Articles Tagged with Social Media

4 Quick Twitter Tips for Award Ceremonies

Award ceremony photoI’m not a social media consultant, nor someone who’s ever run social media for an event such as an award ceremony. However I’m a heavy Twitter user and I’ve seen a ton of award ceremonies – new or old, big or small, hardly known or well-established – making what I’d consider to be major mistakes when tweeting about their award ceremony during the event itself.

Trying to run social media while running an event can be tricky, I get that (I know from my own experiences)… Unless of course you have someone else in the role doing it, or you make sure to dedicate some time during the night to doing the necessary tasks yourself. Whatever the case, here’s my tips on how award ceremony events can make a huge (yet simple) difference on the tweeting front…

1) Make the Twitter handle & hashtag (really) obvious on the night

This is the head-slappingly simple one which makes me want to cry when award ceremonies don’t get it right. Either they won’t actively promote their hashtag (missed opportunity!) or there’ll be confusion as to what the hashtag actually is, resulting in either a mix of hashtags being used (some of which will be incorrect) or potential tweeters abstaining from using a hashtag – or tweeting altogether.

Put your Twitter handle and hashtag everywhere. And I mean everywhere. Put it on the website; put it in Twitter profile bio; put it on the promotional literature that goes on the tables such as the ceremony booklet/list of nominees; put it on the banners and signage; put it on the big screens; put it everywhere. And if you put it on the screens, don’t just show it briefly – make sure that it’s visible at all times, whether it’s a slide deck, a series of videos or a mix of media. It’s bound to result in a higher take-up of hashtag/handle usage when people tweet their experience, whether it’s about the people they’re with, the food & drink, or who the winners are.

Speaking of tweeting about the winners…

2) Make sure you tweet the winners (i.e. don’t rely on others to do it)

I’ve seen this happen more than once, and it’s weird: when the official Twitter handle of the award ceremony only RTs other people tweeting about the event (such as the attendees) but doesn’t actually tweet anything itself. It’s bizarre. It also means that they don’t tweet the winners as they’re announced. Perhaps they’re too busy, and/or perhaps they’re simply relying on the attendees doing it for them – after all, there’s usually at least one person who’ll go to the effort of tweeting the names of the winners of every category. But what if that doesn’t happen? I was at an award ceremony a while back where people – neither the attendees nor the organisers themselves – were tweeting the winners, resulting in people tweeting saying “…So who won the [x] category?” – especially those who couldn’t attend, like myself. It was a complete mess.

So take the time and effort to tweet each winner as-and-when they’re announced, complete with their Twitter handle, maybe a photo of them grabbing the award, and – of course – the hashtag. Be the official spokesperson for yourself, as it is meant to be.

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The Share Button on Facebook is Broken on Mobile

Facebook Share issue banner image
This post is 50% rant, 50% a heads-up to the Facebook devs, and 50% mathematical enigma…

For a while now I’ve shared other people’s Facebook posts on my personal profile and noticed that some of them would show up as expected, while others would show up… differently. And by “differently” I mean incorrectly and therefore badly. I’ve just discovered why and how it happens: the issue is with sharing via mobile in particular.

Sharing on Facebook desktop vs Facebook mobile

When you share someone’s post, if they have written some text while sharing a link and you hit the ‘Share Now (Friends)’ option, you expect the whole lot to be shared: the text, the link, and it should say “Steve Morgan shared [original poster]’s post.” Like this:

Facebook Share issue image 1
This is how it works – on desktop. On mobile, Facebook strips the text and the “Steve Morgan shared…” bit, and only shares the link. Completely devoid of context. Here I am tapping ‘Share Now (Friends)’ on mobile…

Facebook Share issue image 2
…and here’s the end result:

Facebook Share issue image 3
Bleugh.

I’m using an iPhone 7, currently on iOS 10.3.2, and the version of the Facebook iOS app is 132.0. Not that I think any of that matters, given that it’s been happening for a while (so I don’t think it’s iOS or app version specific).

It’s not just bog-standard posts that’s affected

At first I thought it was only normal post-sharing functionality that was affected. But I discovered the issue when I tried sharing an ‘On this Day’ post.

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24 Hours of Selfies: My Challenge for Red Nose Day 2017

Red Nose Day selfie photo
It’s a bit short notice (given that it’s only two days away!), but I’ve decided to set myself a challenge for Red Nose Day 2017:

On Friday 24th March 2017, I’ll take a selfie with everyone that I speak to face-to-face (regardless of whether I know them or not!)* and tweet the pics via my Twitter (@steviephil) using the hashtag #steviephilselfie.

* Obviously people can opt out and stuff (plus there’s a few other ‘rules’), but hopefully people will want to get involved.

I had the idea for this ages ago, and RND seems like the perfect opportunity to give it a go. I should be working at Welsh ICE (my coworking space) on the day, so hopefully I’ll have plenty of people to interact (and take selfies) with. If I’m not then it’s gonna be pretty lame, as I’ll probably work from home and I’ll only end up doing selfies with my family, haha… So fingers-crossed I’m at ICE, eh!

If you’d like to sponsor me (please do!), you can do so via my dedicated RND Giving page: https://my.rednoseday.com/sponsor/steviephilselfie. Even if it’s just a couple of quid, it’ll all make a difference. Thank you in advance.

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Quick Twitter Bio Tip: Utilise Returns for a Better Layout

Twitter bird image
2019 update: I don’t think this trick works any more, but I wanted to keep the post up just in case…

Twitter addict? Personal branding important to you? Then this might be of interest…

I made a cool discovery the other day. You can use returns in your Twitter bio, which some third-party apps will honour. While it’ll look exactly the same in Twitter itself (as if it’s ignored it) and therefore seem like a completely pointless exercise, other apps show them, which means that you can spread out your Twitter bio across multiple separate lines.

This is especially handy for me as my Twitter bio looks a little messy because it contains a lot of brief one-liners with @mentions:

Twitter profile with no returns screenshot
In its default form it looks a little higgledy-piggledy, especially on Tweetbot for iPhone:

Tweetbot (iPhone) bio, no returns screenshot
As you can see, it looks like I talk about being a freelance SEO consultant, then something about MOM and Welsh ICE, and then I’m a member of something, and then State of Digital… You get the idea. It feels a little disjointed and hard to read, as the parts that are connected are on separate lines from one another.

Enter the ‘Enter’ key

But fear not, my friend, for you can add enters/returns to the bio of Twitter. Go to your Twitter profile, hit ‘Edit profile’ on the right, make your edits in the box on the left, hit the ‘Save changes’ button on the right, and you’re done. Nice n’ easy, no?

(Pro tip: I suggest using an enter and a space each time, just in case places that don’t honour it don’t show a space after the full-stops, therefore looking like this: “@Welsh_ICE member.@stateofdigital…”)

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Why Radiohead’s Marketing Campaign for the New Album is Pretty Genius

I just wanted to type up a quick post talking about what Radiohead have been doing recently to promote their new album – A Moon Shaped Pool – and why it’s awesome. I’m not even a massive Radiohead fan (don’t get me wrong, I like their albums, but they’re not one of my favourite bands), but even so, you can’t help but admire their marketing approach. There’s two sides to it that I want to talk about: going against the social media grain, and not making the album easily accessible…

The social media disappearance

I didn’t even realise that Radiohead were releasing a new album until a couple of weeks ago when half my Twitter feed shared articles about Radiohead’s social media disappearance, i.e. keeping their profiles/pages but deleting all old tweets and status updates.

Radiohead on the Guardian screenshot
At first, I think a lot of people thought “what the hell are Radiohead doing?”, like it was a bad thing to do, because it goes against the typical social media way of thinking – the fact that you should use those channels to talk about yourselves, not simply be mute. But that’s exactly why it was such a smart thing to do. Everyone talked about it. EveryoneThe Guardian. Vanity Fair. Pitchfork. NME. Mirror Online. The Telegraph. The Independent. Mail Online.* Mashable. Fortune. ITV News. Daily Star. The Huffington Post. I could go on…

* …Who I’m not going to link to, because… it’s Mail Online. I mean c’mon… this blog publishes some really stupid stuff, but I’ve gotta have some standards…

Then, a few days later, a whole bunch of the biggest news publishers in the world wrote about them again, when Radiohead broke their social media ‘silence’ by releasing one of the songs.

From what I could see it was one of the most talked about, widely reported – and therefore highly anticipated – album releases I’ve seen this year so far.

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