Tips for having a secure password on Social Media sites

Posted on June 8, 2012 by Nicky Kriel

In case you haven’t heard: A hacker managed to obtain over six million LinkedIn passwords and published them on the internet.

Most of them are still encrypted, but as a precaution everyone should change their LinkedIn password. Now, if you think it is a problem particular to LinkedIn, I am sorry to tell you this: It may be easier for hackers to access your information than you think!

This is a good opportunity to look at your passwords across all your Social Media sites.

A few days ago, I was training a business how to use Facebook and the owner went into the administration part of her website and I noticed her password was only three characters long. I was horrified at how vulnerable her site was. A simple piece of software could access her website within minutes.

Almost every day I get a Twitter DM from someone whose Twitter account has been compromised. I really doubt that there are as many terrible blogs about me as people are claiming. At least the hackers have moved on from offering free iPads and sexual advice.

So here are a few simple tips to follow:

Separate passwords for each Social Media site
Used randomised characters rather than words
use a mixture of letters, numbers and special characters
use at least 8 characters, ideally more
Change your passwords at least once every six months

I know it is a pain, but it is worth doing. I used to have one password for everything until someone started accessing my computer last year. It is amazing how quickly you can memorise random characters when you type them in enough times!

Let me know if you have any more tips.

Nicky Kriel

Nicky Kriel is a Social Media Coach & Trainer inspiring, educating and empowering Business Owners to use Social Media more strategically. She is also the author of How to Twitter for Business Success. For more information visit http://www.nickykriel.com or to find out about her courses that she runs in Guildford visit http://www.nickykriel.com/courses

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Pinterest for beginners: 4 Ways to avoid Wasting your Time on Pinterest

Posted on May 27, 2012 by Nicky Kriel

Pinterest is becoming very popular and more and more friends are jumping on the bandwagon. I have notice many people are making time wasting mistakes. If you are new to Pinterest and you want to use it to drive traffic to your website: Don’t make these four novice mistakes!

Mistake #1:Pinning photographs rather than websites

People new to Pinterest see boards with pictures and then create their pinboards with photos they have stored on their computer. You may end up with pretty boards, you won’t get any traffic from the Pinterest community. The strength of Pinterest is that the pictures are links to websites.

What to do:

1. Click on the Add button.

2. Choose “Add Pin”copy the URL of your website page

3. Copy the URL of your website

4. Pinterest will then give you options to:

Choose the image you want if your page contains multiple images.
Choose the board you want to pin it to
Add a description

Which brings me neatly on to Mistake no. 2

Mistake #2: Not adding a proper description

So many people don’t bother to fill in the description or add only a very short description. You can 500 characters to your description. Make sure you spend the time to add the following to each of your pins.

A description containing your keywords – Pinterest has a robust search function make sure you add words that you think people might be searching for.
An URL! Yes your picture contains the URL, but not everyone knows how to use Pinterest so make it easy for them to find your article or product.
A price (if appropriate) – If you are selling products on your website then you will want to add a price because it displays the Price and it adds it to the Gifts section of Pinterest. See below.

Mistake #3: Not Installing the Pin it button

The Pin it button makes Pinning very quick and easy to share content on Pinterest. You will find it by click on the About Section and choosing the Pin it Button.

What’s really clever is that they will show you how to install the Pin it button according to the browser you are using. They even show you a video to make it very easy to install.

This makes it incredibly easy to share content from any webpage. When you find content you want to share:

click on the Pin It button
Select the Image you want from the available images on the page
It will then allow you to choose which board you want to add it to. The default is always the last Pinboard you used. Make sure it is the right one! I have added so many pins to the wrong board, by not paying attention to this! You can repin them to the right boards, but it wastes some of your time.
Make sure that your description has keywords
If the content is from someone else’s website make sure that it contains their orginal headline and it links to their website.

Mistake #4: Not using Pinterest to source pins

Pinterest is not just about you and not all your pins should be links to your website. Millions of beautiful images and useful articles have already been pinned.

Use the Search function on Pinterest to find Pins or Boards that will be useful and repin from theses boards. Repinning is like sharing on Facebook and Pinterest users love being repinned. If you want to create an inspirational board such as Dream holidays or your Bucket list, you can spend hours trawling around the web to find suitable images or you can use Pinterest for inspiration and speed. Your choice!

These are just some tips about Pinterest. Let me know if you want more by leaving a comment.

P.S. You are very welcome to Pin this post.

Nicky Kriel

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5 Easy Tips for Facebook Page owners

Posted on July 12, 2011 by Nicky Kriel

Do you use Facebook? The chances are very strong that you answered “yes” to that question. Many business owners are familiar with using Facebook, but need help with more specific “how to” questions about Facebook for their business. These are some of the questions that I am often asked.

1 How to add a comment as your Profile on your Page

If you are the administrator of your Facebook Page, the default will be set that any post or comments you make on the page will be published as your Page. But what happens if you have a few administrators and occassionally you want to comment as your Profile rather than as the Page?

This is what you do:

Edit page (top right hand corner)
Choose “your settings”
Untick the posting preference to post as your profile
Save this and post your comment
Remember to undo this once you have added the comment, if you want to post as your Page normally

2. How to Tag your Page

Very simply, if you want to tag your Page in a post,

use the “@” symbol followed by your page name ie @yourpagename.
As you type, a dropdown box will appear and you can select your Page name.
This creates a hyperlink to your Page.
You can also tag photographs with your Page name.

3. How to see who has liked your Page

To see which people have liked your Page (Pages who have liked you don’t count in the number of likes).

Select Use Facebook as your Page
You will notice that instead of having three icons, showing your friend requests, messages and your notifications in thetop blue bar, you will have two.
The friends icon will show you all the people who have liked you Page

4. How to curate content for your Page

The good news is that you don’t have to create all your own content. There is a wealth of information and tips on Facebook that will be useful to your fans. Share these articles with them as part of your content strategy. So how do you get great content delivered to you so that you can pick the best articles?

Use Facebook as your Page
Visit Pages that regularly produce great articles or blogs for your industry. (Great sources for me are Social Media Examiner, Mari Smith, Mashable to name a few)
Like these Pages as your Page
When you click the Home button of your Page (using Facebook as your Page), the news feed will consist of posts from the Pages that you have liked as a Page.
Find interesting articles and share them with your page by simply clicking the “Share” button and adding your personal comment about the article.

5. Keeping Spammers at bay

Make sure you have set your notifications to alert you when someone comments or posts on your page. You can’t be on the Page 24-7 but by being alerted, you can respond quickly.

If someone has posted to your wall something that you don’t believe fits in with your wall or is obviously self-promotional, or may contain viral links,
hover your mouse to the top right hand side of the post and a little wheel icon will appear.
Click on the icon and select whether you want to hide post, remove post, remove post and ban user or report abuse.
Check to see whether Facebook is counting valid posts as spam by checking your hidden posts
If you notice that some of your comments are in a darker shade of grey, it is possible that Facebook considers it to be spam and it will only be visible to you and the person who posted it. See Darker Shades of Grey on Facebook

Let me know what else you like to know as a Facebook Page Owner. I have already had a request to blog about using Facebook Insights. Did you find this useful?

Nicky Kriel

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K.I.S.S. on Social Media

Posted on June 13, 2011 by Nicky Kriel

Have you heard of the K.I.S.S. principle? You know, the acronym for Keep It Simple, Stupid? Well, for Social Media , the principle of K.I.S.S.S might be more relevant: Keep it Simple, Short and Shareable.

Why Simple?

People don’t have much time. In fact, you probably only have 1 second to make an impression.

When you Tweet,
post on Facebook
or update LinkedIn

Is it obvious what it is about?

I have seen paragraphs condensed into one tweet!! 140 characters full of abbreviations and acronyms. Would you be bothered to decipher it?

Keep one thought per tweet or post.

Action Point: Double check your tweet or post to make sure that it is obvious to the reader

Why Short?

On Twitter - you have a limit of 140 characters. Do not be tempted to do a longer tweet even if certain apps allow you to do so. It means your reader has to open up a new page to read the message and then close it down. Little things can irritate people, especially, when the same thing could be said more succinctly.
On Twitter - if you want people to retweet your message, you should only use a maximum of 125 characters or less to allow people to share your message easily with their followers.
On Facebook Pages – research has shown that the shorter the post the greater the response! In fact, 80 characters is the optimum length of a post to get the maximum response. How long are your posts?

Action Point: Can you make your post shorter without losing meaning?

Why Shareable?

If you are using Social Media, you want people to respond to posts and spread them around the Social Media Universe.

How much thought are you putting into why someone would want to share your post?

Do they make people laugh, smile or think?
Are they helpful, insightful or informative?
Remember: all your posts should be engaging, entertaining, educational or enriching!

Action Point: Check your posts before you share them and ask yourself, “ Would you share or engage with this post if you were reading it?”

What do you think K.I.S.S. should stand for? Leave your comments below, thank you.

Nicky Kriel

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Now Facebook Share button makes sharing even easier

Posted on June 8, 2011 by Nicky Kriel

Have you noticed that the Facebook share button has changed?
When you clicked the Share button before, you could only share it to your Profile. It meant that you had to copy the links to your Facebook Business Page!
Now it has changed.

If you click the Share button now you will see this

If you click on the little arrow next to “On your own Wall” you will get these options

Do you notice that you are also given the options of sharing on a friends page and with a group?
You can also share them privately to a Facebook friend or to yourself
Being able to share it with your Business Page is brand new!
By choosing “On your Page” It will show you all the Pages that you own or are administrating.
Click on the Page that you want to share the article to.

The post will be shared on your wall.
In this case, the post will appear to be posted as Social Media for Newbies because my default is set to post as the Page.
If you have changed the default so that you post as your Profile on the Page, the post will appear as your Profile.
(You can also customise the post to only appear to fans in a particular country or in a particular language. Just in case, you didn’t notice the little lock symbol!)

If you have no idea what the difference is between Facebook Profiles and Pages; have a look at Facebook: Profiles vs. Pages

Let me know if you found this helpful. If you have any questions, why not ask them by leaving a comment?

Nicky Kriel

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