One of my favorite features of the new Timeline is the cover photo. The cover photo is displayed at the top of the profile and extends for the entire page width. From what I’ve found, the ideal size for this space is 850×315 pixels but no smaller than 720 pixels. Since this a large photo area, a high-res photo is optimal to avoid pixelation. Your “profile pic” is now a 125×125 image embedded in the lower left corner of your cover image.

In Facebook’s help section, it details the difference between the profile pic and the cover picture:

A cover is the larger photo at the top of your timeline, right above your profile picture. Note: Like your profile picture, cover images are public, which means anyone visiting your timeline will be able to see them.

We’ve found that people have a better experience viewing your timeline when they see a cover that is as unique and individualized as you are. This helps people learn more about you. It also helps us prevent spam, fake profiles, and other content that can detract from your experience on Facebook. An easy way to ensure your cover image is unique is to choose an image from your life, like a photo from a wedding, day at the beach, or birthday party. If you want to use a photo to show solidarity or express support for a cause or organization, you can still post a status or a photo and feature it on your timeline.

As mentioned, cover pictures, like your profile picture, are public which means anyone who comes to your profile can see this image. There is some question about whether Facebook is making efforts to control this space to keep it free from promotional and business images. The above quote seems to be Facebook’s effort to encourage people to keep it personal.  Facebook profiles have always been meant to be more personal than for business and some users are reporting a message from Facebook when they first load their cover image that discourages promotional or commercial images in that space. The cover picture is a great way to make your profile stand out and really make an impression, so put some thought into the image you will be using and feel free to change it up once in awhile.

With the new Timeline, no new information is being shared and none of the privacy settings for any of your old posts have been changed. You may however, want to go back any new posts that are surfacing in the timeline and change their visibility to “Only Me” if it’s a post that you no longer want viewed. Using the “Activity Log” page is the best and easiest way to go through your posts and do this.

Another feature of the new Timeline is that you can go back and add “Life Events” all the way back to your birth. Of course, Facebook encourages you to add these events but certainly it is up to you how much more of your life you’ll be willing to share with Facebook.

For additional information about the new Facebook Timeline, see the resources below:

• The Complete Facebook Timeline Guide on Mashable

• Facebook Help Section for the Timeline

What are your thoughts on the new Timeline for personal profiles?

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For this particular tweet chat (#TGTaste), Thirsty Girl, one of the fastest growing social networks for women, is teaming up with Ian Hongell (The Duke of Shiraz) from Peter Lehmann Wines to chat about their 2008 Barossa Shiraz (G’day mates!). This will a great opportunity to not only chat directly with the winemaker about  his wine but also to tweet with Head Thirsty Girl, Leslie Sbrocco (author of “Wine for Women” and regular TODAY Show wine contributor) about all things wine and in particular her suggestions for what to pair with this wine and her thoughts about this wine.

I am thrilled to be a part of this Twitter chat and am so looking forward to connecting with other wine lovers and chatting about Shiraz (or just our love of wine in general!) I received my Tasting Kit for this Twitter chat last Friday evening (and who doesn’t love to receive wine at their doorstep on a Friday evening?) It looked like it was just waiting for me to open it.

2008 Barossa Shiraz- Peter Lehmann Wines

I must confess though…I wasn’t able to wait until tomorrow to try it. We were have some lovely BBQ steak over the weekend and the Shiraz just seemed like it was screaming for me to try it. You will however, just have to wait until tomorrow at 5 pm PST and follow me on Twitter (@jkvirtualoffice) to find out what I really thought about the wine.

If you want to join in on the Twitter Chat (hopefully with your own bottle of Shiraz or an equally fine wine), here are the details:

• Follow #TGTaste using Twitter Search or Kurrently.com to see the Twitter Chat conversation.
• Be sure to tag your tweets with #TGTaste so we can all see them as well.
• Follow @beathirstygirl who will be moderating the chat, Head Thirsty Girl, Leslie -@lesliesb, and Ian will be tweeting at @YouBetShiraz for all the latest related to the chat.
• Download the Tasting Notes HERE.
• Click here for more information on TGTaste.
• Join YouBetShiraz on Facebook for more information and updates.

Even though you won’t be able to hear Ian’s great Australian accent during the chat, you can catch him here on YouTube:

Disclosure: http://cmp.ly/2

When you use Twitter Search, there will be four tabs: Tweets, Tweets with Links, Tweets Near You and People.

The two things I noticed, is that promoted tweets will come up first and within the People tab, verified high profile accounts tend to come up first. You are also only given a small sample of people to follow which is somewhat disappointing since it would be nice to have the option to sort through a few more accounts as a way to find followers within the search parameters you are using.

You will also notice at the top underneath the Results headline, is a link for “operators” which are a list of different operators you can use for Advanced Twitter Search to refine your results even further. You can see in the screenshot below a list of the tips they offer you if you click on the Operator link.

It’s nice to see Twitter growing up in a fuller search feature which helps to make the platform even more useful for people who are looking to connect with other Twitterers.

Other news posted related to Twitter’s Advanced Search upgrade:

Mashable: Upgraded Twitter Search Helps You Find New People to Follow

TechCrunch: Twitter Finally Brings Advanced Search Out Of Purgatory; Updates Discovery Algorithms

• How to measure success in social media

• Where I see social media going

• What brands I think are doing an incredible job with social media

• Why some companies are not very successful with their social media efforts

• How my business and social media services have evolved in the past couple of  years

And more.  You can read the full interview HERE.

The other post that you might find of interest is over on my other blog Magic Fan Pages (where I try to cover the different aspects of using Facebook to help market your business- however, this poor blog is woefully neglected.) I wrote a post about Facebook Privacy and Account Settings that you need to know. There was a recent report that indicated 93% of Facebook user accounts are not that secure. So, in response to that, I thought it would be good to put up a post with some important privacy and account settings to know about to help make your personal profile more secure.  You can read that post HERE.

1) Facebook Insights will provide some good in-depth information for a fan page. You can download these date into Excel or you can snapshot the graphs they offer. (keep in mind though that FB data aren’t always that accurate but can provide a good overview). You will need to do a bit of analysis with these data but they can help you determine what types of content your community likes and interacts with. You can access the insights for all of your Facebook pages here: http://www.facebook.com/insights/

2) Twitter Counter will show the growth of followers for your Twitter account the past week, month, 3 months and 6 months. This site will also graph the number of tweets per day.

3) Tweetreach will show the reach of a twitter ID, a hashtag or a phrase. The free version only offers data for the most recent 50 tweets. This is important to remember so that you run a report right after a campaign or after a certain event.

4) Wildfire has a pretty cool social monitoring tool that allows you to track your Facebook page or Twitter against competitor accounts. You can find it here: http://monitor.wildfireapp.com/

5) Socialmention.com is a great social media search engine that will track mentions of your company, brand or a specific phrase and also provides feedback on overall sentiment of those mentions.

6) I also recommend bit.ly as a URL shortner. It  is good for tracking link clicks.

These are just a few of the tools that can be used for measuring some of your social media and online activities. There are, of course, other paid subscription tools out there that will offer you a much deeper analysis of your social media efforts.

Now, setting up a Twitter account is not really that hard and most people can easily walk through the steps to get going in a matter of minutes. However, there are some important considerations to take into account when setting up a Twitter account to help your account appear professional and optimized.

1. Got to http://twitter.com and click on the big, yellow “Sign Up” button.

2. On the sign up page, it’s recommended that you put in your real name or alternatively, you can put in the name of your business. It just depends on how you’ll be using the account. If you are a solo entrepreneur or you are the person who will be tweeting, then it is generally a good idea to put in your real name. If you plan to use the account to tweet as a “business” or if multiple people might be tweeting from the account then put in a business name.  Whichever, you chose, you can always change it at anytime, so it’s not set it stone. Keep in mind that this field is indexed and picked up by the search engines, so that’s something to take into consideration as well when deciding what to put in the Name field.

3. Your Username- This will be your “Twitter Handle” or how you will essentially be known to others on Twitter and it’s what will show up in your Follower’s Twitter stream when you send out a Tweet. You are allowed a maximum of 15 characters for your name but don’t feel compelled to use all of them. A shorter Twitter name has it’s benefits. Primarily, if someone re-tweets one of your tweets, then a good chunk of the 140 character limit isn’t take up with your Twitter name. Also, a shorter Twitter name is easier to remember. I also typically recommend that you stay away from using the “_” (underscore) symbol in your Twitter name. Some people use this to add a space in their name to separate words. It’s really not necessary and people don’t generally like to have to type in the underscore symbol when tweeting to you or when including your name in their tweet.  Also, capitalization doesn’t matter for a Twitter name. If you put capitals in your Twitter name, people can still tweet to you without including the capitals.

After choosing your username, put in your password and email account and press the “Create My Account” button.

Next Steps

At this point, Twitter will ask you about find other people to follow via your email address book or through suggested users. You can choose to do this or you can click on “Skip This Step.”

After you’ve gone through these step, you go to your main Twitter dashboard. You will still need to add your website link, your bio and a picture for your avatar. All of these are important to complete as part of the set up of your Twitter account.

Settings

In the upper right corner, you’ll see your username and an arrow. Click on the arrow for a drop down menu and select “Settings.”  Within the Account menu, you can select your language, your time zone and whether you want to add your location to your tweets. This is also where you can select to “Protect Your Tweets.” This means that only people that you allow to follow you can see your tweets and they are not public, nor are they searchable in the search engines. Generally, if you are using this Twitter account for networking and business, then you won’t want to use feature and you will want your Tweets to be public.

Profile

Next, from the top menu, choose “Profile.”  This is where you will add the following:

• Avatar- Here you can upload your photo or your logo to be used as your account avatar. Try to choose something that will translate well in a small square photo. If your logo is big or is a shape that will not fit nicely in a small square photo consider either making a version of your logo to fit in a square or choose something else to be your avatar. You can add your logo to your background instead as part of your branding efforts. People also really like to see photos of people as avatars. If you are tweeting as yourself, a photo of yourself is generally what people prefer to see when they are looking at your account and in deciding whether to follow you. Do not skip this step!
• Location. Add your location such as city and state here. You may also choose just to add your state. Keep in mind that this field comes up in searches when people are looking for others to follow. So, if you want to have people in your city or state be able to find you, then it’s a good idea to post your actually city and state here.
• Website: Input a link to your website, blog or someplace on the web where people can go to find out more information about you or your business. A Website link helps to legitimate your account from spam accounts.
• Bio- This area is limited to 160 characters. This is a good place to describe you or your business. Keywords here are good as this is another are that is searchable within Twitter and by the search engines.

Click Save.

These are some the important basics for setting up your Twitter account. You might also want to check out this post with tips for finding people to follow on Twitter and using Hootsuite to help manage your Twitter account.

What other questions do you have about setting up a Twitter account?

This is yet another feature that local businesses need to be on top of and figure out how to use it to their advantage. Foursquare and Yelp already have proven track records of helping driving customers to businesses. Now, the biggest player of them all has stepped into the ring. Most business have heard or know that they really should have a presence on Facebook with a Business Fan Page.

How Facebook Places and Deals Help Local Business

• Build loyal customers
• Visibility- when someone checks in at your Facebook Place, it shows up on their profile and in the News Feed for all their friends to see.

In order for a business to be able to create a deal in Facebook, they will need to have claimed their Facebook Place first. Then you can create a Facebook deal, wait to get it approved by Facebook and then promote it.

Users can find Facebook Deals when they check in at different locations using Facebook Places for Android or the Facebook iPhone App. There are four kinds of deals currently available.

• Individual Deals- Discounts, freebies and coupons  for individual users that check in
• Friend Deals- You and other friends check in together to claim a deal.
• Loyalty Deals- Earn a deal or a discount based on checking in a certain number of times.
• Charity Deals- Choose to donate to a cause when there is a check-in.

Each of these different types of deals have clear advantages to businesses. Deals is currently rolling out across the county and already big businesses have already sign up to offer deals including Gap, Chipotle, McDonalds and Starbucks.

You can read more here directly from Facebook about Deals. TechCrunch also had a pretty comprehensive post covering the Facebook announcement where they note that currently Facebook Deals will only be available to US businesses.  Facebook will also be offering the Deals service to users for free which will make it hard, if not impossible, for other geo-location services to try to charge businesses for offering deals to users.

I’ll be keeping up on the best ways to use Facebook Places and Deals for local businesses, so be sure to drop me a line if you have any questions.

There are several different options available to help you manage multiple social media accounts at once. Among the most popular are Tweetdeck, Seesmic and Hootsuite. Depending on your needs and desire for access, then you might consider  each one of these for different reasons. All of them have a web version and apps for iPhone. Tweetdeck and Seesmic also have downloadable desktop versions.

For everyday non-mobile use, I have found Hootsuite to be my preferred social media management tool. Hootsuite provides you with a comprehensive social media dashboard for managing multiple social media accounts and platforms all in once place.

First built as a Twitter management tool, Hootsuite has grown to include the ability to post to LinkedIn, Facebook, Facebook pages, Ping.fm, MySpace, WordPress, Foursquare and importing RSS feeds.  With Hootsuite, you can pull in multiple Twitter accounts, multiple Facebook profiles, multiple LinkedIn accounts, etc.

For Twitter accounts, you can quickly and easily view your Home Feed, your @ mentions, your sent tweets, your direct messages, plus add columns for any of your Twitter lists, columns to monitor keywords or key phrases, and a pending tweets column for any scheduled tweets. You can have up to 10 columns for each twitter account showing at one time. I typically add a few columns for monitoring keywords and a few more columns for lists of specific twitterers for different purposes. For example, I might like to keep up on the tweets of my colleagues, social media people and local friends.

Hootsuite makes it easy to reply, re-tweet, send a direct message, add a tweet as a favorite, reply all (for tweets with multiple twitterers listed) or send a specific tweet to email. Another nice feature is the amount of information available about each twitterer including their Twitter bio, a link to their twitter account, their website, how many they are following, number of followers and the ability to report them as a spammer. What I really like about this feature as well is that it includes easy access to their timeline, their mentions, their favorites and links to their other social network accounts. You can easily follow, unfollow, direct message or add someone to one of your lists from this window as well.

For LinkedIn or Facebook, you can monitor the news feeds of your connections in Hootsuite and schedule status updates to go out to each of them. For Facebook pages, you can see all of your posts to the pages and schedule updates.

Hootsuite offers a handy link shortner that makes it easy to shorten a URL and include in it a tweet. There are analytics available for each link shortened using ow.ly so you can track how many times a link has been clicked or you can select a specific tweet and see that stats for that tweet. This is a great way to gauge what types of content your followers are interested in and respond to. Hootsuite recently added the ability to bring in your Google Analytics making it easy to monitor yet another piece of your online activity from one place.

You can also bring in the RSS feed for your blog so that when you post on your blog, it will automatically post to any of your social networking accounts. Other RSS feeds can also be pulled in and set to automatically post to your accounts. For example, each Delicious account has it’s own RSS feed. I set mine so that when I bookmark something in Delicious, it will automatically post that article or website with a link to Twitter. I preface these tweets with “Bookmarked:” This lets my Twitter followers know that I’ve just bookmarked something that I found interesting and that I thought they might like too.

Hootsuite allows for multiple users to manage different social network accounts from their own respective Hootsuite accounts. Hootsuite confirms who is the “owner” of an account and then you can give access to someone else to that account as a team member. This is very helpful when multiple people need to manage an account and especially in the work that I do. This means when I reply to something in another account or if I schedule a tweet to go out, then the other person with access to that account will see that I’ve already replied or can see what I have scheduled to go out.

Update: Hootsuite recently announced they will start charging for different plans with different levels of features. They will have one plan that remains free with limited features. You can find more information here about the new Hootsuite plans.

Image via CrunchBase

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Any small business or entrepreneur anywhere near an Internet connection these days, will have heard about the importance of using social media as a marketing tool. Many will not know the ins and outs of how to go about getting started or keeping up with their social media efforts. What’s more is that small business owners and entrepreneurs are VERY BUSY and they just do not have time to  learn and maintain everything that goes with social media. This is where I come in as a Social Media Virtual Assistant.

I help small business owners figure out the what and the how for using social media for their business. We identify what their goals are and how to work towards achieving those goals and some measurable outcomes in using social media for business. I can take care of the initial set up, including all the technical aspects along with my recommendations or shortcuts for how to fully optimize a their presence on different social media platforms. I will give suggestions for how to help syndicate their content throughout their networks and I can help set up systems for helping to manage or automate where it seems feasible.

My efforts work best and get the best results with clients when there is good, open communication and when the client clearly understands and participates where needed with the different social media platforms and networks. The biggest mistake I encounter in working as a Social Media Virtual Assistant, is that some clients come to the table with a “set it and forget it” mentality despite my best efforts to advise them otherwise. Hiring a Virtual Assistant to help you with your social media and online visibility but thinking that it will not require any participation from you is a mistake.

I am happy to be a partner in my client’s social media and online efforts. I love the rush of seeing how making connections, networking and creating relationships can really help small business owners and entrepreneurs thrive. What I’ve decided I won’t do, is run a client’s social media on auto pilot. It’s not right for social media and it’s not right for me.

The “social” part of “social networking” means BEING ENGAGED. Hiring a Virtual Assistant to help out with tasks related to social media doesn’t make you social and I guarantee that you will be disappointed with the outcome if you choose not to also participate.

I can help streamline your social media efforts and I can keep on top of what needs a response from you. But, in the end the words and voice need to be yours.

Would love to hear your thoughts or comments on this!

Image by Joriel “Joz” Jimenez via Flickr

Last week, Twitter launched Blackbird Pie where you can post the link to a specific tweet and it will automatically generate code to embed that tweet into your blog post. Previously, most folks were mostly using screenshots to show a tweet or a series of tweets. While the code generate does seem rather long just for one tweet, it does become a pretty handy tool as it includes that Twitter account’s avatar and part of their background.

To get the code you need to grab the link for that particular tweet which can be found by clicking on the time stamp listed below in small font underneath a tweet. Usually it says something like “about 2 hours ago.” If you click on that it will take you to a page for that specific tweet and you just need to copy the URL for the page. It usually looks something like this:

“http://twitter.com/jkvirtualoffice/status/13878799371″

And when you enter it into Blackbird Pie, click “Bake” and it will generate the code for that tweet which you can then paste into your blog post.

What’s also nice about this feature is that it will generate links to Twitter account of the person who tweeted it as well as to the Twitter accounts of any Twitter folks who might be mentioned in the tweet.

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