Facebook’s update was reportedly made to address some of the poor internet connections on several areas around the globe. In India, Brazil and Mexico, the update has isolated the posts which take several minutes longer to load and those that are fast even with an average connection.
The social media king has revealed that the news feed was updated so other countries would enjoy it without harming the loading time on several posts.
According to Reuters’ post, as reported by Yasmeen Abutaleb, “The Facebook app is able to select articles, pictures and videos to load based on the strength of users’ connections. If they have weak connectivity, News Feed will select content that is easier and faster to load, such as text articles or posts.
Facebook employees in India reported slow connectivities that often made the app frustrating to use, said Tom Alison, Facebook’s director of engineering. The company then sent a team to India, dedicated to delivering a faster News Feed experience in areas with weak connections.”
The report stated that the content in the news feed would be impossible to load if the internet connection is already slow, consequently loading several videos at the same time.
Dividing the megabites to different Facebook posts would be beneficial especially when the worst times of loading comes.
Furthermore, people in the Philippines, where the internet service providers charge expensively, and worse, the internet is undeniably slow, could still enjoy the update without getting relative loading time delays, as per the usual.
Facebook updated its news feed for a better and absolutely convenient platform for businesses worldwide. In lieu to the king of social media growth of 25 percent in February 2015, a very unbelievable milestone for the company, Facebook is now aiming for a larger business-based platform for everybody.
The social media platform unveiled that they are creating this whole new innovation for the betterment of everyone, knowing that they have already less 100 million active users globally. “The goal of News Feed is to show you the stories that matter most to you,” the social media giant states, extending the update to all Android, iOS and even desktop users. “To do this, we use ranking to order stories based on how interesting we believe they are to you: specifically, whom you tend to interact with, and what kinds of content you tend to like and comment on.”
Facebook can now analyze the user’s posts, likes and comments. With this, the algorithm is now adjusted based on whom and which the user is interested in to. According to a report, “Facebook analyzes those patterns, preferences, and behaviors to show you more of what it thinks you’ll like—including particular advertisements.”
Moreover, Facebook is now adding features on its personalization menu. Users can now alter and adjust those posts that they are interested in. An example would be, having a specific user’s posts be on top of all the others. It is like an important person you would wish to check out – something like pinning the person’s latest posts on the active user’s news feed.
Wired reports, “Take the “find new pages” feature. It makes it super easy for you to discover and connect to the artists, news outlets, and businesses you like. Of course, the options you’re given are based on the pages you’ve previously liked to increase your [chances] of liking more pages—and give Facebook that much more insight into your predilections, taste, and interests.”
Previously, Facebook has already changed the feature where people can only hide some users from showing up his/her posts on the user’s news feed. But now, it is a way different game. The user can now unfollow persons or pages that he/she does not want to see. This feature is different from unfriending as it discreetly hides the person’s or page’s posts. Win for all!
Here, Facebook teaches users on how to follow those user’s that people may have unfollowed previously:
You can reconnect with a person, Page or group that you unfollowed by following them again.
Notifications
Only you will see the change. The person, Page or group won’t be notified that you followed them again.
Facebook recently had bug issues where users could not access their accounts. Some users received a ‘Service Unavailable’ response from their browsers. These glitches happen in rare cases, especially when congestion in the social media platform happens.
Meantime, we will be discussing out Facebook statuses are getting really annoying as time passes by. There are so many users who post irrelevant and disgusting posts. Disclaimer: You may shoot your friend after you read the article.
Those prayer and faith statuses
Like really? Are you trying to convey religious beliefs or are you just trying to get the attention of people? Those statuses, some have images on in, telling people to either Like or comment “Amen.” To be honest, this is a good gesture of faith. However, considering that many people are just trying to get tons of likes and have their status on top of everybody’s newsfeed, we don’t think that’s a good idea.
Like this to get floodlikes
Oh my goodness! Apparently, there are so many skeptics out there trying to overload their Facebook with people they don’t really know personally. Good thing Facebook has controlled people who sends spam of friend requests that eventually result to more likes.
Comment and I’ll send you a message
To those people trying to grab the eyes of robbers, this is so perfect for you. Facebook has this feature wherein people can be tracked by the use of Location settings. In this feature, people can be tracked on where they are currently, and where they may be going. If people become too careless of this, many would be dead by the time comes.
Like so I know you’re still active or I’ll unfriend you
Even Taylor Swift could not handle the fact that she’s the most followed person on Instagram. So why are you trying to impress people by knowing that you lots of friends? Really, it doesn’t sound good.
I am pregnant prank
It may either be real or not, but honestly you’re just trying to win the heart of your ex. When love tries to search for affection, it’s really going to do everything – without minding the fact that you are acting weird on Facebook, where nobody really cares if you’re carrying a baby or just trying to pose for men.
Will be on social media break
Is this a joke? People tend to post these on the platform more often nowadays. With all due respect, people still has feelings that they want to share and that they may be leaving because they care for themselves, but really, it’s quite distracting.
The politics post
Everybody knows that Clinton and Trump are going head to head on the 2016 Presidential Elections. So don’t be a Cleopatra and try to dominate your friends with your political views.
Facebook has recently discussed their plans of renovating the platform. In July, the social media company opened a forum regarding the changes in both iOS and Android FB apps soon to be unveiled. On the second week of September, Facebook has finally introduced the new News Feed.
On the newly updated News Feed, Facebook has diminished most of the spams such as memes and silly videos uploaded on the app. So far, the application has been working well in terms of optimal performance.
Furthermore, Facebook has updated the settings wherein the user can now change customize who are their priority users to check on their news feed, to reach out those who have been unfollowed and check on more pages that are, on record, would be interesting depending on the user’s interests. Basically, Facebook has made innovations on reading their users’ interests.
Meantime, this is also a great news to those who are working on the social media for a living. Business marketers, who eventually have their company pages, shall love the new shopping page feature which was first available in July. Just like the usual Amazon and eBay features, Facebook will now be having the ‘Shop’ button where users and look for their needs and a guaranteed delivery door-to-door, depending on the transaction and terms of the company, is likely. There are brochures and promotional products available on the said feature. It’s eventually like a whole new platform of online shopping – but on the social media king!
Such feature is confirmed by Recode, from the statement of Shomair, as reported on Buzzfeed. Moreover, the platform will be featuring a better and more efficient call-to-action at the top of every shopping page. Such call-to-action bars will be helpful in creating a faster and easier access to the seller, to a customer care chatbox or to the hotline.
There are millions of active users on Facebook, and every day there are people who creates and goes out to reconnect with people. Having this said, it is inevitable to have the company rising as one of Amazon-like or eBay-like online shopping platforms.
The social media king, Facebook, has unveiled a new feature that allows users to check on several pages of uploads – such as videos, photos and statuses. There are millions of recorded uploads per day, considering Facebook’s abundant population of active users, so their way of innovating the algorithm so that more and more people can be reconnected – depending on the settings, of course.
Facebook has had several new feature releases from the CTAs (call-to-actions), business and promo videos, shopping pages and etc. recently. Now, they have made an advertisement that leads to a landing page where users can check on the page’s posts. It is like the latest feature that Apple has launched for their iPhone 6S – but only on a Facebook format.
The new ads are now better than what they have released previously. According to Recode, “This look isn’t entirely new. Facebook showed off something very similar to advertisers at Cannes Lions back in June, but said the ad was a just a mockup. It’s easy to see why Facebook is headed in this direction.”
“For starters, the ad looks much better than a traditional sponsored post within News Feed; Facebook is working with publishers and brands to generate more high-quality content, and ad material is no exception. Plus, it’s likely that the company can charge marketers more for an ad that includes multiple photos and videos (not to mention a full-screen takeover),” the site says.
This new way of resorting new business posts and to uplift Facebook business ventures shall attract more marketers to build their companies on the application. This will eventually grow the ad revenues and possibilities for Facebook users to connect with the business sites they haven’t been to usually.
Some products that aren’t capable to reaching millions of people in a single week can now feel free to model on a single ad and have its name grow continuously. This section wherein Facebook allows their marketers to promote and sustain their business is what sets Facebook from their social media competitors.
Yes, just like Twitter, Instagram and Pinterest, Facebook also involves business and there’s no other social media platform that can reach millions of people on a single posting like it.
The said social media company has updated their terms on who to promote, show longer, and charge less and more. Meaning to say, the large investors or companies have less chances of getting the high spots on the news feed due to the fair terms and conditions for the far smaller companies.
Facebook has gone way far on exposing people’s ideals and interests. The power of posting updates of a person’s daily life to criticizing others’ posts led to the discovery of a new online app to reveal ones’ personality.
A very powerful tool to introduce to the public, the Apply Special Sauce, details a user’s way of thinking through the recorded likes he has done on his/her feed. It is like an EQ Test but replacing the actual test questions.
Michal Kosinki, an assistant professor in organizational behaviour at Stanford’s Graduate School of Business, developed an app that could analyse a person based on the ‘likes’. His motive is to let the users check on how distinctive their social media actions can be. For instance, the tool could determine ones’ psychological gender, sexual orientation, personality (i.e. Openness, Conscientiousness, Extraversion, Agreeableness, and Neuroticism), intelligence, life satisfaction, political orientation, religious orientation, education and civil status.
These psychometric tests tend to revolutionize how Facebook could become a person’s living storybook, where he/she is the main character of a chaotic yet satisfying world of ventures.
I, myself, had a try and I was surprised seeing accurate results. It is safe to say that the level of how these personality, satisfaction and psychometric tests are carefully interpreted in the way the takers could understand and accept fully.
“Click on Predict My Profile to receive an instant prediction of your psycho-demographic profile based on your Facebook Likes. Our models were built using actual psychological data and social media profiles from over 6 million people, allowing us to accurately predict a range of traits without asking you any questions. We share anonymised samples of this data with academics in order to support high-quality research into online behaviour, resulting in over 40 journal publications since 2011.”
There, you will be transferred to a follow-up site where you have to log in to submit your Facebook Likes so they may view the API output. According to the side, “This is a prediction of your psycho-demographic profile based on your Facebook Likes. It uses a snapshot of your digital footprint to visualise how others perceive you online and therefore may not be an entirely accurate picture of who you really are.”
Facebook Hacking: A Crisis inside Social Media Details
Many of the Facebook users nowadays tend to set their posts to public viewing – meaning, everyone can see it without any security. The fact that these some details are visible to strangers who might review the user’s file could not just destroy personal accounts, but to also end lives.
Reza Moaiandin, a software engineer, has acquired details, photos, locations and even mobile numbers of strangers with the use of algorithms and search engines. By the use of inserting mobile numbers on the search bar, a person could possibly be found together with the pieces of information available for public viewing.
“A few months ago, I discovered a security loophole in Facebook that allows hackers to decrypt and sniff out Facebook user IDs using one of Facebook’s APIs in bulk – therefore allowing them to gather millions of users’ personal data (name, telephone number, location, images, and more). This post is an attempt to catch Facebook’s attention to get this issue fixed.
Through this, a hacker can then communicate with Facebook’s GraphQL to get as many details as possible, by passing the hashed ID.
By using a script, an entire country’s (I tested with the US, the UK and Canada) possible number combinations can be run through these URLs, and if a number is associated with a Facebook account, it can then be associated with a name and further details (images, and so on),” according to Salt Agency blog post; citing source.
Social media has drastically affected our lives since its inception. It has changed how we pass and receive information, how we communicate with people in our inner circles (and those outside of it) and how eCommerce works.
We’ve heard ample stories of how online shenanigans work, but little did we know, social media usage has more effects on us. You might have noticed that itch to check your Instagram, Facebook or Twitter feed after an hour of not doing so. You think that’s nothing? It surely isn’t.
PHOTO. Photo by Chris Jackson/Getty Images)
In an article published on CBS Atlanta website, it was noted that a new study suggests that frequent social media use could have serious implications on young people’s mental health. Furthermore, the report says “teens who use social media sites for two hours or more daily are at risk for poor mental health, psychological distress and suicidal thoughts.”
Frequent social media use could have a negative impact on young people’s mental health, according to a new study.
For many teens, going even an hour without checking Facebook, Instagram, or Twitter is a struggle. Twenty-four percent of teenagers go online “almost constantly,” according to a recent Pew Research Center study.
But more alarming than the time spent are the negative consequences that young people may suffer from due to too much screen-time.
The study, from Ottawa Public Health, suggests that teens who use social media sites for two hours or more daily are at risk for poor mental health, psychological distress and suicidal thoughts, as reported by Huffington Post.
Researchers looked at data from 750 students in grades seven through 12 who took the 2013 Ontario Student Drug Use and Health Survey. The study found that 25 percent of students surveyed reported spending at least two hours a day on social networking sites. These same students were categorized as reporting more poor mental health issues, symptoms of anxiety and depression, and suicidal thoughts.
“It could be that teens with mental health problems are seeking out interactions as they are feeling isolated and alone,” Dr. Hugues Sampasa-Kayinga, the study’s lead author, told The Huffington Post in an email. “Or they would like to satisfy unmet needs for face-to-face mental health support.”
Sampasa-Kayinga notes that the link between social media and mental health issues is complicated, and that simple use of sites like Facebook and Twitter “cannot fully explain by itself the occurrence of mental health problems.”
Researchers are now investigating how this issue might be fixed, and in some cases turning the problem into the solution.
“We see social networking sites, which may be a problem for some, also being a solution,” Dr. Brenda K. Wiederhold of the Interactive Media Institute in San Diego said, as reported by Huffington Post. “Since teens are on the sites, it is the perfect place for public health and service providers to reach out and connect with this vulnerable population and provide health promotion systems and supports.”
Experts also suggest parents pay attention to how much time teens are spending on these sites and its possible link to mental health issues.
The research was published online on July 13 in the journal Cyberpsychology, Behavior, and Social Networking.
One way social networking sites, like Facebook for one, have drastically changed us is how we communicate with peers.
One article making rounds in the cyberspace this week is Facebook’s sms notifications. In this instance, it ridiculously sends out an sms reminding you of someone’s birthday. It then asks you to reply with 1 if you want to send a greeting to that person. Too ridiculous it makes me wanna receive one.
Aaron Miles shares his insights on this new development from Facebook in the article below.
Alex Hern of The Guardian has a weirdly disconcerting article up, “‘Happy Birthday!’ is dead, and it’s all Facebook’s fault,” about how Facebook’s efforts at creating convenience for its users is just leading us ever further into a techno-dystopian cyber-future where all our interactions with other human beings are nothing but an unending series of robotic button presses completely detached from anything resembling actual emotion or thought. (Okay, I’m exaggerating. A little.)
Here’s the thing: Facebook users have long been able to use SMS to interact on the site by posting via text messaging. As Hern reports, a new feature being rolled out by the social network allows users to reply to a birthday notification text with just the number ‘1’ to automatically post “Happy Birthday!” to the wall of the person celebrating the fact that they didn’t die partway through the year. As Hern states: “Birthday wishes are finally meaningless.”
Call me a curmudgeon (because I am) but this feels strange and ominous. Facebook has now spared us from the seemingly overwhelming labor of, you know, even typing two words. I like to think the idiom “it’s the thought that counts” still has some meaning, especially in a world where, for years now, all the things we should put be putting effort into remembering on our own, like birthdays, anniversaries, etc., are now handled by automatic reminders and smart calendars.
But at least those reminders and calendars called us to action. We might get a little beep telling us it’s someone’s birthday, but, up until now, we’d still have to call them, or email them, or post an original message on their social network of choice. Now, we get the message automatically, and can reply automatically. Oh, sorry, we still have to type a single digit, but I’m sure we’ll find a way to automate that one small bit of effort soon. As Hern says in his article, “it would be more heartfelt to send ‘Wibble!’ to your friends.” Wibble indeed, Mr. Hern, wibble indeed.
Anyway, I look forward to the days when wishing someone a real and sincere happy birthday will by necessity end with the note, “*This message is original and not generated by any algorithm or other automated service.”
Now if you’ll excuse me, there are other issues of great importance that I must address.
New measures are now being looked upon to address these concerns. Some have already gained grounds, just like this new bill that would regulate social media interaction of students.
Facebook has been a legitimate and reliable source of news for years now. It’s effectively delivered news to users in an unprecedented way. Although, this convention threatens the business of news organizations because people are no longer going to their websites anymore, there’s no stopping publishers to continue promoting their contents on the popular social network platform.
The Facebook algorithm that determines what appears in news feeds also favours content hosted natively—meaning it’s in the interests of people looking for exposure to upload their content to Facebook directly. But it’s the product of a concerted push by Facebook to encourage content creators to publish or share contents to the platform natively.
We’re still halfway through the week, might be too early for a rundown of the most explosive news we’ve heard this week, but the following news are too good to be skipped. Here’s the 3 news that definitely rocked the social network this week.
It’s presidential campaign launch season, and Facebook has tracked reactions to each candidate’s official announcement since Sen. Ted Cruz (R-TX) became the first major candidate to jump into the race in March.
The figures include all interactions (likes, posts, comments, shares), positive or negative. They’re less an indication of how popular someone is than of how much interest there is in them, from either side. With numbers now in for Jeb Bush’s announcement, Hillary Clinton is far, far ahead:
In the 24 hours surrounding Clinton’s announcement on April 12, 4.7 million people produced 10.1 million interactions on Facebook. Cruz is a very distant second, with 2.1 million people creating 5.5 million interactions, about half of Hillary’s performance. Here’s a chart showing the number of interactions for each candidate, rather than the number of people interacting about each:
Hillary’s dominance makes sense. She’s by far the best-known candidate nationally, in either party, and is among the most admired women in the entire world. She faces many fewer, and much less potent, primary opponents than any Republican candidate, meaning the base isn’t as fractured and more Democratic voters are likely to like and share posts about her. She also had a very social media-centric announcement, eschewing a big rally in favor of a video posted on YouTube and (yes) Facebook:
But the Republican results, particularly Bush’s, are interesting. Jeb didn’t embarrass himself by doing as poorly as, say, Martin O’Malley or George Pataki, but he was bested by GOP rivals both serious (Marco Rubio, Rand Paul) and not (Cruz, Ben Carson), as well as by Bernie Sanders. He wasn’t too far ahead of retreads like Mike Huckabee and Rick Perry — even though his last name means he’s better known than any other candidate besides Hillary.
The number of people liking, commenting, posting, and sharing in the 24 hours around an initial campaign announcement isn’t likely to tell you much about who’s going to win in the end. But it does tell you a little bit about the degree of public interest (again, positive or negative) at the campaign’s outset. And it doesn’t look like people care all too much about Jeb.
Thanks to Andy Stone at Facebook for the data.
Content that is interesting, unique and of high-quality will arouse strong feelings within its audience. Much more if it directly concerns them, they’ll love it even more.
Out of politics, here’s a horrifying news out of Missouri.
Two horrifying posts on a Facebook account shared by a Missouri mother and her disabled daughter led police to discover the mom brutally killed in her Springfield home.
The teenage daughter, meanwhile, was mysteriously found in Wisconsin the next day with a man authorities have only identified as “a person of interest.”
The bizarre case started Sunday afternoon when friends noticed an alarming message on a Facebook account shared by Clauddinnea “Dee Dee” Blancharde, 48, and her 19-year-old daughter, Gypsy Blancharde.
It read: “That Bitch is Dead!”
An hour later, the poster wrote in a comment under the status: “I f—en SLASHED THAT FAT PIG AND RAPED HER SWEET INNOCENT DAUGHTER…HER SCREAM WAS SOOOO F—EN LOUD LOL.”
Friends initially responded with a flurry of fearful messages. “Should someone notify the local police??? This sounds scary,” one wrote. Some suggested the account got hacked. Finally, a few went to check on the family, and got no answer at their home.
When police arrived, they found Dee Dee “deceased of a violent nature,” theSpringfield News-Leader reported.
Authorities did not believe it to be a random attack, and thought Dee Dee might have been dead for up to 24 hours before she was found, KOLR reported.
Gypsy — who is wheelchair-bound because of leukemia and muscular dystrophy, according to neighbors — was considered missing until Monday morning, when she turned up unharmed with an unidentified man in Big Bend, Wis. The 25-year-old man was arrested, but police are not yet calling him a suspect. They also are not ruling out Gypsy as a suspect.
The stepfather of the man found with Gypsy told WREX the two were dating online, and said the man recently visited Missouri to bring Gypsy to Wisconsin.
Police have not yet determined how Dee Dee was murdered, how her daughter ended up in Wisconsin and how much of the vile Facebook comment is true.
Almost every week we hear major news out of our most revered tech companies, and this week didn’t fail. Much has been said about Oculus, but this week the exchange of words among stakeholders has gone a little notch higher.
Virtual muck now struck from smut bucket content glut despite Luckey’s pluck
Facebook has contradicted a statement by Oculus founder Palmer Luckey and declared that pornographic content will be forbidden from appearing on the Oculus store.
Speaking at Silicon Valley’s Virtual Reality Conference in San Jose, in May, 22-year old Oculus founder Palmer Luckey was asked whether his company would be blocking adult content on its headsets.
Luckey said the company will allow pornography on its VR buckets because Oculus is committed to creating an open platform.
However, Business Insider reported the new details about the Rift that were released on Thursday, which appears to contradict this.
The report suggests that Oculus will run its own app store similar to Apple’s app store, which is the only means of getting mobile apps onto iOS devices.
Oculus would therefore not be an open platform, and Facebook has said it would use its control to “vet the apps that appear in its store, and even rate the apps” according to the report.
However, virtual reality sex games will not be a part of that.
“Oculus only distributes developer content that meets its terms of service, which forbids pornographic content from being a part of the Oculus Store,” a spokesman told Business Insider.
Business Insider then asked, whether in Oculus’ efforts to produce a family-friendly headbucket, it would also be banning violent content too.
“Oculus only distributes developer content that meets their terms of service, but it isn’t open to discuss what those terms are at this time,” came the exceedingly American reply.
The digi-goggles will ship to customers in 2016. ®
The most recent change to Facebook’s News Feed algorithm considers the measure of time users spend seeing stories. The change was made in recognition that users don’t essentially like, comment nor share each story that is critical to them.
The change to the News Feed algorithm will take off “over the advancing weeks,” and will not essentially affect the pages.
The following outlines the sheer indication of Facebook’s announcement as reported by Mashable’s JP Mangalindan about this recent change on the popular social network.
Facebook revealed on Friday that it has tweaked the stream of information you get on the service once again — this time to factor in the amount of time you spend looking at a post.
Previously, how high or low a post showed up in your News Feed — or if it showed up at all — depended on how much your Facebook friends liked, commented on, or shared it. But no longer.
“It’s not as simple as just measuring the number of seconds you spend on each story,” wrote Facebook software engineer Ansha Yu in a company blog post Friday. “Some people may spend 10 seconds on a story because they really enjoy it, while others may spend 10 seconds on a story because they have a slow Internet connection.”
The solution? “We’ve discovered that if people spend significantly more time on a particular story in News Feed than the majority of other stories they look at, this is a good sign that content was relevant to them,” Yu added.
So if you spend a lot of time glancing over a News Feed post with photos from your sister’s wedding, say, Facebook now notices that, factors in how long the post is on your screen, and places any other photo-based posts from your sister higher up in your News Feed.
The aim is to make the News Feed more compelling and interesting for users and ultimately boost overall time spent on the social network — by treating time spent on a post as another measure of interaction. How often do you check out your News Feed, and linger on an interesting post without liking, commenting or sharing it?
This is also the latest in a long series of News Feed tweaks Facebook makes for accuracy and relevance. This April, for example, the social network announced it had adjusted the News Feed algorithm to emphasize updates from friends versus content from Pages.
Later that month, it updated the algorithm again, this time to downplay posts highlighting what a friend Liked or commented — they either show up lower in your News Feed or don’t show up at all.
Facebook’s News Feed algorithm now factors in how much time you’ve spent looking at a post, on top of whether you’ve Liked, commented on or shared it.
Facebook also rolled out this week a new feature that will collect pertinent information about a company or a place like posts from the company’s page, upcoming events, check-ins, etc. and place it at the top of news feed.
Facebook Introduces Place Tips for Business Pages: “Place Tips gather useful information about a business or landmark (like posts from the business’ Page, upcoming events and friends’ recommendations and check-ins) and show it at the top of News Feed to in-store visitors.”
Facebook Rolls Out Facebook Lite: Facebook Lite is “a new version of Facebook for Android that uses less data and works well across all network conditions.”
Publishing on social media can be daunting at times. It requires focus, wisdom and dedication. If you haven’t established a system that lessens the gravity of difficulty in producing social media contents, now is the time to learn it all.
Tom Van Buren, a contributor at ProBlogger.net writes a feature that outlines how advance scheduling can do wonder in our social media marketing programs, and teaches us how exactly to use it.
3 Steps to Saving Time by Writing Social Media Updates in Batches
Scheduling updates in advance solves a number of social media’s most frustrating problems. It gives your routine newfound flexibility, and it can even make you a better blogger. But there’s one hurdle that scheduling alone doesn’t take care of for you: those updates still have to come from somewhere, and that means you have to write them.
Part of the appeal of scheduling is that it stops social media from interrupting your life every time you want to post an update, but without a sound strategy for actually writing those updates, you might just be trading one type of frustration for another. This post will show you how to write social media updates by the batch, so you can more easily grow your fanbase and drive more reliable traffic to your blog.
Think about more than just your own traffic
Social media is an invaluable resource for driving traffic to your own website, but getting carried away can do more harm than good. Forty-five percent of users cite excessive self-promotion as a reason why they would unfollow a brand on social, which means your strategy has to be a lot more refined than just sharing your own links.
Break down your typical updates into categories by type, so there’s variety to the content you share. In addition to posting links to your own blog posts, for example, you might also use social media for posting tips, linking to useful content on other websites, sharing inspirational or funny quotes, and so on. (Quotes and tips in particular are useful for getting shares, which can help you grow your audience.) These categories will guide you through the next step of the batching process: actually writing your updates.
Save time by writing in blocks
If you regularly schedule your social media updates, you might already be writing them in batches – just very small ones. For example, you might set aside time every morning to write and schedule your updates for that day. While this works in theory, it prevents you from developing a big-picture strategy, and it isn’t saving you as much time as it could.
Use the categories you defined to write as many updates you can within a certain time frame (much like the longstanding Pomodoro Technique suggests). Take 20 minutes to write as many updates as you can promoting your various blog posts, then another 20 for tips, and so on. Writing as much as you can within a certain time period gives you the ammunition with which to load your schedule, and it helps you build and maintain creative momentum as you go.
Writing bigger batches like this may seem like a major time commitment, but think of it like making a weekly trip to the grocery store instead of going every day. It may feel like you’re spending more time at the store, but for as long as the groceries last, you’re not wasting time on things like planning meals, making your list, driving back and forth, unloading the car, and so on. Once the work is done, it’s done.
The amount of time these updates last will vary depending on how often you post, but there’s one final step you should take to make sure that you get as much out of them as possible.
