Nowadays, everyone’s plugging content into social media everywhere, all the time. And it’s quite an undertaking to keep your social media properties filled with topical and relevant content all day long. A lot of social media sites allow you to link your profiles for automatic cross-platform sharing. And that helps. But if you don’t have time to post at regular points of the day you may want to take a look at Buffer.

Buffer is a service that helps you feed your social media properties at a schedule you select with content you load into the queue. You can use Buffer online or download it to your phone or tablet (iOS and Android.) And it connects to a lot of other apps and extensions to make information sharing and social networking a breeze.

Its snazziest feature is the scheduling function. Other apps – like HootSuite – allow you to schedule posts, but Buffer is more set-it-and-forget-it. You set the day schedule (daily or select days). You set various times. (This is by the minute; HootSuite only offers five-minute increments. So, if you prefer 9:17 am to 9:15 am, Buffer is the way to go!) You create a queue in your “buffer,” filling it tweets for Twitter, status updates and posts for Facebook, and articles for LinkedIn. As long as your queue has content, Buffer “automagically shares posts for you through the day.” The only thing you have to remember to do is keep content in your Buffer queue. (The app sends email reminders when your queue is low, so remembering is even easy!)

You load content into the queue by going to the Buffer webpage or app and typing a post just like you do on Twitter or Facebook. You can add links and photos. And Buffer uses its own URL shortener. Buffer also offers the option of posting timely content immediately with its “Post Now” feature and its browser add-on. The “Post Now” feature allows the user to create content and post it instantly to any of their profiles. The browser add-on, which is available for Firefox, Safari, and Google Chrome, allows you to post content as you surf the web without leaving the page you are viewing. So you can feed your queue without breaking your web-browsing stride.

Buffer provides analytics for those who really want to know who’s tapping into their network. Here’s the best part: while analytics often come only on the “pro” versions of many other apps, Buffer offers it for free! No upgrading is required to track the number of retweets on Twitter or views on LinkedIn. The information analyzed changes according to which social media outlet you used to post content, so your data is never generic. While the data is not as robust as HootSuite’s pro offering it should be ample enough for most.

Buffer helps eliminate that overwhelming feeling of trying to update all day. You log on – once a day, once a week, or however often you like – upload your content, sit back, and watch your entries circulate your networks!

Go be awesome.

Autriel Galloway

Over the past 10 years, the X has followed me east and west across Knox County, as I left the newspaper business and moved into corporate health care communications and now to a public relations firm. During that decade, the journalism/communications business has changed in fundamental ways. Reporters used to do just that, report and write. We cultivated cynical, doubting attitudes and worked with a team of photographers, editors and graphic designers who all performed their specialized talents. Now those professionals have become jacks-of-all-trades, with reporters filming and posting video (both print and TV journalists now do this). Everyone blogs, tweets, and posts material to websites and social media.

Having so much information at our fingertips in so many different formats can be both a blessing and a curse. It’s almost difficult to remember how we researched story topics before we could “Google” them. This required pounding the pavement either to a library, office, courthouse or newspaper morgue, or at least calling an official or expert. Now the problem is sometimes having too much information at our fingertips – trying to decipher what is true, valid, qualified when it’s all piled up on the computer monitor by the order of search engine optimization.

It’s hard to police professional journalism standards in a communications world that is changing by the day, one that has a multitude of outlets, and one in which the contributions of laypeople are often considered equal to those of trained professionals or seasoned experts.

My hope is that the focus would turn soon from quantity to quality, with more scrutiny of sources, attribution and content. I think things have changed so drastically and for such an extended period, the priority became merely keeping up, adapting and surviving the latest round of layoffs. Maybe that’s just the journalist in me talking. This is secret, but in colleges across the country every J-school student gets a transfusion of one pint of “type J” blood that then stays in our systems forever – it’s a bit of a curse.

Anyway, back to the X, which spurred this whole line of thought. It lived in my backyard off Strawberry Plains Pike in east Knox County for several years, and I used to joke that I was going out in the yard to kick my “ex.” I then took the X to west Knoxville when I moved across town, and it perched on a retaining wall where I saw it each time I pulled in my driveway. I naively hid the extra key to my house under it – not the most clever spot, but I couldn’t resist the obvious symbolism.

A few weeks ago, I came to work for Moxley Carmichael in the historic Miller Building at Gay Street and Union Avenue, just a couple blocks from the former News Sentinel building site (which is now a grassy lot). I brought the X to my very cool new office to decorate a great granite windowsill. One of my new colleagues, Creative Director Charley Sexton, asked me about its origins. I realized the X has almost come full circle back to where it started out in Knoxville, and I guess so have I.

Perhaps over the next decade, the communications field will move back toward its center -– a focus on clarity over clutter, credibility, pertinence and meaning –- while retaining the many wonderful attributes of the Internet, social media, mobile devices, immediacy and competition among media outlets that before this era of change didn’t compete against one another.

The ride is going to be interesting and exciting for all of us.

Blog editor’s note:
Moxley Carmichael is adjusting the tone of New Streak to include more general communications topics in addition to social media subjects. The firm’s addition of Senior Account Executive Jennifer Lawson seemed like a fitting time for this change. Lawson brings to Moxley Carmichael 15 years of newspaper journalism experience as a reporter and editor, as well as almost five years health care communications/marketing experience. She’ll work primarily with the firm’s health/medical clients.

You work hard to maintain your social media presence. You diligently monitor and follow up on comments and retweets. You strive to provide your community of followers and friends with timely, topical content in which they are interested. You agonize over the filters to apply to your Instagram uploads. So you need to take your social media password protection seriously.

We’ve all seen the headlines about the password security breaches at LinkedIn and eHarmony. And there are hackers working everyday to develop new tactics to get access to your online profiles. Recently our own digital media manager Bob Wilson spoke with WATE regarding password security related to the hacking of UT president Joe DiPietro’s Twitter account. Just last Friday Facebook pushed security tips to its users at the top their pages. And Twitter’s outage yesterday sparked false claims from some hacker groups, but the question on everyone’s mind was had Twitter been hacked?

So don’t make it easy for hackers. Below is a great infographic developed by Rapid7 showing the top 30 passwords hackers crack first. Check this list now. If you are using any of these as your password, stop reading and go change your password now.

CLICK HERE FOR FULL INFOGRAPHIC

You work hard to build trust and confidence with your social media communities. Don’t let that effort vanish with an unwanted cyberattack.

That’s a lot of users and whole lot of fast growth. It could even be debated that Twitter is the center of the social media universe right now.

So what’s holding you back? I drank the Kool-Aid (@charley_s). And it was delicious. Now let’s talk about getting you started on Twitter.

After you set up your profile, you need to start following people. Find a friend, a mentor, a business leader or someone else you admire, and follow them. Now check out who they follow. It’s likely that if you like them, you’ll like who they follow. Twitter will also offer some suggestions on who they think you should follow. This can be hit or miss, but they’re trying to be helpful.

Below are some great lists to help kick start your following.

Business and industry leaders - Following professionals in your field is a great way to keep up to date on what’s happening. Good Twitter citizens will share links to interesting articles and start meaningful conversations about industry trends and topics.

Comedians - 140 characters is the perfect length for a punch line.

Politicians - Left, right, middle. They’re all on here.

News media - The news media loves the access it gets to viewers and listeners. Effective users of Twitter will share updates to breaking stories and timely events.

Musicians - Follow your favorite band or musician and stay up to date on tour info and album releases. And you’ll be surprised how much these folks will share about their personal lives. Be careful of getting a false sense of friendship. Just because you know where Lady Gaga likes to go on a Saturday night does not mean you’ll be hanging out with her there.

Family - You thought Facebook was the only place to keep up with what your kinfolk are doing? Ha. Enter shorter, more rapid-fire updates. You do not have to follow your family, but the same “follow me, because I follow you” rules apply to Twitter as they do on Facebook. And you don’t want to make Thanksgiving dinner uncomfortable with Aunt Bessie.

A great place to see a power player list is the top 100 Most Followed People on Twitter as tracked by Twitter Counter.

Lifescoop just released a list of the Top Influential People to Follow on Twitter. It’s a good mix of the types of people listed above.

Twellow is a great resource to help you find specific users, not by name or popularity, but by subject. They have a great categorical listing by topic as defined in people’s Twitter bios. If someone says in their bio they are a web programmer, then they will show up in the Computer and Technology listing. You can also search for keywords that will be in someone’s Twitter bio - your city, industry or interests.

Buckle Up: It’s a Fast Ride

It’s true jumping in and out of the Twitter stream throughout the day can be a tough routine to make habit. But Twitter is taking steps to make it easier for you to catch up on what you missed throughout the day. This week the folks at Twitter started rolling out a weekly digest of hot tweets you may have missed. You can also activate mobile notifications to receive immediate updates when specific accounts post tweets. This will help insure you never miss important info from people or organizations you know you want to keep up with. Good examples for this are local and national news sources, entertainment outlets and business leaders.

Monitoring the Twitter stream is a great way to stay in the know. By strategically selecting who you follow you’ll be constantly presented with topics and information that are relevant to you and your business.

Listening is good, but participating in the Twitter stream is when this social media platform really takes flight (pun intended). After you are comfortable with the conversation and communications style of Twitter, get active. Start retweeting and commenting about tweets and post relevant news and topics to what your Twitter community is talking about. You’ll soon find that people are interested in following you.

Just over a week ago the Knoxville Convention Center was the hottest spot for social media discussion in the continental United States. Mark Schaefer and the Social Media Club Knoxville assembled an amazingly strong and deeply talented cast of social media experts to expound on their experiences, opinions and practices at Social Slam 2012.

Click here for a full run-down of the roster and links to their Twitter profiles. To see Twitter activity about #SoSlam, click here.

These speakers were awesome. Social Slam 2012 was inspiring on so many levels, from brand management to marketing strategies to good old-fashioned company storytelling. It would have been difficult to not come away refreshed and refocused.

The great stories and presentations have been washing over me for the past few days. The event coordinators say the videos of the full presentations will be available on the website at a later date. I highly recommend keeping an eye out for those to be posted. (Check out @TheSalesLion if you want a masters class on energetic presenting.)

Below are my five favorite takeaways from Social Slam 2012. I have indicated which presenter shared these ideas, and I recommend you pay attention to these folks. They are some of the best thought leaders in the industry.

1. Content is king. We’ve all known this for some time. And it hasn’t changed. You want followers and readers? You want inbound links? Write and post good content and people will read it and share it. (Marcus Sheridan, @TheSalesLion)
2. Social media scoring is on the rise. Mark Schaefer’s latest book, Return On Influence: The Revolutionary Power of Klout, Social Scoring, and Influence Marketing, is all about social scoring (check out Klout) and how it will influence social media interaction. Some folks online are decrying social scoring as evil, and will forever change the way our social media communities behave. Others are taking a more strategic approach to knowing someone’s Klout score (e.g., using someone’s score to determine how to leverage or react to a particular person’s online comments about your company’s widget). (Mark Schaefer, @markwschaefer)
3. The “three screens” (TVs, smart phones and computers) are quickly becoming one screen - tablets. With the rise of tablet sales and usage we must adjust our communication strategies to follow suit. Due to development of great apps, no longer do TV networks dictate when we watch our favorite programming. We don’t have to rely on monitoring websites for updates from our favorite companies; we get push notifications through their apps. Video chat apps like Skype and FaceTime are changing the way we talk to each other. Our communications strategies must be nimble enough to adapt to the ever-changing content digestion habits of our audiences. (Mitch Joel, @mitchjoel)
4. Do something with your analytic data. There are lots of great (and mostly free) tools to monitor the activity of our digital communities. You can easily see what your followers are doing and what they are saying. Act on it. You’re getting free business tips. Don’t squander the info. Make a plan and follow up with site visitors and blog commenters by offering them additional resources or blog posts you have written on similar topics. Engage with them. (Tom Webster, @webby2001)
5. You can measure anything. For quite a while social media measurement has been as elusive as documenting a UFO sighting. Completely viable, but no one can get a clear picture of the thing. One trick is to set a goal, something where you can place a checkmark in a box - we won the account, I sold a widget to that person, I got a meeting with that company’s CMO. Don’t pick non-convertible goals like number of Facebook fans or Twitter followers. Social media is not helping your bottom line if your followers are not coming in to your business to get the good stuff you’ve got. You may have to do a little bit of pencil and paper research to track your results. After you put yourself out there to a particular group (give a presentation, attend a networking event, give a webinar), watch your followers. Did they visit your website? Did they read your latest blog post? Did they start following you on Twitter or like your Facebook page? Great. Engage with them. Thank them for the follow or like. Send them follow-up info to what got them on the hook in the first place. Your goal is to put sunshine and water on that new business kernel and help it grow. (Gini Dietrich, @ginidietrich)

Another small takeaway I would like to add is the advice to not follow generic data. When you see a blog post or industry report that offers the best time to tweet or post to your blog, don’t fall in to that trap. Your business is unique to your company. Your customers may be operating on an entirely different timeline than the status quo. You’ll need to do your own legwork to determine the best times to interact with your customer base. Sprinkle some tweets and posts through the week and times of day. Determine which ones get the most traction through retweets or comments. And there you go. Now you know what activity timetable works specifically for you. (This was another gem from Tom Webster, @webby2001.)

Social Slam 2012 was, in a word, fantastic. I loved the energy and the sharing of ideas and it made me very excited to be in an industry where the trends and strategies are changing so quickly. I can’t wait for Social Slam 2013. But until then I have a lot of new ideas to implement and great industry leaders to listen to and follow.

And I would love to drop a word in Mark Schaefer’s ear: Social Slam FALL 2012.

Then Instagram announced it was being acquired by Facebook for $1 billion dollars - huge! So you’ve heard about Instagram, but maybe you are thinking, what is Instagram? Simply put, Instagram is a mobile photo sharing social network that allows users to share their lives via photos. Some people share photos of themselves, others only show photos of friends and some only share photos of where they are. It’s completely up to you as the user to determine how you want to make use of it.

Its key feature is that its apps allow you to easily modify the photo with different filters before posting, making it not just about sharing the photo but capturing something emotional and interesting. There are 17 filter options on the Android app that allow you tweak the shot until the photo you get it as you want. My favorite part is that with the right filter, a relatively mundane photo can turn into quite the artistic photo.

Instagram allows you to capture an event or activity in a manner that words sometimes just can’t describe. I tend to capture photos of places that I find interesting. For a few examples, I was walking downtown this week and shot this photo of an interesting window, and a few weeks ago I took this photo of a bulldog while visiting my family.

Gavin Baker - Instagram - "Downtown"

Gavin Baker - Instagram - "Bulldog on a bench"

Here are a few examples from our own Charley Sexton, and WBIR’s Erin Donovan.

Instagram - Charley Sexton - "Untitled"

Instagram - Charley Sexton - "Stripes"

Instagram - Erin Donovan - "Special Olympics medals"

If you regularly use your phone to take photos, then I’d suggest you download Instagram to your phone and get started. If you’re like me, you’ll start to look for things to share!

Facebook Timeline rolled out last week, and as suggested you’ve added a cover photo. But now what? The Facebook page update had so much more to it than just the photo. Facebook also included a number of new features for page content including:

• starred content
• pinned content
• milestones
  

Starred content

Instead of just having posts, we now have the ability to add other levels to the content we post to Facebook. We’ve got our “normal” updates that don’t receive any special treatment. But every week, I’m sure there are posts that are important to your organization, photos from an event, a special announcement or just an important update. You can star those, and the posts receive more emphasis and space on Facebook, taking up both columns of Timeline.

Pinned content

Occasionally, you’ll have an update that you want to stay at the top of your Facebook page for a while, such as news release or the announcement of a special sale. This is the type of content that you will pin and it stays on the top of your page for five days.

Milestones

Every organization has a history of notable events — new locations, 1,000th customer, or times you won awards. These milestones for your organization should be added to your page to help tell your organization’s story. I’d add just a few milestones at the beginning and then continue to add new ones on a rolling basis.

As you plan out your conversation calendar, add next to the updates whether the content should be pinned, starred, or if a new milestone or cover photo should be added. These new content features bring depth to Facebook pages that we can make the most of!

I’ve read no less then five headlines recently, touting ways to leverage Pinterest on behalf of your brand with titles such as:

“5 Best Practices to Get Your Brand on Pinterest”
“How to Master Pinterest for B2B Marketing Success”
“Pinterest Marketing Tips for SEO and Affiliate Sales”
“101 Ways to Market Your Business on Pinterest”

Here is the problem with every article and headline I read: they don’t mention why people actually use Pinterest. They mention 101 ways to leverage Pinterest for your content or list the technical ways to increase the likelihood of getting your pins the most benefit. But sadly, a lot of those recommendations to pimp your brand will probably work in the short term. Therein lies the problem, if Pinterest gets polluted with junk content, it will lose its mojo. Pinterest is very visual and part of its allure is that it is visually easy to use. “Pinners” find and share (via pinning) photos of subjects that appeal to them. These photos are pinned on a customized pin board and arranged by category. Mix in poorly shot, categorized (and produced) photos with all the current great photography and it is a very different place and not as enjoyable to spend time on.

Pinterest is a site people (especially women) love because it helps them find cool, interesting and helpful things and organize them in a visual way. It is enjoyable to browse to learn new things and check out the latest trends in fashion, design, decor and food. Pinterest is addictive, because it is both simple to use and useful at the same time. If you want to use Pinterest to have an impact, start by capturing that desire users have to find something cool and save it. It will take more work, but it will bring you greater, long-term success.

Do I believe brands should be on Pinterest? Absolutely. You should build strategies based on helping people find cool things. It can be vintage advertising, great products or innovative methods to create something. HGTV posts design and home-related ideas and photos, TIME posts magazine covers, and Whole Foods posts recipes and gardening tips. Pinterest won’t work just to post your content and hope that it will be repinned. You need to think about what your customers would find interesting and would want to save and share. You can inspire, but you mainly need to be relevant and interesting.

Because the game ended in such a fashion, the Superbowl broke the record of Tweets Per Second (TPS) at a sporting event with an average of 10,000 tweets per second in the last three minutes. This is double last year’s TPS high, at 4,064 during the Superbowl. That’s a lot of Tweets!

The fact that there were over double the amount of tweets from last year indicates a growth in the adoption of Twitter users in the USA. This is good for you, because it means that there are more users that you and your brand can connect with online. This growth in active Twitter users will show up as positive for you, as users engage around topics they are passionate about and you can connect with them around your shared passion points.

This also matters because people need to realize ways that Twitter is valuable to them. Personally, I use Twitter because of the people it has allowed me to connect with and meet. However, not everyone uses Twitter the way I do. Some use it just to browse and read information, others may only use it to chat with a few friends, and many brands use it as a customer service channel. There are multiple types of users on Twitter, and for sports fans, collaborative consumption may be the driving force of why they will join the network and engage with each other.

Overall, this growth in TPS is a leading indicator that Twitter matters. So if you’re on Twitter, this is great news and expect increased engagement from your followers. If you’re not on Twitter yet, it might be time to get signed-up - whether you’re a football fan or not.

Three things for you to know.

#1 - You can’t avoid it
Timeline is the new format for your profile on Facebook. You don’t get a choice on if you use it or not. You’ll receive an email telling you that it’s been activated on your profile, and you have seven days to spruce up or clean up any information that you don’t want spotlighted.

#2 - It’s about you
Timeline is about your life. You can add events to your timeline. There is a new category called “Life Event,” and it essentially allows you to add things that have happened in your life to the timeline on Facebook. They have pre-categorized menus, so I just added “Bought a house” to my timeline for January 2011. Facebook allowed me to pick a photo (or upload one) of the house and provide additional details if I wanted.

#3 - You’ve got your own billboard
With the new profile, you can add a cover image to the top of your profile. It’s a very dominant image, and feel free to upload almost anything you want. Here are some great examples of how others have used the space.

Timeline does create a very interesting way to review what you’ve posted to Facebook. For example, I joined Facebook while in college, so there are photos, comments and events that I haven’t thought about since then - but I can view them and travel back to 2005.

More importantly, it’s essentially creating a scrapbook of your life moment by moment that is added to Facebook. My suggestion is to embrace it. Add some of your life events, both from the past and as they happen. In few years, you’ll appreciate your Facebook memory.