Making Sense of Facebook and Twitter

Statista published their 2016 social media report and this is what I saw: Facebook, the monster on the block has 1.6 billion active users, Instagram and Twitter coming in at 400 million and 320 million respectively and 100 million active users on both LinkedIn and Pinterest.

It seems to me that, as a SBO, we would want to get our heads around some of this in the interest of putting it to work for the business. So, here’s some introductory information on a few platforms that are very popular:

Your Facebook Page for business can be linked to your blog in such a way as to:

• Allow readers to get right to it from every page of your blog.
• Allow readers to share any of the posts or pages from your blog on their Facebook news feed, or with many of their online communities (Twitter…) for that matter.
• Allow you to notify all your page followers of a new post, they can see an image and an excerpt as well as a link back to your blog and share this Facebook post with their friends.

The administrator of the page may post messages coming from the page or from their personal account. Of course, you can initiate any communication you’d like with your followers directly from the Facebook Page using text, images and video.

Your page analytics are available to you as well as targeted advertising at a cost that can fit any business. The page itself and it’s functionality I’ve described is free.

Your Twitter profile allows you to do micro-blasts about anything you want as long as it is done in 140 characters or less. These tweets can contain text or links, which opens the whole thing up to images, video, blog posts (ehem) or anything that can be put on a webpage to which a link can lead. Think about what some of these features could mean to you:

• Any tweet sent shows up in the Twitter feed of those following the tweeter. So, your feed is a scroll of what the accounts you are following are tweeting.
• Any tweet containing word(s) preceded by a hashtag (#) can be grouped with other tweets containing the same hashtag and accessed by anyone in the world.
• Any tweet containing a username (@username) will show up in that user’s notifications – in effect addressing your tweet to or cc: that/those users.
• Any tweet can be liked, shared or retweeted by others

Follow a person, a personality, an organization, a company or a government agency. In general, no approval is needed. The tweets from those accounts will begin appearing in your feed.
Direct messaging allows private messages user to user as long as they follow each other.

If this interested you, follow along. I’ll continue in this fashion for other platforms, beginning with the ones in the wagon wheel from our Strategic Planning page (top of the home page). Or, just follow this blog and you’ll get notifications when new stuff is posted.

Next up…a look at media hosting platforms – YouTube and SlideShare.

Social Media is Massive (Part 2)