Tips and tricks for Facebook, Twitter, Flickr, YouTube, Pinterest and Google+. Presentation was given at the National Association of Government Webmaster (NAGW) conference in 2012.
48. Google+ Shortcut URL
• Available to limited users
• Go to your About Page
• Click the Claim URL button
• Alternatively notified via email
49. Google+ Shortcuts
• Now you can use shortcuts:
– google.com/+customURL/posts
– google.com/+customURL/about
– google.com/+customURL/photos
– google.com/+customURL/videos
– google.com/+customURL/plusones
51. Google+ Keyboard Shortcuts
Keyboard Shortcut Purpose
*Word* Text between * bold
_Word_ Text between _ italic
-Word- Text between – strike through
Spacebar Scroll down Google+ feed
Shift + Space bar Scroll up Google+ feed
J Scroll down one post
K Scroll up one post
Tab + Return Post options menu
+Username or @Username Reference another Google+ user
Some of my tips where covered in the NAGW webinar last month but I will show some here. If you haven’t set a Facebook Username I will show you where to do this. How to setup your Founded Date Establish Facebook Milestones Facebook Tabs Social Media Jam Session
You might also hear this referred to as a vanity URL. There used to be a requirement that you had to have so many fans before you could change your username. I am pretty sure this has been lifted so check this out if you haven’t already. Choose your page and then establish a URL in the box on the right. You can have periods in the URL. The nice thing about adding them is the URL will work with or without them in the future. We made our URL the same as our official city website URL. Choose wisely because if you mess up you can only change it once. Social Media Jam Session
You might not choose to add milestones, more about this in a minute but at a minimum add your agency founded date. This is something about timeline that is cool. On the right-hand side click the Founded link and edit the information here. Add some old timey photos and a link back to your website to tell the full story. Social Media Jam Session
Go to update the status of your Facebook page but instead choose Milestone. Add the events here that make your agency unique. Once added you will be able to navigate to them via your right-hand side timeline. We added our sister cities in our timeline. Social Media Jam Session
Facebook “tabs” used to look more like tabs than they do today. At one point you actually navigated to them using tabs. There are three that you can’t delete which are photos, map and likes. You can move them around in here but they are auto generated by Facebook. You have a total of twelve so with three default tabs that leaves you with nine spots to put additional stuff on your Facebook page. You can fill these spots with apps that you install built by someone else or I am going to show you how easy it is to build these yourself. Social Media Jam Session
You will need to create two versions of every application. I know how ridiculous this sounds but it is what it is. One will be hosted in a non-secure directory and the other will be hosted on a secure directory. Social Media Jam Session
You need to confirm your identity to register as a developer. You will need to verify with either your mobile phone or your credit card. If you provide your mobile number Facebook will send you a text with a code that you need to send back The second option is to enter your credit card information. The mobile number/text message options doesn’t always work outside of the U.S. You might find that you have already done this step. Facebook required me to do it even before I developed anything. Install the Developer App Social Media Jam Session
Create the directory on your server. Probably not your root directory. Make one named /facebook for example. Name the file index.html so Facebook can find it. When you give the URL to Facebook you don’t tell it the file name just the directory. If using an IIS 7 server must name page with .aspx (or I’m guessing .asp if older) default.aspx is easiest. If you use .html, Facebook tries to POST to page, resulting in http status of 504 (This is what took me a bit to figure out). Use target=“_top” if you want to pop out of the iframe As of October 1, 2011 you were required to have both a secure and non secure versions. Include HTML, CSS in the file. Don’t use FBML or FBJS. Social Media Jam Session
This link is your Apps dashboard. Click the + Create New App button. App Name is how it’s displayed to users (no more than 32 characters and no less than 3 characters) App Namespace used for Opengraph as well as the URL of the app. If used by another app on Facebook you won’t be able to use the name. Apps.facebook.com/namespace They also ask if you want to use web hosting but you probably don’t need that. Just by clicking continue here you are agreeing to Facebook Platform Policies. You will have to pass a security check to make sure you aren’t a robot. Social Media Jam Session
The bigger icon is 75 x 75 pixels. The smaller icon is 16 x 16 pixels. File size limit 5 MB. If your upload does not work try a smaller picture. The contact email will be your personal address by default but you can change it to your agency email. Social Media Jam Session
Website with Facebook Login, App on Facebook, Page Tab You can choose narrow or wide here. Narrow is 520 px and wide is 810px. Page tab image – 111 px by 74 px. I will show you another place where you can change this. Social Media Jam Session
This is a bit of dark art and it took me a bit to figure this one out. Go to this URL and substitute your App ID and the URL that is listed in your Canvas Page. If you do this right… Social Media Jam Session
This box will pop up and ask you what page you want to add the app to. Social Media Jam Session
If you do this is will create a page associated to your application. You probably don’t need this and at this time it is not required. If you do this you will have a Facebook page devoted to your app. I believe is comes with a wall and everything. One more thing you will need to monitor! Social Media Jam Session
Here you can change the icon and swap the position of the application. Change the custom Tab image. 111px × 74px is the size used here You can also change was it says below the image which is called Tab Name. Both of these might come in handy if you install a 3 rd party application and want to over ride these Social Media Jam Session
Go to this URL and you will be prompted to login to Twitter Click the create new button Social Media Jam Session
Under settings enter your Twitter username You used to have many more customization options. Now they give you height, theme of light and dark, your domain where you are going to use it and a link color option. When you are done click the Finish & Grab Code button. You can now take this code and paste it somewhere on your website. Social Media Jam Session
Another option is a search widget. This allows you to display the twitterstream for a specific search word or hash tag. We have used this when we have wild fires going on. We do display a disclaimer right before it saying that we can’t verify all of the updates and are only providing the information as a service. If you have ever followed a hashtag you know that pretty much anything can show up there. You customize this similar to the previous widget and then grab the code to embed in your website. Social Media Jam Session
Copy/paste the code they provide and put it into your website Social Media Jam Session
You can use Twitterfeed to update several social media accounts at once The fastest duration is every 30 minutes Free service but it can be buggy at times Social Media Jam Session
Give the feed a name. For URL or RSS Feed URL you can use RSS from your website or any other website that you want to send updates out from. We send our news releases out this way and we also use this for emergency status updates from another agency. Social Media Jam Session
Unfortunately the most frequent this service can update is every 30 minutes. In the advanced setting you can tie it to your URL shortening service. For example we use bit.ly so we link them here. You can also add a post prefix or post suffix which can come in handy if you always want to add a specific hash tag. We have used this for wild fires to make sure our updates get in the right place. Social Media Jam Session
Here is where you can setup where you want to publish to. All of these will require authentication to allow Twitterfeed to work. You will have to login to Twitter of LinkedIn and you have to be an admin on the Facebook page. You can send the update to multiple pages and accounts. This is our emergency status feed which we send to Facebook, our main Twitter account and our Police Twitter account. Social Media Jam Session
I am going to discuss some tips and tricks regarding YouTube. YouTube the last I checked was the second largest utilized search engine. Social Media Jam Session
Splicd is a free service that creates a time splice of a YouTube video. The code you grab will add a link to the Splicd website. Input the YouTube URL and the start and end time. Click to continue. On the next page you can grab the embed code. This is a free service but included in the embed code is a link back to the Splicd website. For those of us who have to show a leaving website message you should be able to add the necessary code and be able to maintain the link. Social Media Jam Session
From here you can customize the size and then grab the code for pasting into your website. Social Media Jam Session
It used to be a lot easier to embed your YouTube channel. The easiest way to embed the whole channel is via the Google Gadget. This is not a great example and not very navigable. If you are comfortable with programming you can use their API to create a customized player. I included a link in the list for a jQuery player that might work. It’s called jsFiddle. Round Rock Texas has written some code to embed YouTube in their website. I have included a link to their player in my link list. Social Media Jam Session
In Flickr you have sets and collections. Sets are a group of photos from an event or something specific. A collection is a bunch of sets put together. You can create different collections from various sets. Social Media Jam Session
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This application will monitor images put in a folder and instantly upload them to Flickr. Download the application and install Connect Foldr Monitr to your Flickr Account In this example they are uploading photos to sets based on directory name. This makes organization easy, but remember that users with free accounts are limited to three sets, so choose your directories wisely. We also chose to have the Monitr start syncing and minimize itself when run, so it behaves like Dropbox. Social Media Jam Session
Click the Login link to authenticate against your account. Do a search for the images you are looking for. In this screenshot I am looking for the images in my city account. Social Media Jam Session
Select the images you want to download. Whether this app will work depends on your Flickr download settings. You have to allow downloads in order for this to work. Social Media Jam Session
Pinterest is a social media website used to create photo bulletin boards. The photos that you pin to your boards will link back to the website where they originated from. There has been some controversy around the legality of these boards and copyright for photos. If your agency is concerned by this you could create your boards from images on your own website or photos on your own Flickr or partner agencies. Social Media Jam Session
To mention a pin to a Pinterest user, you first need to be following at least one board belonging to the user. Then, type the @ symbol immediately followed by username. Potential matches to this username will begin to load; when you see the person you want to mention, click his/her name. Social Media Jam Session
Add a "$" or a "£" to the Pin description and Pinterest will automatically add a price banner to the photo. The Pin will then appear in the Gifts category. Within the Pin, remember to link to the website where fans can purchase. Just remember to remove the Pin once you’ve sold out! Social Media Jam Session
Google+ is not really popular right now. But many of us grab our agency name as soon as new websites are created to make sure we can reserve them. I am going to discuss how you can setup a verified Google+ account to show you are the official agency. Discuss some of the keyboard shortcuts you can use in updates to make bold text, underlined, italic text, etc. Setup a shortcut URL I will then discuss hangouts and how to do that. Social Media Jam Session
Verification for Google+ pages is available to a wide range of businesses and organizations. To be eligible for verification: Your Google+ page must be authorized by your commercial entity, organization, brand, or product. Your Google+ page’s profile must contain a link to your organization’s website. Your organization’s website must connect to your Google+ page, by adding the Google+ badge or by adding a snippet of code. A meaningful number of people must have added your Google+ page to their circles. In our case Google emailed me and asked if we wanted to be verified so I filled out the form and got verified in about 2 weeks. Social Media Jam Session
Google+ does not yet offer a shortcut or vanity URL but you can use gplus.to to generate a shorter name 3 to 25 characters Can’t contain special characters You can create a nickname for each individual Google+ account Only Latin characters and numbers Social Media Jam Session
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Note: No one owns a hangout so anyone in the hangout can invite anyone else No more than 10 people in a hangout at once You can invite specific circles to attend so for example businesses or residents, etc. if you are covering a specific topic of interest. You can also invite people on their phone. Give the hangout a name. Hangouts On Air Broadcast your Hangouts live and record them as YouTube videos. When you first click the button you are going to have to install a plugin that makes it work. The user will see a IM box pop up and they can click the link to join the hangout. Social Media Jam Session
The picture at the top is options you will see once in your hangout. You can share your screen on Google+ also. You can do effects on your picture or bring in applications. President Obama used Hangouts and allowed 5 pre-selected users to attend (January 2012) Social Media Jam Session