Before you begin reading this post I am having a grumpy old man moment and pointing out all the things that I have found to be quite irritating whilst using Twitter for my first year and I imagine must annoy others. I share my moaning moments with you in the hope that you won’t make the mistakes and instead make your Twitter account a highly influential social media account that will work for you and your business.

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Moaning Negative Statements – In day to day life no one likes a moaner or someone who puts others down and when on Twitter its the same ball game so avoid sharing your negative thinking on your social media platform at all costs otherwise you may find people start unfollowing you.

Political messages – likewise, everyone has their own idea of how the world should be run and what is right and wrong. It is best to have followers that agree with your way of thinking but to avoid upsetting anyone its best not to put any of your extreme political views on Twitter unless of course you are a politician! Its a risky tweet to tweet.

Validate you are a REAL Twitter user – Ever so often I get a DM ( direct message ) that says, please validate you are not a robot by following this link . It may only take around 20 to 30 seconds to validate but can I really be bothered and is there really a problem if a fake account follows you that happens to be a bot? Not really, you simply just dont follow them back. Its definitely a roll of the eyes moment.

The Egg – The first thing you should do when you start using Twitter is to create a profile and if possible design a good twitter background and profile picture in a clever and imaginative way that expresses your personality. If you remain an egg you are looked at as untrustworthy and not really worthy of following. If you have trouble designing a good profile then contact me and I will help you design a profile that reflects your personality or brand.

Hashtag junkie – #today #i #went #the #supermaket #and # bought #a #cabbage. When nearly every single word in a tweet is hash tagged it is seen by other users as spam. Hashtags do help get your content seen by more users but limit it to just a maximum of three hashtags.

Selfishness – me me meeeeeee! Yes we all want to be noticed and we all want to do more deals but to create relationships you need to help each other. Don’t just promote your own thoughts and products but be actively RT ( retweeting ) the tweets of others, the ones you find interesting and if you have used twitter lists maybe diversify how you share your tweets. For instance, monday could be ‘graphics’ day, tuesday could be ‘marketing’ and so fourth.

One good form of practice that is recommended by Twitter experts is for every one of your own pieces of content share 5 of others.

Tweeting like its going out of fashion – spending every waking moment on Twitter is not healthy and neither is tweeting 10 times in one minute. If people see your profile picture directly after each other in their feed they are likely to get fed up and unfollow you. Instead spread out your tweets throughout the day and put your most influential ones on your account when Twitter is at its most active ( around 2PM GMT).

Having few tweets compared to number of followers – 100,000 followers? Well done! That must have taken some time to build that kind of recognition especially with only 300 tweets, tell me how much you paid for that following. Twitter users aren’t stupid and if you are trying to deceive people into following you then its not a good start in building trust is it?

Tweets that add no value – informing the world you had cornflakes and orange juice for breakfast is not going to add value to your followers. What information do they really want? What do they want to feed on? Think a little before you tweet and try to provide things that you know others will benefit from.

Was it something I said? – people who follow you only to unfollow you a couple of weeks later to try and build their following/follower ratio will irritate the heck out of the users. Why add someone to your network only to unfollow them later? Doesn’t really make sense does it? If you want to keep track of who is unfollowing you use justunfollow.com.

Thanks for following! @myunclebob @davidthegnome @catsgroup  – When you follow tweeps some users thank you for it. and tag you in a tweet with several other users. I understand its a form of trying to build a larger network but it doesn’t add anything to the majority of followers and will become irritating to see ‘thankyous’ regularly in your feed. The best way to say thank you is in a direct message in private rather than on the main feed.

In the next post I will discuss 11 ways to build appreciation for your tweets on Twitter.

The majority of potential customers and clients are now online and that is great news for any business owner, it means reaching in to your target market is a lot easier than it once was. The problem is, do you use this online way of living to your advantage and not only to your advantage but to the advantage of your customers.

The internet has made shopping around easier and personalization of service of huge importance and if your business isn’t using its digital marketing tools properly then the company is likely to fail. In this post I will discuss three ways that I GUARRANTEE will help you generate ‘the right traffic’ and leads for your business.

1. Blogging, but the right content

What, you don’t know how to blog? Do you have an opinion? Well then my friend, you CAN blog and I believe that EVERYONE should be blogging! Blogging is actually a really fun way to get your thoughts out of your head and shared with anyone who is interested and willing to read the content you provide. It is so important that your business ( or as individual ) are blogging and for quite a few reasons.

Firstly it breaks down perceived barriers between being a professional corporation to an approachable professional that cares about its customers and becoming seen as an educator not just an informer. Secondly blogging helps boost organic search results and thirdly if you write the right content then you are being a little bit psychic and answering questions that customers have before they even make enquiries empowering your customers! In this era customer truly is king and being a caring compassionate business that really wants to make a difference to people it does business with are the businesses that are going to thrive in the 21st century and beyond.

Write the right content

People get confused about what blogging is. Blogging is not really a tool for spreading gossip and news or discussing the latest news events ( unless it is really appropriate for your business ), the reason you shouldn’t blog about major events and twist it on to your business is because the person who views the content is interested in the ‘news event’ not your services or product! Comprende!?

Instead take just 10 minutes of your time and ask yourself what is the last 20 questions a potential customer or lead asked? Usually cost is top for most businesses but what else is an issue? When you have the questions you have the greatest content creation tools at your disposal and if  you ignore the customers needs you will always be seen as a corporation that are not very approachable.

Remember, its time to be personal and friendly with the customers NOT just provide a service or product. Show the consumers why you are the company to do business with.

2. Getting your employees to blog

If you are small to large-sized employer then this applies to you otherwise one man bands, im sorry ignore this section!

Your employees are the ones who are your point of contact with most of your clients, particularly the sales team so get those guys knowledge and get them putting pen to paper ( or finger to digital ), they are perfect people to try blog content because they know not only the questions that consumers have but usually the answers to their problem too!

Not only the fact they have all the questions and answers of your market but they will also free up your valuable time! A blog post can take anything from 30 minutes to half a day ( should you be interested in creating a good infographic or something else of such liking), if you have 30 sales staff and each one writes just one blog post a week that is 30 pieces of new content for the search engines to feed on and you didn’t have to divert some of your time to writing a post!

Guest blogging both home and away

So your blogging, your workforce is blogging and now your content is mounting but you can add even more content to the fabulous informative blog you are creating for your market! Inviting others in your industry to blog on your website will not only benefit you but it will also benefit the guest by increasing awareness of their ability and creating back links to their own content.

It may not seem a very clever idea, isn’t it like inviting the wolf to the lamb’s dinner? It depends on your viewpoint, personally I believe by building relationships with fellow industry experts you can build mutual respect, share business when your workload is high and also help promote each other; surprisingly you may even learn a few things from the new post too!

Social

Lastly, if you are not on social media then where the heck have you been!?! EVERY and i mean EVERY business has to be on social media, social media is becoming a much more powerful tool for generating traffic than the organic search. I guess the most obvious reason for this is that you will connect to people who you really do have an interest in, particularly on Twitter so getting your message out to the right person is instantly easier.

Every time you create a new piece of content ( not just blog posts, images, infographics, podcasts too) then share it on all social platforms. A lot of marketers might tell you to just use LinkedIn if you are a B2B, others will say to target a few social platforms, I am going to tell you to target as many social media platforms as physically possible! Create networks everywhere, the more you connect to people from every country and continent on the world the easier it is to reach the right people with your product or service but don’t spend all your time on social media and neglect the importance of actually running your business.

How do you drive traffic to your website? What do you feel works best? Please comment in the box below.

Schedule tweets you say? But how?

Juggling your time between social media accounts and the important part, your paid work, can be difficult at times. You want to be seen as active on Twitter and attempt to add something of value but you also want to ensure you complete your work to as high a standard as possible so tweeting ever so often isn’t really productive to your job’s productivity. Do not fear, there is a solution! In this post I discuss how you can schedule tweets to appear at different times of day throughout your working week allowing you to get on with other elements of your job.

Managing your Tweets

Social media managing program “HootSuite” is a great tool to see all your social media identities all in one place. One of my favourite features about HootSuite is the ability to schedule social media activity down to the exact day and time it will be posted, how good is that!?

1. Set up an account with HootSuite

Setting up an account with Hootsuite is simple it even gives you the option of signing in with one of your many social media accounts once you have registered them. As you register to use Hootsuite you will arrive at your dashboard and a button will say “Add a Social Network”, click it.

As we are looking at Twitter then simply follow the instructions to add your Twitter account as your first social media to manage via Hootsuite, you can add all the others later.

2. Flying in to publish and schedule tweets

Once your log in to HootSuite there is a dashboard to the right. To proceed click the paper aeroplane symbol (publisher ) and you will arrive at the screen to schedule tweets that can be seen above.

In order to begin scheduling Twitter posts you type your tweet where it says “compose message…”.

Once you have composed the message you want to communicate, to the right of your newly created message is another box where you select the social media platform you want to share the message on.

As mentioned earlier Hootsuite isn’t just for managing Twitter and scheduling tweets, you can manage every social media program you use via Hootsuite so proper use of the program can really help you to be more productive with your time whilst enhancing your social media experience for you and others.

What time is it!? Schedule tweets tiiiimmme!!

Once you have completed your tweet and added a link to the post then you simply click the calendar icon ( shown in blue on the above image ) and a calendar will pop up with the date and time options. This is where you plan your social media activity.

There are optimum times of day that are best for posting on different social media  see this infographic on my Pinterest account for more information so you can get the most of scheduling your posts for certain times.

Once you have completed the time setting press “send now” and it will appear in your schedule list.

Repeat the process until you have a weeks worth of scheduled tweets at varying times, sit back and watch the tweets roll out allowing you to focus on the other parts of your job.

Wait! Don’t forget to interact with your Twitter community

Although its great being able to pre-plan your tweets don’t forget that Twitter is a “social” media platform so try and interact with people’s tweets and when you receive communication on your own tweets, respond back for Pete’s sake!

The more you personalise people’s experiences with your social media accounts the more you will gain in online respect as a social media influencer.Like in the real world talking and giving importance to others views and opinions helps to build relationships, no one likes to be just spoken to and not heard…

Hootsuite is a great social media management program and to be able to schedule tweets is just one of the many great features that it has to offer. I highly recommend you take a little adventure through this management program and see just what can be done with it.

If you have any feedback or have a question please don’t hesitate to contact  me below or hey, why no on my twitter account?

So you have your Twitter account and you have a few thousand Twitter followers, great stuff! After a small amount of time, you notice a feature on your twitter account to the top left called lists. “What the heck is this for, Twitter lists!?” you think, why on earth would anyone need a list feature? Well in this post I hope to help decipher exactly why Twitter lists are useful and how to use them effectively to improve your social media experience.

What is a Twitter List?

As your twitter followers increase and you start following lots of relevant Twitter users, being able to keep up to date with all your favourite Tweeps and finding useful tweets can become difficult, if not impossible. One feature of lists is to help you cut through the noise to find the diamonds amongst the coal!

Twitter Lists help you organise tweets you are interested in

A list helps you organise your favourite Twitter users into a type of “Twitter Groups”. So for instance, if you look at my Twitter Lists on my personal account you will notice at the time of writing this blog post I have around ten lists, three of which can be seen below.

Being able to add your favourite Twitter users to groups makes it easy for you to organise the most influential Twitter users you follow into categories like “Web Design“, “Graphic Design” Typography” etc and is useful for when you are having a day where a specific interest is grabbing you. I guess you could compare twitter lists to a telephone directory, it makes it much easier to find people and information you are looking for.

So why should you bother creating Twitter Lists?

There are several reasons you may want to create Twitter lists, one I have already discussed to keep track of your favourite Tweeters but there are more.

Another reason is to build relationships with those who really matter to you in your personal and professional life.

Build Relationships using Twitter Lists

By adding someone to one of your lists that Twitter user is notified and it is almost like giving that person a little high five to say “Yo! My hommie, your tweets rock my world!” and helps to build a mutual respect between the two of you, after all, you think that Twitter owner can add a lot of value to your digital life.

Recommend other Twitter Followers

When you create a new Twitter list you have an option to make it private or public. If you think that some of the people you have in your lists should remain private ( i.e. family members, celebrities you like or a bit of a detective keeping track of your competitors tweets) then do consider making a list private otherwise keep it public.

This helps the Twitter account user benefit from a little bit of publicity should your followers check out the twitter list they are on.

Make a Twitter Search for Twitter users easier by sharing lists

You don’t have to keep your lists stored away in the Twitter closet…get it out!

Simply navigate to the list you would like to share, copy the  url and post it into your Twitter Feed. Hey presto! Twitter list shared!

Do you have to be following the user you include in a Twitter List?

This is a question I asked myself when I started creating lists and the good news is, you don’t have to be following them!

This is particularly good news if you are reaching your “2000” limit and unable to follow any more users ( until you have a 10% followers to following ratio ) but don’t want to loose some really influential and educational tweets.

To gain the most benefit from this part of the twitter list feature  then you need to use twitter tools like justunfollow.com.

One of the features that Justunfollow has is that it allows you to find who is following, not following and unfollowing your Twitter account cutting out the mystery of who to follow and unfollow.

There are more features to this Twitter tool but I recommend visiting the site for more information.

Ok, so I kind of understand Twitter lists now but how do I create one?

Rather than rewrite the wheel, so to speak, I have provided a link to Twitter’s very own guide in how to do this here.

Should you have any questions about twitter lists or have some more information you would like to share navigate to the bottom of the page and please leave a comment.

P.S. Please add me to some lists too and I may just return the favour! Cheers my dears! 😀

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Sometimes deciding what to write about on your blog can be difficult, you just get a creative block and it’s like you are sat in a white room, on a white stool with white windows & with nothing to white, oh sorry I mean write! Finding out what is trending on social media is one great way to inducious your creative sparks. In this post you will find four useful links to find out what is currently trending.

Google Trends

Each day there is new content created on the web and search engine giant Google is a great place to find out what is trending. It is the most widely used Search Engine in the Western Hemisphere so if you write about something related to the main trend you have a good chance you may generate some traffic from it.

Reddit

Ever heard of reddit? Well you have now! Reddit is a place that people share stories that they find interesting and they post them in specific categories. The benefit of this for looking for ideas for your own works is that you can see how many up’s they have which gives an indication at how interesting and successful the story might be if you were to create something yourself around that particular article.

Buzz Feed

BuzzFeed is the leading media company for the social age, intensely focused on delivering high-quality original reporting, insight, and viral content across a rapidly expanding array of subject areas. Their technology powers the social distribution of content, detects what is trending on the web, and connects people in realtime with the hottest content of the moment. A great way to really spark your imagination with many subjects and ideas to discuss on your blog, what could be better?

Youtube Trending

Lastly, if you are starting to enter the world of video blogging you may like to take a look at this site. It gives you insight into what is currently trending on youtube. Even if you aren’t video blogging it still might spark some ideas for your latest blog post or podcast.

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Remember, although all these websites are informing you of what is trending at that particular moment you may want to try and be a little bit psychic too and write about things that are yet to happen but are foresable and highly likely to happen as this will give google time to index your content and you won’t become old news. Alternatively, if you can write an article within a couple of hours and you have large social media followings on various platforms and you are a part of various communities then don’t worry so much about natural search results just make sure you use the hashtag as effecitvely as possible when describing your blog post so that your article can be found amongst all the other trending information. Best of luck and if you have any other ideas of to find out what is trending then please feel free to comment in the box below.

What is your Twitter Followers profession?

“You there What is your profession?” The soldier replies ” Im a potter…sir”

the king continues integrating “…and you, what is your profession?” “sc-scultper sir”

And he askes once more ..”you?” “BlackSmith”

“Spartans what is your profession?”

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 Building your Spartan Twitter Followers Army

There are several ways to build your Twitter following on Twitter but there are two common ways. Follow people in the industries you are interested in and they will follow you back or alternatively you can pay someone to give followers.

Slow and steady follower gains but a strong small and influential group

The first path of following people and receive follow backs to those in my particular professional industry is the option i chose. Admittedly it takes time to build a large Twitter following this way but like 300 Spartans going to war, having 300 relevant Twitter followers compared to 30,000 you have paid for that have no real interest in you or your business is a waste of money and a weak following regardless of numbers.

Paying for a fake Social Image

I know some people pay for a following so they can look like they have integrity and are a powerful online social force with something important to say but strength doesn’t come in numbers it comes in the quality of the few and I can quite proudly say every follower I have on Twitter is someone in my area of expertise that may retweet what I tweet and get some benefit from my tweets.

How to spot someone who has paid for followers

Usually spotting a Twitter User that has paid for followers is easy. One key factor is having very few tweets for the amount of followers they have gained. A sure sign something fishy is going on.

You are being decieved by the seller if you pay for fake followers

Not only are you being decieved by the seller of the fake followers but they will also abandon you before you know it. I do know somebody who has bought Twitter Followers and they have started loosing quite a few of those followers a couple of months later.

Do you want to deceive your potential clients?

The worst part of buying Twitter Followers is that you are deceiving your potential clients into thinking you have integrity and influence if they follow you on Twitter when really your reach and influence in Twitter is small.

My final note is this, fight your fight the proper way, take your time ( believe me it takes time! ) and build your following by following others in your industry, retweeting, favouring and sharing other peoples content, build strong relationships with followers and you will gain respect as a true Twitter Power then you too can call yourself a Spartan Tweeter.

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 A top tip to build a truly powerful twitter army

You may already know this but there is a great online program called justunfollow.com. You can see who has followed you, unfollowed you, even copy followers of people you follow which is ideal for building a relevant Twitter Following. I use it every day on the free version but for just a small fee you can follow and unfollow as much as you like and build your following much quicker.

Follow me on Twitter 

What social media is best for me? Choosing the right social media platform for your needs & business mission can be quite tricky as more and more social websites start to saturate the market. Depending upon your product and goals different social media platforms will better fit your needs to use than others. Below is a infographic I discovered when on pinterest. I think this helps in making it clearer what kind of value your business will likely gain ( if used correctly ) from each platform.

I think with the recent publicity of Instagram’s new policy on who owns the copyright of the images you upload has started making many people wonder.. “should I use Instagram or not”?, particularly if you are uploading all your professional creative works to the social media platform, but I believe that Instagram does have its place in any designer’s app arsenal. It can actually be a really useful and beneficial tool to all creatives and here is why I think so.

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Raising Awareness

The benefit to any budding photographer, artist or graphic designer is obvious. It can show to others what you are capable of and also how you see the world. Creatives see the world in a slightly different way than a “normal” person, a lot of things have metaphors, they see composition in things that others wouldn’t batter an eyelid at and Instagram allows others to see into the world of our creative minds..i think that is a very powerful tool for all creatives, it definitely inspires us to create.

For fun

For me, being creative is a hell of a lot of fun and is on par with video games and high adrenaline sports. Just taking random photos of things you experience and things you see can be great to share with the world.

Inspiration catalogue

As a professional designer I am constantly thinking of how things can be designed, improved or made exciting and sometimes when you walk past somewhere something sparks inside you. Instagram can be a place to store all the things that inspire you and hash tagging each image will also make it easier to find. You may argue Facebook offers the same option but I believe using Instagram for this purpose is a much better app than Facebook for storing inspiration & ideas from general life.

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Don’t be daft

Don’t put images on Instagram that you have spent weeks creating, I don’t believe Instagram was made for that. Unless you are happy for others to lift your hard work and use it as their own or alternatively if you have already received payment for your creation then that is fine, it could even help you build a larger fan base.

Improving design composition

If you set your camera to have grid lines what you can do is really play with composition ( I will discuss this in the near future when I discuss the basics of photography ), this is useful for photography but can also be applied to other areas such as graphic design, web site design & painting. You will notice you really pay attention to how you layout your composition whenever you work and how important it is in creating excellent design.

Increase creativity

It also has the knock on effect of becoming more creative as you are constantly thinking how you might be able to catch the perfect image and seeing everything as a work of art rather than just passing your time through space and time. I highly recommend using it as much as possible to increase your imaginations power.

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Benefits outway the negatives

If you are concerned about copyright and who is using your images then don’t use instagram, if on the other hand you are happy for others to see life through your eyes and you want to improve your creative skills then instagram is probably one of the best apps out there right now. The world is a beautiful place, we should record it, share it and spread the positive things we experience, lets change our perceptions of reality together

What is Tumblr? Tumblr is a microblogging platform and social networking website. The service allows users to post multimedia and other content to a short-form blog. Users can follow other users’ blogs, as well as make their blogs private.

Problem with Tumblr

Tumbler, like Instagram & Facebook has also received criticism for the ability of bloggers to violate copyright. Tumblr’s visual appeal has made it a haven for photoblogs, which often times include copyrighted work from others and publishing them without payment. Tumblr users are able to post content that isn’t their own by re-blogging. Re-blogging involves presseing a buttong that allows users to re-post content that they found on a blog which they subscribe to, onto their own blog.

Widgets

Just like WordPress Tumblr allows users to add widgets that allow to add things that make their website that little bit unique such as twitter feeds, livestream apps or music players that being playing music when other users view their blog.

Combining Twitter with WordPress

That is how I would describe Tumblr really..a blogging platform with social media principles. If you are user of Twitter you will know that to get people to follow you you are best finding people that have the same interests as you & then they are likely to follow you back too and increase your fan base getting your content more noticed. How do you find people to follow? There is a “explore” button on the dashboard where you will find lots of interesting topics that people tag their blog post in.

Tag, your it!

What is tagging I hear you say? Every time you post something i recommend putting some keywords in the tagging box.  Basically what this does is act like a keyword so that it makes your content easier to find. Say someone is looking for flowers and your blog post is a picture of one then one tag you would use is obviously “flower” and you may get discovered by that searcher.

 Oi ! I posted that!

Get used to feeling like this! People will repost your things if they like it, thats the whole point of tumblr, its blogging but with a difference. It gets shared easily and quickly and you may often find things you have created in other peoples blogs. If you do this correcty it can create a larger following on your own blog and if you have a website, it could even direct people to your site too! More traffic? Now that can’t be bad can it!

 RSS me baby!!

not much time to create stuff for your blog? No problem! Other people can put things on your blog through rss feeds, you can simply set up different rss feeds to appear on your blog in the preferences setting.

To tweet or not to tweet, that is the question!

Every time you blog on your Tumblr account you can choose whether to immediately share it on twitter & facebook but if  you blog a lot on tumblr it could annoy your twitter followers..i know if i see over 10 posts in one go on twitter it can make me quite irritated especially if i am not interested in the first tweet they put ( sorry to sound moody, but its true for most users! 🙂 )

 Wow big blog! Its just like a book

When you have a lot of pages then you can even get it published into a book! Now that is pretty cool isn’t it!

Is it for me?

The thing about Tumblr is it is a combination of WordPress ( a mainstream open source blogging CMS platform for those who know a little bit of code ) and Twitter, combining people who are interested in the same things as you…but the good thing is it is so very very simple. It is ideal for those who have lots of photos to share and are inspired by quotes and such like. If you aren’t ready for hardcore blogging like what I am doing here Tumblr is for those taking the step up from twitter & facebook amongst friends to start gaining a larger voice in their world community. [divider style=”1″]

How do I use it?

I use it to post my works and become inspired by others works and show appreciation to others and promote the work of those I admire and useful things I find along the way…I think they key to a good internet is a true bohemian heart, free love, free information & free creativity. Yes we all need to make a living but if you truly want to make an impact in the world and offer something of value to people then free is the best place to start…when you have a big enough following then you can consider selling some of your things to your close nit fans. I hope this blog post has helped you in undrestanding tumblr a bit more…if you are still unsure how tumblr works you can visit my site here : – http://jawilson-design.tumblr.com/ or alternatively just set up your own tumblr account ( it even comes with an app for easy uploads! ). Happy blogging! 🙂

Conclusion

Before starting this experiment last week I didn’t think much would change if I used Facebook every day or not but after really studying the effects of Facebook for the last week in more detail I have noticed several factors of why Facebook is possibly a necessity for modern living but also a curse in another sense.

Reactivation

Benefits

I reactivated my Facebook account and within 2 minutes I received a greeting from my family..they were definitely glad I was back on Facebook, their preferred way to communicate with me and to see what I am doing.

The odd thing is that I have spoke to the majority of my family this week on the phone (which I probably enjoyed more) and that didn’t happen as often before the experiment..

Gaming

I think the only beneficial feature of Facebook I missed was the gaming and even that isn’t all that, I can use my Xbox360 or smart phone for gaming anyway…

Did I miss using Facebook?

No, not at all…standing back form the social media platform for a week I realize the majority of it is quite boring and now I have had a week away from it I would gladly give up Facebook altogether (although my family back in my home town may make this slightly difficult). I feel as though Facebook is simply a gossip, bragging & voyeuristic program that has little benefit to the self other than an ego trip and another way to be in touch.

I believe a reason people don’t want to give up Facebook is because they are a fearful of missing out on something that a lot of others in the world are using. The other reason why people may feel that Facebook is necessary for their life is everyone wants their views or message heard (and by god, can this be annoying sometimes) and to feel respected. Everyone wants to feel they have a strong purpose in society or at least among their friends…Once you use it to communicate with your friends it becomes difficult to imagine your life without it…imagine life without a telephone, it is the same simple principle.

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Keeping communication

The reason I reactivated my Facebook is simple…for my family. It makes my female relations happy to be able to see what I am doing with my life no matter where I am in the world and if I don’t have Facebook I guess it makes them feel they are not connected to me as closely..so this is the reason I may keep it but I won’t be using it as much as I used to.

Setting up Facebook properly

I realize i got distracted by Facebook mainly because of notifications and when you are trying to focus on other things that isn’t good. The news feed that contained my friends views..pages I follow..and such like do not add much value to my life either, I would rather speak to my friends and family in person than see a one sentence notification to “like” and show my social approval.

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Time management

Being aware of how you spend your time on social media, I believe, can be hard to keep track of and you can easily spend wasted time on Facebook when it could be spent doing things that are more beneficial to you.

Life isn’t all about spreading what you do to the world or simply being fed what others are doing or saying either,it should be an enjoyable and fulfilling experience without having to think about what everyone else is saying, thinking or doing…I will be discussing ways you can manage your time better on social media and improve your productivity during the week.

Staying in touch..properly

A notification on my Facebook wall updating all who know me what I am thinking or doing when all is said and done is not a great way to communicate with close ones really is it? Not only this but storing your photos on a platform such as Facebook makes them available to the world whether you decide to change your settings to private or not

Danger of Facebook Page

if you have a Facebook page to advertise your business it can be quite dangerous( especially as a designer) as it is quite easy to download and store pictures that don’t belong to you ( similar to Instagram rules as Alex Rabbets MD of MigSolv Data Centre Specialist discusses here ) so think very carefully if you want to create a Facebook page or not, particularly in the creative fields…

What happened to the telephone

Whether we are concerned what social media is doing to us as a society we can’t disregard that technology does advance.

200 years ago we would have communicated via the written hand and it would have taken weeks to arrive to. 100 years later and the telephone advanced communication and now the invention and mass use of the internet has sped up communication between communities yet again.

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Has Facebook benefited society?

Facebook has given rise to quickly create mass riots in Egypt, Lybia & such like to stop dictatorship governments which seemed like a fantastic thing at first. Liberating people that felt totally out of control of their lives but now they are in a similair difficult position only they are struggling to gain some structure, ruling power & laws and it isn’t just middle eastern and north African Countries…not so long ago mass riots also took place in South London due to people’s terrible use of Facebook destroying lively hoods of hard working people.

Seeing things you don’t want to

Some people “like” pictures that are truly disturbing such as people being hung in the street, other violent crime & no matter whether you want to or not if your friend has engaged with it you are likely to see it in your own news feed.

The danger of Facebook is that EVERYONE regardless of background or intentions can get their message heard & not everyone has a compassionate, loving nature & more, there seems to be a lot of anger, revenge & hatred in people right now which is terrifying to think any one of those people with such pains can connect to those with the same views & increase the effect of their view of the world, spreading their feelings to a large portion of the world’s population. A very dangerous prospect…

Final Thought

I believe Facebook (& all social media) is changing communities, connecting like minds together ( positive with positive & negative with negative) & making everything, good and bad in the world more transparent, not having to rely on Mainstream media ( which is a good thing, journalists have had too much power in manipulating viewpoints).

Whether Facebook is going to be beneficial for society or the demise of law & order is yet to be seen, only time will tell..