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Five social media skills millennials don’t have

10 Friday Oct 2014

Posted by leonidesignoryblog in Best Practices, community manager, Content Marketing, Hootsuite, Marketing, Online Marketing, Social Listening

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Best Practices, Online Marketing, Social Media, Social Media Marketing, social media networks, social media tools, social sharing

Shared from Ryan Holmes

Don't assume younger staff will know everything about running a clever social media campaign.Don’t assume younger staff will know everything about running a clever social media campaign.

They’re the generation brought up on Facebook. Some have never known a world without the Internet. The innermost details of their lives have been exhaustively Instagramed and they get their news from Twitter, not TV.

But when it comes to using social media in the workplace, millennials – the generation whose birth years can range anywhere from 1980 and 2000 – can be surprisingly, even dangerously, unprepared. “Because somebody grows up being a social media native, it doesn’t make them an expert in using social media at work,” says William Ward, professor of social media at Syracuse University’s S.I. Newhouse School of Public Communications. “That’s like saying, ‘I grew up with a fax machine, so that makes me an expert in business.'”

For students and recent grads, some social media 101 is definitely in order.

Lacking in critical areas

According to Ward, who teaches a series of popular undergraduate and graduate courses on social media at the university, millennials are lacking in a number of critical areas. While they’re very good at connecting with people they already know, they often fail to understand the professional opportunities and pitfalls posed by networks like Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn and Instagram.

“Companies hire millennials because they think they’re good at social media. Then their bosses discover they don’t have those skills and get frustrated,” Ward says, noting that social media expectations are often higher for millennials than for older workers, who may be just as inept.

For students and recent grads entering the workforce, some social media 101 is definitely in order. In particular, career-minded millennials desperately need to brush up on these five social media skills:

1. Knowing when not to share

Recently, Business Insider attracted attention for firing its CTO, Pax Dickinson, because of comments he made on his personal Twitter account. While Dickinson’s Tweets on women and minorities were especially offensive, the situation hints at a larger issue. Millennials sometimes fail to appreciate that personal profiles can have professional repercussions. Twitter, Facebook and other networks are largely public platforms; comments made can – and often do – get back to bosses. As the Dickinson case shows, few employers are eager to associate themselves with off-color or offensive content, even when it may be intended as a joke.

2. Using social media to actually save time

According to a 2013 Salary.com survey, the most frequently visited personal website at work is – you guessed it – Facebook. As networks proliferate – and millennial employees not only check Facebook but post on Twitter, browse Instagram and more – social media has the potential to be a devastating time-suck. Yet it can also be a time saver in the office. A recent McKinsey reportnotes that social media has the potential to save companies $1.3 trillion, largely owing to improvements in intra-office collaboration. Internal social networks like Yammer enable employees to form virtual work groups and communicate on message boards. Instead of endless back-and-forths on email, co-workers can post and reply in continually updated streams. None of this is revolutionary, but millennials are often still in the dark on ways Facebook-like innovations are being taken behind the firewall.

3. Understanding how to crunch the numbers

While millennials often have an intuitive understanding of what resonates on social channels (hard to go wrong with cat GIFs), quantifying what works and what doesn’t is another matter. Should the success of a Twitter campaign be measured on the basis of retweets, mentions, replies, referral traffic or sales leads? What are the best times of day to post on Facebook and what is the optimum post frequency? Which analytical tools are best for crunching the numbers? While social media is about authentic, human interaction, it’s also an arena where data can easily be collected and applied to improve results. Knowing what data to look for, where to find it and what to do with it separates real experts from mere social natives.

4. Mastering the multi-network shuffle

It’s one thing to be a Twitter guru or have a huge LinkedIn following. The real talent lies in orchestrating different platforms to work together and in understanding the niche each fills. Visual networks such as Instagram and YouTube, for instance, are increasingly the foundation of campaigns by social-savvy brands such as Nike, Red Bull and Mercedes. Catchy images and videos are, in turn, seeded onto traditional text-based networks such as Twitter and Facebook. From there, links lead viewers back to blogs and company pages, sending customers spiraling deeper into the sales funnel. Meanwhile, uniform hashtags across platforms help unify and track the overall campaign. Even millennials with deep social credentials often fail to understand the profound multiplying effects of integrating different networks.

5. Networking professionally on social media

By the time millennials graduate, many have dutifully filled their LinkedIn profiles with part-time positions, internships, extra-curriculars and academic accomplishments. But the network’s true job-finding power is often overlooked: Hiring managers and CEOs who would normally be out of reach are often just a connection or two away. In fact, you don’t need to be connected at all. A paid feature called InMail, for instance, enables users to send emails directly to any one of LinkedIn’s 277 million members. Truly enterprising job seekers can hunt down big fish like Richard Branson, Bill Gates and Deepak Chopra, then send a pitch straight to their inbox. Notoriously footloose millennials – forever in search of the next job opportunity – might well take this tip to heart when searching for greener professional pastures.

The plug ‘n play myth

Of course, amassing these skills is no short order, and millennials aren’t the only offenders. “The real problem is that we expect people to know these skills without providing any training,” social media professor Ward says. As the number of social networks expands and platforms are used in more sophisticated ways, it’s unreasonable to expect anyone – even the most plugged-in users – to just intuitively get it.

But there are options for millennials hoping to brush up on social media skills. “There are lots of online training programs out there,” Ward explains, “though some are better than others.”

He cautions learners to stick to programs offering industry-recognised certification, like the most widely used offering, Hootsuite University, an offering from my company which has seen 50,000 people enroll since it was started in 2011 and is also used in 400 higher education programs.

For millennials competing in a tight market, these skills – unheard of just a decade ago – can mean the difference between finding and keeping a job. “Students using digital and social media professionally in an integrated and strategic way … have an advantage,” Ward says. “[They’re] getting better jobs and better internships.”

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The Hootlet: Social Sharing for Lazy Professionals

07 Saturday Dec 2013

Posted by leonidesignoryblog in Facebook, Google+, Hootsuite, LInkedIn, Multi Channel Marketing, Pinterest, Twitter, Uncategorized

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Best Practices, Community, Engagement, hootlet, links, Marketing, Social Media, Social Networks, social sharing, Tools & Apps

I have to say I love Hootlet. For me personally it is a blessing of time saving.
If you’re like most business owners, you probably spend a lot of time each day searching for valuable content that you’d want to share with your audience on your social networks. Even though you can copy and paste each link into the status update window, it’s a slow manual process, especially when you’d like to share multiple pieces at a time.

On a different note, social media research is a major part of any serious marketing strategy, but it’s often ignored and businesses are missing on valuable information about their brands. The Canadian social media management company, HootSuite, has been developing a really cool feature that addresses both challenges – social sharing and research – with one tool: the Hootlet.

hootsuite mascot main

Featured image credit: Ssango

The Hootlet

You’ve probably heard of the Hootlet add-on extension for Chrome and Firefox when it was first launched in 2009. The new updated Hootlet version takes social sharing and research to a whole new level. Its primary function is to simplify content sharing via HootSuite and distribute the content to multiple social networks and even schedule your posts.

In essence, Hootsuite’s Hootlet is an effective tool to:

–          Search social media content next to your Google search

–          Share content while you surf, without leaving the web page you’re on

–          Highlight text in a page and share it directly to your social media accounts

–          Discover relevant geo-located social media content

–          Cross promote images and videos

–          Schedule posts on your social networks from any web page

Whenever you find a page that’s worthy of a share, click the owl Hootlet button on the top right corner of your browser window and the Hootlet compose box will appear. It will automatically add the title and a shrinked URL into the share box.

Next, you can select the social account to share the article to, schedule or use the AutoSchedule feature to automatically pick the optimal time to distribute your content.

The Hootlet interface has been revamped with a modern streamlined design:

hootsuite hootlet image 1

A New And Improved AutoScheduling Feature

With the previous Hootlet version, if you had the AutoScheduling feature activated in the HootSuite Dashboard, it would automatically assume that it would apply to all “on the go” shares. Now, if you want to share a post right away, you must deactivate the “AutoSchedule” option in the share box and then hit “Send Now”.

While “AutoSchedule” allows you to space out your posts when you don’t care about time intervals, there are still posts you’d like to share immediately. The new version of the Hootlet allows you to “Schedule” or “Send Now” without needing to deactivate the “AutoSchedule”.

Extended Sharing Capabilities

Before, when you clicked on a post’s sharing buttons, the Share box included a custom HootSuite button that allowed you to share that post via HootSuite. Posting visual media to social networks has always been difficult. Now, the sharing capabilities have been extended to Instagram and Flickr images, Pinterest pins and even YouTube videos.

hootsuite_hootlet_youtube

What makes the Hootlet so effective is that it’s more than just a sharing tool. Each time you share a web page, the new version will also allow you to select text on that page, click the “Share” button and have the highlighted text appear as the text you’re sharing, instead of just the title.

Anyone can share links, but it’s the unique spin that you give to your posts that makes your content special. Quoting from a web page and commenting on it will make all the difference between your posts and other people’s. Similarly, quoting some text from your own article and sharing it is another way to get even more tweets for your post, after you’ve tweeted it once using the article title.

You can also choose which features you want to turn on. First click on the top right Chrome settings button:

chrome hootlet extension

Next, click on “Extensions” and then select “Options”, under the Hootlet extension:

hootlet chrome extension

Now you can customize your settings:

customise hootlet settings

Related and Geo-Located Tweets

When conducting a Google search, you’ll see an option box that shows tweets related to your search. The tweets are displayed to the right of your search and can provide valuable insights. Let’s say you’re searching for trends in your niche by typing your keywords in Google and the Hootlet will provide relevant tweets based on keywords, location or business listing.

local_tweet_hootsuite

For instance, when searching Yelp for local information, you will see what others are tweeting about near to the location that you’re viewing.

yelp hootsuite

These geographically related tweets can help you discover new customers, influencers and new business opportunities. You can reply or retweet messages directly from your current window.

Google Maps Integration

With the new Google Maps integration, you can type in an address and pull out tweets near your location that people have shared recently. This feature is especially useful for local businesses that might want to see what’s new in their area or track Twitter promotions focused on in-store campaigns. This feature is also useful for live events promoters or even media journalists covering a local news event.

Easy Cross Posting

There are a few other Chrome extensions (or services like Buffer) that do these different tasks, but the Hootlet is the only one that enables cross posting. Whether you’re on Pinterest or Flickr and want to share images to Facebook or Twitter, you can use the Hootlet to easily share that information.

hootsuite pinterest

The HootSuite dashboard is especially useful for small businesses who can spare no more than an hour or two each week to set up their weekly social media calendar. The Hootlet offers a great way to get everything done.

Final Thoughts on Hootsuite’s Hootlet

The functionality offered by Hootlet  provides a unique social sharing experience to your daily browsing efforts. Now you have one tool to perform all your social searching, sharing and scheduling directly from the web browser.

The Hootlet extension lets you search social media content as easily as you browse Google, post content directly from web pages, select text and automatically create ready-to-share messages, search location relevant tweets and share visual media effortlessly.

I’ll give you four reasons why I’m  sure you’ll love the new Hootlet:

–          You’ll never have to leave your browser window to share content

–          It literally consumes 5 seconds to schedule a post.

–          You can auto-schedule your posts

–          You get the automatic ow.ly URL shortener and analytics

No more copying and pasting content that you want to share with your fans and followers! Thanks to the new Hootlet , social sharing is as easy as one click and all your links are trackable via your Owly Stats.

The updated Hootlet extension can be located on the Chrome Web Store and you can watch this video to see how it functions in practice.

Shared by permission, this post The Hootlet: Social Sharing for Lazy Professionals appeared first on LatestCrunchs.

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