent

This one comes from my Dad and perhaps one of your parents, “If you don’t have anything nice to say, don’t say anything at all.”

The same goes for social media, don’t show anger and resentment or respond to nastiness in any way. If someone blasts your work with something negative, ignore them. If they attack you a second time, block them. On the other hand, when someone leaves a positive comment, respond to it. Remember, you’re not delivering a sermon, you’re opening a dialogue.

5. Greater Integration of Messaging

“Our tools are not improvement to modern society, they are a challenge to it.” — Clay Shirky, Here Comes Everybody: The Power of Organizing Without Organizations

Platforms like Twitter and Facebook naturally serve as great messaging tools, but when integrated with an event promotion strategy, social media can amplify your message and encourage attendee posts before, during, and after the event to create anticipation and buzz.

Another way to help boost your readership is through the use an “Influencer.” This is where focus is placed on key individuals rather than the target audience as a whole. By identifying those individuals who can influence your potential readers, we gain even further exposure by “piggybacking” on their popularity and exposure.

Much in the same way that Father Time gives way to the New Year’s Baby, stone tablets were replaced long ago with social media just as our bound and printed books are now available online. Don’t be a prehistoric penpal, engage with your readers successfully online through social media.

 

About the author:
Hilary Smith is a graduate of Medill School of Journalism, and specializes in telecommunications. She also covers social media, VoIP technology and globalization. You can find her on Twitter at @HilaryS33.