Social Media Made (Really) Easy

What are the main social media platforms, and what are they for?

A whistle stop tour of the main media platforms, Pinterest, Facebook, Twitter, Instagram and Linkedin. Tik tok gets a quick mention too.

What it’s for?

Who uses it?

How they use it?

PODCAST SERVICE

If you can’t find my podcast in your usual service, you will find the links here:

https://midlifeisntacrisis.libsyn.com/website

If You Prefer To Read Your Content

Hi, Christie Adams here on the 30th of August recording this slightly before launch.

I wanted to get a podcast episode out to you that includes some real information and real tips nd I thought social media is a good place to start.

I’m going to go through four questions, really, about each social media,

why you should use it,

who uses it,

what it’s for and

how you can use it.

I will go through Pinterest, which isn’t really social media, but I’ll explain why I’m including it.

Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, LinkedIn.

I’ll mention Tiktok now, because the only reason I’m not doing a Tiktok tutorial or information in this podcast is because Tiktok is currently under some investigation and it may not exist. I think it probably will still exist, but I didn’t want to waste your time going into something that you may not want to use if everything goes through with the court case.

Okay, if Tiktok continues, then I will do a separate episode purely on that.

I will be doing future episodes on each of these forums, so keep an eye on the website and subscribe to the podcast.

Okay, so let’s dive in.

Pinterest.

This isn’t really a social media platform. It’s just about the biggest search engine after Google in this world part [and China?] it’s a visual scrapbook.

If you’re into a hobby or writing or creating or art or fashion or carpentry, whatever you may be into, you can create a Pinterest pin board, just like a scrapbook.

And you can create resources. I’m a writer. I create a Pinterest board for each one of my books so that I can store visual images that relate to my book and inspire me in Pinterest.

So think of it as a massive giant scrapbook, and everybody else has got scrapbooks that you can go and have a look in and take the pictures out of their scrap book and pin it into yours at the same time.

So that’s the way of thinking of it. So that’s Pinterest. That’s all I’ll talk about at the moment.

If you’d like a separate episode on Pinterest, please let me know in the comments or drop me a line. And I will look at doing that cause it’s massive and it has a huge influence.

The next one we’ll come on to

Facebook.

You may have already got a Facebook profile. You may be a massive Facebook addict or not really like it and not really understand it.

It belongs to Mark Zuckerberg who is also, I think in court as we speak about the monopoly that he has, because it is such a huge, huge force. I did rebel against it for a while, I tend not to follow the crowd and it was very much, everybody’s got a Facebook.

Since I’ve been in business as a creative, it’s been massively helpful for me.

There are three ways that you can get involved on Facebook, a Facebook profile, which is purely for private information. Some people use it for business, but you need to be careful of that because you can’t get booted off, because in the rules, the profile is not to be used for business purposes. It’s there purely for you.

You can just put your name in, or you can put every little tiny detail of what you eat for your supper and they can, you know what television programs you like, everything.

The advantage for businesses is that they can use it then to target you in advertising. So if you put in that you will love Agatha Christie films. And somebody writes a book about Agatha Christie. Then they could target adverts and they would reach your feed on Facebook. So that was the Facebook profile, which is very much a private profile.

If you want to create a Facebook Page, that would be when you’ve got a business or you’ve got some sort of interest outside your personal life.

If you like, it could be a hobby, it could be a shop, it could be a business, but Facebook pages are where you tend to find them.

You’ll get a little icon that will say, will you like this page? It’s just some companies need that as publicity, but that’s more of the business aspect to it.

Then Facebook Groups or the social element of social media.

You can be friends with people on your personal profile, but a group is where you will create a community. It could be book lovers, podcasters, carpenters, sailors, people who love Greece. There’ll be a group for everybody you can possibly imagine.

They’re also paid groups where you subscribe to be a member and often these are closed or secret.

You won’t even see them. They can be private. So that’s the three elements of Facebook, a profile, a page or a group.

People who use it?

Most people in the world. That’s all I can say on that because there’s no sort of specific person who uses it. It is tending to get midlife or an upwards.

Young people are not so much subscribing to Facebook’s. That’s worth bearing in mind if you have youngsters or if you’re targeting youngsters with any sort of business opportunities.

Instagram is the next one.

Instagram is also owned by Mark Zuckerberg and they’re very closely related. They both got stories where if you post a story in one, it links to the other, et cetera. So they’re very closely linked. And Instagram is very much a visual board. It’s more of your shop window and of people, it’s full of beautiful imagery.

It’s also full of a lot of people’s pictures of the dinner, and pictures of the pets and cats and things like that.

It’s very much a visual forum that is full of beautiful imagery. Some not so beautiful. And it’s very accessible.

I do coach on Instagram, I’ve built a huge sort of profile on there for business, and it’s been really successful for me. A lot of business accounts are on there.

Now it does get a very bad press because people see it as just young girls in bikinis but it’s definitely not that.

I would strongly recommend that you have a look at that, especially if you’re into art or photography or anything visual. If you do any sort of visual hobby, then that’s definitely somewhere to look.

So we’ve covered Pinterest, Facebook and Instagram. So far

Twitter,

Twitter is based on trends or news. It used to be a lot shorter characters. Think it was 140 characters that’s letters on the keyboard and spaces. And now I think it’s 280 it may change again.

It’s very much a good place to communicate with groups on a less visual level than Instagram.

Twitter is more text-based, it’s very much a promotional place. If you have a blog or a website, I use it a lot for news because you can go in, create your profile and have a look at trends.

It will show you news in your area.

It will show you trends in your area and things like the coronavirus. COVID, there’s a special page for that at the moment. So you can access information really quickly.

It is very good for news and up to date information. You’ll often find that news is on there quicker than it is our news channels like the BBC or CNN or whichever news channel you subscribe to.

It’s definitely worth having for news and keeping up to date.

It’s also very good for promotion. There’s a lot of communities, it comes down to hashtags as Instagram does and trends.

I’ll do another talk about hashtags [#] at some point, but a hashtag is basically the hashtag key on your keyboard that you type in at the front of a word and everybody who uses that same hashtag maybe #podcast. Everybody who uses that will be able to link to that and see it, and see everybody else who was posted on that topic that day or that week or that year.

You can follow whoever you choose to follow, famous people or your friend or your boss or whoever. So that’s Twitter.

And the final one I’ll cover today just quickly is LinkedIn

LinkedIn still is very business based. It’s very much a career website where you can put your CV.

And if you’re applying for jobs, you can get yours up there. It’s very underused by people. I think that they don’t realize how many opportunities there are on there that if you work for yourself or you’ve got a small business, you may not think of going on LinkedIn, but it’s definitely for business people.

It’s getting less so, there are now some videos of cats and animals appearing as there always will be, but basically it is for business. There are lots of business opportunities on there.

If you’re looking for a job, I would definitely recommend, or if you’re open to a new career, definitely recommend having a LinkedIn profile.

Have a look round, you can follow people, you can look at what they’re doing. They’re quite short blog posts type articles, a lot of the LinkedIn posts are just short text that then links you to another website or to a blog page somewhere else where the full article will be published.

So that it’s, only a whistle stop tour of social media.

I’ve mentioned Pinterest, Facebook profiles, pages and groups, Instagram posts and stories, Twitter for news, and it’s limited characters and trends, LinkedIn for business.

And then quickly, like I say Tiktok may or may not develop at the moment. That’s also for business. And again, it’s very misjudged, but I’m not going into that in depth at the moment.

So how do you start on them?

The first thing to do is just create a profile, but think about what name you want to use. It may be that you want to use your private name, but what I would strongly recommend is come up with something that sums up your personality or your character to add to it rather than numbers.

Because if you see a lot of people, who’ve got like @Fredblogs123, or @ErnestJones345, and the forum itself will suggest that to you.

When you put your name in, you can guarantee there’s somebody else in the world with your name.

I would definitely recommend that you put a name in on LinkedIn, use your name, that’s your business name, but on the others, maybe you something that relates to you.

Mine, Christie Adams Writer, I’ve got @ChristieAdams23, things like that, just so that you look like a real account and you don’t look spammy and they won’t get blocked.

If you want to pursue this further, I do provide a paid service one to one.

If you want to, we go in and we can get all your profiles, setup, all your pages, all your images and everything. We can get all that setup on a one to one can chat over zoom or Skype, whatever suits you, and get all that sorted for you.

If there’s four to six people, four to six of you in a family or a group who all want to get up and running, I can do a group program as well.

Okay. So get in touch, ask any questions. It’s been very much a quick tour.

I realize that you might have got some questions, but I just want to make sure that you’re not scared of social media and don’t be afraid to jump in and have a go. What’s the worst that can happen? You can always delete it afterwards.

Please be kind and polite and tolerant, and don’t be abusive because the world needs a lot more kindness and less abuse.