Peter Lang - Social Media Strategies - California

How to Use Hashtags: A Simple Guide

Peter Lang — Mon, 14 May 2012 22:11:12 +0000

Hashtags are showing up on all your favorite online communities and play a valuable roll in the user experience. During our workshops, quite a few attendees get confused about what to do with the hashtag we provide. What is it? What does it do? How do you create one? So I’d like share with you a Simple Guide to Hashtags.

What is a hashtag?

A hashtag is simply a keyword phrase, spelled out without spaces, with a pound sign (#) in front of it. For example, #iphoneography and #nature are both hashtags.

What does a hashtag do?

A hashtag enables conversations of different users to be aggregated into one feed, which you can find by searching the hastag in the Search system of that application or website. Here are some examples:

Twitter

Instagram

As you can see from the Pinterest image above you can search the term and get similar outputs. A hashtag (#) is used just like searching a keyword except that it narrows the target output to be more specific to the searcher.

We’re able to connect topics being discussed about the same topic using a specific hashtag, therefore the content (tweets, photos, or pins) will appear in the same stream. In that way, hashtags are an invaluable solution to the problem of tracking a conversation among a vast sea of user generated content.

Hashtags play an important role in organizing the conversations around live, in-person events or conferences, and webinars.

Although hashtags relatively simple, you should be aware of some of the threats that can come from using them as well. Some of the negatives and best practices to keep in mind while using Hashtags:

Best Practices for Using Hashtags

1) Check the Relevance

Once you’ve decided on a keyword or a phrase, search for it. Use the search tools in the applications, like Twitter.com/search, and enter your hashtag in the search field. Is someone else already using that hashtag for their event or campaign? Do you want to associate your hastag with the current feed using it?

If you want to use the hashtag for your item specifically and there is a lot of conversation around it already, you might want to choose another hashtag that isn’t as frequently used. In that way, you will reduce the chances of people who are not a part of your target audience entering/diluting the conversation you want to take place.

If you want your to participate in the conversation proceed with using the hashtag you’ve selected.

2) Industry or Brand Keywords

Using Hashtags strategically can open more opportunities. For example, it can communicate a message to those not actively searching for them. If the hashtag reflects an industry or branded keyword that is interesting to a viewer, they might, be interested in checking out the rest of the conversation happening around that hashtag.

3) Caution: Sentiment can be Dangerous

We hear more and more about politicians and big brands have a failed experienced on Twitter by choosing hashtags that include the word “love” in them. When sentiment is being shared you should make sure you’re not putting it in the mouth of your followers unless they really love you. Otherwise, they might turn against you and cause a major PR controversy. For instance, the Mitt Romney Twitter campaign that sought to wish him a happy birthday also attracted quite a lot of critical comments. If you are just starting out, pick something neutral that simply reflects your topic or campaign.

Also, beware of hashtag campaigns that have the potential of getting abused by users. McDonald’s launched a hashtag campaign #McDStories, with the hopes that users would share fun stories about their experience at McDonald’s. But what McDonald’s didn’t anticipate was the negative use of this hashtag. During this campaign if you searched for “McDStories” you weren’t seeing postivie stories but more like the one below, which described horrible experiences users had with McDonald’s.

I’d pet a million stray pit bulls before I’d eat a single pink-slimy McBite. #McDStories

It’s important to consider the other ways people could possibly interpret your hashtag. If you have naysayers willing to speak out against your brand than they might use hashtags against you.

4) Promote the Hashtag

A hashtag is only useful if people know about it. To get the word out start incorporating it into other marketing channels. For instance, when you we have an event approaching, add the event hashtag to your email reminder or follow-up touch point, and the presenter reminds attendees of the hashtag at the beginning of the event as well.

5) Hijacking Hashtags for Sensitive Situations Not Smart Business

Hijacking hashtags designed for serious and sensitive issues can lead to some pretty bad consequences. Designer Kenneth Cole, for example, tried to insert his brand into conversations about the Egypt uproar by tweeting the following:

Through this tweet, Kenneth Cole tried to hijack the #Cairo hashtag in attempt to promote the spring collection. This campaign wan’t received well as it was met with strong public disapproval and media criticism.

Twitter’s official stance when it comes to hashtag abuse:

“The following behaviors and others like them could cause your account to be filtered from search, or even suspended:

Adding one or more topic/hashtag to an unrelated tweet in an attempt to gain attention in search.

Repeatedly tweeting the same topic/hashtag without adding value to the conversation in an attempt to get the topic trending/trending higher.

Tweeting about each trending topic in turn in order to drive traffic to your profile, especially when mixed with advertising.

Listing the trending topics in combination with a request to be followed.

Tweeting about a trending topic and posting a misleading link to something unrelated.”

As you can see, they take it seriously…

6) Keep it Short

A Hashtag should be short and easy to remember. For Twitter you’re limited to 140 characters per tweet, with or without a hashtag. By keeping the hashtag brief, you’ll save your audience some room to include more commentary about your content.

What are some of the advantages you’ve learned from using hashtags? Share them in the comments!

Facebook just bought Instagram for 1 billion dollars

Peter Lang — Mon, 09 Apr 2012 22:57:11 +0000

A very interesting announcement – Facebook just purchased Instagram for 1 billion dollars. Not long after Instagram released its android version to a frenzy of 30 million users did Facebook aggressively acquire the company for $1,000,000,000.00.

Instagram isn’t just for hipsters anymore. The photo-sharing app takes an image, makes that image square, puts a retro filter on the image, and then posts the image to a blog feed in the application with options for social distribution.

You can follow me on instagram: http://followgram.me/peterlang

To all of the Instagram users out there; are you excited or terrified about this merger?

It’s probably a good idea to download your photos or export them to another social network. To do this, use: http://instaport.me/

Mark Zuckerburg writes on his wall:

“I’m excited to share the news that we’ve agreed to acquire Instagram and that their talented team will be joining Facebook.
For years, we’ve focused on building the best experience for sharing photos with your friends and family. Now, we’ll be able to work even more closely with the Instagram team to also offer the best experiences for sharing beautiful mobile photos with people based on your interests.

We believe these are different experiences that complement each other. But in order to do this well, we need to be mindful about keeping and building on Instagram’s strengths and features rather than just trying to integrate everything into Facebook.

That’s why we’re committed to building and growing Instagram independently. Millions of people around the world love the Instagram app and the brand associated with it, and our goal is to help spread this app and brand to even more people.

We think the fact that Instagram is connected to other services beyond Facebook is an important part of the experience. We plan on keeping features like the ability to post to other social networks, the ability to not share your Instagrams on Facebook if you want, and the ability to have followers and follow people separately from your friends on Facebook.

These and many other features are important parts of the Instagram experience and we understand that. We will try to learn from Instagram’s experience to build similar features into our other products. At the same time, we will try to help Instagram continue to grow by using Facebook’s strong engineering team and infrastructure.

This is an important milestone for Facebook because it’s the first time we’ve ever acquired a product and company with so many users. We don’t plan on doing many more of these, if any at all. But providing the best photo sharing experience is one reason why so many people love Facebook and we knew it would be worth bringing these two companies together.

We’re looking forward to working with the Instagram team and to all of the great new experiences we’re going to be able to build together.”

The Headshot Intensive with Peter Hurley – A Great Experience!

Peter Lang — Mon, 26 Mar 2012 21:54:35 +0000

I’ve personally worked hard to branch out into other skills sets like photography. This expansion isn’t solely for enjoyment, it’s because I feel great photography can help all businesses and bring joy to your life. Our company believes strongly that the visuals are as important as the product’s quality. Our company’s graphic designer and creative officer has helped me fall in love with all things creative, including photography. In a previous article I mentioned the importance of professional photography as a strong foundation in your online world and thus have strived to gain knowledge in the field of photography. A major step in doing so was attending “The Headshot Intensive” with world renowned headshot photographer Peter Hurley.

In this post I’d like to share with you that experience, some tricks learned, headshots I took, and some behind the scenes photos and videos.

Who is Peter Hurley?

Peter Hurley, a leading headshot artist for actors, celebrities and executives, is all about expressions. He will often comment on photographs with two extremes. Either the person looks “cool”, or looks “out to lunch.” An example of cool can be found by Googling Brad Pitt. But to explain “out to lunch” you’ll need to picture an individual who is uncomfortable, lacking of expression, and not much different to a “deer in the headlights.” He’s said that “people look like badly embalmed cadavers because they try to pose, but lack the skill to look natural doing it.” This is what he teaches and hopefully what I have learned: to help the people look real.

As you’ll see in my photos below the subjects look comfortable even though I’ve directed them into an unnatural posture. An example of this unnatural posture is when we direct the subject to bring their forehead forward toward the camera. From the side these turtle like poses are ridiculous but from the camera, amazing. For shots from the side he taught us to direct the subject to bring their ear toward the camera.

Here are some of my raw shots from the weekend as well as behind the scenes photos, video and 360 virtual tour of me getting my head shot taken by Peter Hurley.

Inside A Peter Hurley Headshot

360 virtual tour – click on the image below, hold and slowly drag your cursor.

Full Screen

Behind the Scenes Videos

The making of – The Elevator Incident

Raw Headshots

Behind the Scenes Photos

Here is a glimpse from behind the scenes; the headshot workshop, all of us getting trapped in an elevator, meals and experiences captured via my iPhone.

Conclusion

Taking the time to develop and learn a new skill can always bring new opportunities.

To sum up the workshop: The Peter Hurley Headshot Intensive was just that, intense.

What do you think about my recap of the weekend?

Guest posting – Awesome Blogging Tips

Peter Lang — Wed, 14 Mar 2012 06:54:46 +0000

Guest blogging is a strong tactic when building your network and exposure. Geo targeted blog outreach will change your online path for the better.

Before you get started guest posting it’s important to include a few simple things in your guest post requests.

Guest Blogging Requests

Items to include:

Make sure to have a few examples of posts you’ve written. The best practice is to have sample writing in the topic you’re interested in pitching. If you don’t have any writing specific to that niche you can send the potential blog any writing as long as it positively shows your ability.
Suggest a few titles or topics for your guest post.
You should include an author box below your post so visitors to your blog can see your social networks and promotion of your blog so they can potentially see how you promote your own blog so they can see the potential benefit to them of allowing you to guest post.
Your Twitter username will play a valuable role in making connections with other bloggers. Always link the social network you use most.

Guest Blogging Tips:

If you want to increase your chances of being approved for a guest post you should do the above list as well as:

Make sure you read the guest posting guidelines for the site you want to contribute to.
No one likes copy pasts emails or pitches. That being said, make sure you are familiar with the blog’s content. At the very least you should skim the recent posts or categories. The real secret is in the comments. After reading the post check out the comments and make sure to leave them some engaging comments. This will help the blogger get to know you before you pitch your guest post ideas.
YES! Guest posts are accepted on my site. Contact me to discuss.

Guest Posting Submissions

You will discover as you submit posts to bloggers that there are many varieties of sites and guidelines you should be aware of:

As a contributor you will have limited access but you will be able to enter the post yourself. CAUTION: in many cases once you submit the post you CANNOT make changes or corrections so it’s very important that you proof your writing BEFORE you submit.
Author access will give you more control as you can create your post, control formatting, add images (on some, others not), and links with mouse-over text (if allowed) and a very important element, edit your post yourself. This is my preferred method.
You may come into a situation where you’re writing your post into a proprietary system. Proprietary systems are less likely to get guest posts from me as they are often challenging to work with.
Emailing your post. It’s important that the blog is specific in describing the format they want the blog post. You need to know: how to handle links and images, type, etc… Some blogs may have you send the images as attachments while others want to complete avoid attachments as dealing with image rights can become problematic. If a guest poster doesn’t know WordPress, which is my preferred blogging CMS (for now), I ask them to send posts in .html version and also in .txt and/or .doc (Word) because the fact is pasting external type into WordPress will often create formatting issues that requires additional time to resolve.

I hope these guest blogging tips will help you reach out and be published!

Facebook confirms Timeline for Pages

Peter Lang — Sun, 19 Feb 2012 00:24:17 +0000

Facebook’s change to the Timeline profile has created much speculation that Pages will be next. On February 15th, Facebook executives confirmed there are changes ahead that will affect everyone. They plan to add Timeline for Pages this month. No one can predict the subsequent changes this will have for brands and third-party platforms.

In the midst of Facebook’s IPO and a business reliant on 3rd party applications it makes sense that the people in charge are looking for ways create deeper engagement with Facebook applications.

Facebook, developers and businesses

Facebook chose to create an open platform that created opportunities for third-party developers to add their creations to the Facebook platform. Obviously they care about their relationships with developers and businesses as they could have built a closed, static platform and lock every Page to the same features. They’re pushing the industry forward and leading the charge for innovation and progression of the digital world. Applications that increase a brand’s presence, provide content, contests and promotions have empowered businesses and developers to gather user data, generate sales, leads, customer support and much more.

Businesses have put their Facebook Pages at the forefront of other media promotions and Facebook ads, which shows the priority and the money they’re invested in their Facebook channels. According to February 2012 data from Kenshoo, Facebook ad budgets grew 109% month-over-month in the fourth quarter of 2011. A very strong argument is that Facebook’s traffic is contributed to third-party services and Facebook has expressed value and profit those services bring to the Facebook platform.

Even Facebook has recognized this truth in it’s recent S-1 filing.

We generate a substantial majority of our revenue from advertising. The loss of advertisers, or reduction in spending by advertisers with Facebook, could seriously harm our business.

This change will certainly not be the last significant change in Facebook’s future but the good news is that the move to Timeline will give businesses and brands more than just an “Info tab.” Facebook’s actions to-date lead us to believe that they respect a brand’s presence on Facebook and would want to keep opportunities for further methods of engagement.

How to prepare for Timeline changes on Pages

No one outside of Facebook knows exactly what Facebook is going to do next until they make official announcements. Many will probably be made Feb. 29 at the first-ever fMC event.
However, it’s important to remember that Facebook won’t make a change without notifying the public. They have a 90-day notification policy which is designed to give third-party platforms time to learn the changes and figure out how to adjust their services.

Businesses need to keep in mind that the keys to Facebook are engagement and consistency. No matter the structure or design these two core elements will remain. Yes, there will be much press and a lot of hype about this change but you’d do best to ignore the rumors though it will be hard.

Facebook must evolve and it’s in their best interest to expand upon current user experience. Much like Apple, Facebook must lead the market and guide us users down a path that will enhance our lives.

The Hacker Way a 21st-century manifesto

Peter Lang — Fri, 03 Feb 2012 22:47:48 +0000

I’m enjoying Facebook’s road to IPO but I have to take a moment to acknowledge something from Facebook’s S-1 filing. Over the last few days, colossal amounts of attention were paid and will continue to be paid to Facebook’s amazing business results: the 800+ million active users, the $3.7 billion (!) in revenue, and their growth rates, too. These are grand but I hope many of you don’t forget to pay attention to the culture and process that made those achievements possible. In that respect, I want to share with you a n excerpt from Mark Zuckerberg’s letter to shareholders. He labeled their internal approach and continuous strive for improvements and iteration, The Hacker Way. It’s surely a 21st-century manifesto for a new way of doing business. Here’s the excerpt:

Simply put: we don’t build services to make money; we make money to build better services.

And we think this is a good way to build something. These days I think more and more people want to use services from companies that believe in something beyond simply maximizing profits.

By focusing on our mission and building great services, we believe we will create the most value for our shareholders and partners over the long term — and this in turn will enable us to keep attracting the best people and building more great services. We don’t wake up in the morning with the primary goal of making money, but we understand that the best way to achieve our mission is to build a strong and valuable company.

This is how we think about our IPO as well. We’re going public for our employees and our investors. We made a commitment to them when we gave them equity that we’d work hard to make it worth a lot and make it liquid, and this IPO is fulfilling our commitment. As we become a public company, we’re making a similar commitment to our new investors and we will work just as hard to fulfill it.

The Hacker Way

As part of building a strong company, we work hard at making Facebook the best place for great people to have a big impact on the world and learn from other great people. We have cultivated a unique culture and management approach that we call the Hacker Way.

The word “hacker” has an unfairly negative connotation from being portrayed in the media as people who break into computers. In reality, hacking just means building something quickly or testing the boundaries of what can be done. Like most things, it can be used for good or bad, but the vast majority of hackers I’ve met tend to be idealistic people who want to have a positive impact on the world.

The Hacker Way is an approach to building that involves continuous improvement and iteration. Hackers believe that something can always be better, and that nothing is ever complete. They just have to go fix it — often in the face of people who say it’s impossible or are content with the status quo.

Hackers try to build the best services over the long term by quickly releasing and learning from smaller iterations rather than trying to get everything right all at once. To support this, we have built a testing framework that at any given time can try out thousands of versions of Facebook. We have the words “Done is better than perfect” painted on our walls to remind ourselves to always keep shipping.

Hacking is also an inherently hands-on and active discipline. Instead of debating for days whether a new idea is possible or what the best way to build something is, hackers would rather just prototype something and see what works. There’s a hacker mantra that you’ll hear a lot around Facebook offices: “Code wins arguments.”

Hacker culture is also extremely open and meritocratic. Hackers believe that the best idea and implementation should always win — not the person who is best at lobbying for an idea or the person who manages the most people.

To encourage this approach, every few months we have a hackathon, where everyone builds prototypes for new ideas they have. At the end, the whole team gets together and looks at everything that has been built. Many of our most successful products came out of hackathons, including Timeline, chat, video, our mobile development framework and some of our most important infrastructure like the HipHop compiler.

To make sure all our engineers share this approach, we require all new engineers — even managers whose primary job will not be to write code — to go through a program called Bootcamp where they learn our codebase, our tools and our approach. There are a lot of folks in the industry who manage engineers and don’t want to code themselves, but the type of hands-on people we’re looking for are willing and able to go through Bootcamp.

The examples above all relate to engineering, but we have distilled these principles into five core values for how we run Facebook:

Focus on Impact

If we want to have the biggest impact, the best way to do this is to make sure we always focus on solving the most important problems. It sounds simple, but we think most companies do this poorly and waste a lot of time. We expect everyone at Facebook to be good at finding the biggest problems to work on.

Move Fast

Moving fast enables us to build more things and learn faster. However, as most companies grow, they slow down too much because they’re more afraid of making mistakes than they are of losing opportunities by moving too slowly. We have a saying: “Move fast and break things.” The idea is that if you never break anything, you’re probably not moving fast enough.

Be Bold

Building great things means taking risks. This can be scary and prevents most companies from doing the bold things they should. However, in a world that’s changing so quickly, you’re guaranteed to fail if you don’t take any risks. We have another saying: “The riskiest thing is to take no risks.” We encourage everyone to make bold decisions, even if that means being wrong some of the time.

Be Open

We believe that a more open world is a better world because people with more information can make better decisions and have a greater impact. That goes for running our company as well. We work hard to make sure everyone at Facebook has access to as much information as possible about every part of the company so they can make the best decisions and have the greatest impact.

Build Social Value

Once again, Facebook exists to make the world more open and connected, and not just to build a company. We expect everyone at Facebook to focus every day on how to build real value for the world in everything they do.

Thanks for taking the time to read this letter. We believe that we have an opportunity to have an important impact on the world and build a lasting company in the process. I look forward to building something great together.

In order to truly understand whether a corporation’s character and mission statement reflects true commitment you need to to think about the companies entire life. This is Facebook’s eight-year anniversary, and I think it’s appropriate to take a look at what Facebook looked like at the beginning. Here’s a brief quote from Zuck’s very first press interview, when Facebook was but ant compared to today:

After about a week of coding, Zuckerberg launched thefacebook.com last Wednesday afternoon. The website combines elements of a standard House face book with extensive profile features that allow students to search for others in their courses, social organizations and Houses.

“Everyone’s been talking a lot about a universal face book within Harvard,” Zuckerberg said. “I think it’s kind of silly that it would take the University a couple of years to get around to it. I can do it better than they can, and I can do it in a week.”

As of yesterday afternoon, Zuckerberg said over 650 students had registered use thefacebook.com. He said that he anticipated that 900 students would have joined the site by this morning.

“I’m pretty happy with the amount of people that have been to it so far,” he said. “The nature of the site is that each user’s experience improves if they can get their friends to join it.”

I admire this young Zuck, the college student who had the courage to launch an easy, simple app in a week. Throughout the life of this useful app, from when he only had 900 customers to today 800+ million, he has insisted on iterating, executing, and building for the long-term. Thumbs up to all the Facebook Team, I Like it!

Do you blog or podcast?

Peter Lang — Mon, 16 Jan 2012 23:28:56 +0000

Do you blog, or run a podcast?

I ask because every so often, I get an email that reads something like this:

“Hi Peter, I’ve been working up the courage to ask you this for a long time, and I finally decided to go for it. My blog/podcast doesn’t have a huge number of subscribers, but I’d really like to do an interview with you – would you have time to do that?”

My answer is always YES – I’m happy to do it! For few reasons:

1. I appreciate any opportunity to spread the word about my work.

2. When I was starting out, people with much bigger names than mine took a chance on me, and I’m happy to do the same for others.

3. Helping others empowers the web.

I’m writing this post because I know that for every person who works up the courage to ask about that interview, there are five others who never do.

So I’m being pro-active, and offering it to you: do you want to do an interview with me for your blog or podcast?

No pressure or anything, but if you do, I’m happy to help. :)

Advanced Web Ranking 8.6 – What’s Not To Love?

Peter Lang — Tue, 27 Dec 2011 23:11:26 +0000

Avid readers already know my fondness for Advanced Web Ranking from my earlier post. In this post, I won’t cover the general working of Advanced Web Ranking but will instead focus on the upgrade from 8 to 8.5. There are so many cool additions in the version I’m testing (8.6) that I will focus on the changes and improvements made to this seo software.

First off, lets start with the integration of Google Analytics. Google Analytics is a staple for many web owners and the fact that AWR went and incorporated it into their latest version is simply awesome. You can view much of your regular analytics data but you can also utilize the information those analytics provide into very useful charts or take the data and use it elsewhere in AWR. Take keywords for example. If you want to add keywords to any of your projects, it’s as simple as going to “add keywords” -> “analytics keywords”. And just like that, you can import keywords from your website into search engines to see where you rank for each keyword! Personally, I think this was a fantastic addition have used this feature for every site I manage.

The next new feature that was a smart addition is the link profile with data from SEOmoz. It generates a list of all inbound links to give you a complete profile. Not only does it do this for your site, but also does this for all competitors’ sites as well! Tracking the link profile used to be a bit of a hassle as you had to maintain these records on your own and updating was very inconvenient. Now with the link profile on the new version of AWR, you can have a complete link profile for you and all your competitors that updates when you want it and tracks the link profile over time.

I always thought Advanced Web Ranking created very sharp and useful reports but they definitely stepped it up in the latest version. The fact that it incorporates all the information from the previous version of AWR but it also includes customizable reports that include Google Analytics data and link profile information. This is definitely a time saver and has proven very useful in the short time I’ve had the new software.

Overall, I am incredibly pleased with the updates in the latest release of Advanced Web Ranking. The addition of Google Analytics and SEOmoz have vastly increased the overall performance of AWR. Combine that with the reports and it is definitely one of the top tools for those looking to maximize their SEO.

Top Tips for Staying Secure on Facebook

Peter Lang — Wed, 14 Dec 2011 03:22:14 +0000

Some of you have little interest in using your brand for personal development. Some of you are happy using social networking to interact with a small group of family and friends. So these steps are great for you.

Here are some steps to stay safe while on Facebook.

Only friend people you know.
Make passwords account specific. Use a separate password for each account you may have. (i.e. Facebook, Twitter, etc..)
Don’t share your password. If you need help and that requires giving them access make an alternative password and change it once the help is finished.
Alternate your password on a regular basis. Change it at least once a month.
Limit the amount of personal information you share with people and companies.
Log into Facebook only ONCE each session. If Facebook is asking you to log in again, close the window and go directly to facebook.com in your browser. If you’re being asked again you may be getting hacked!
Use a one-time password when using someone else’s computer.
Log out of Facebook after using someone else’s computer.
Use secure browsing whenever possible.
Only download applications from trusted sites.
Keep your anti-virus software updated.
Keep your browser and other applications up to date.
Don’t paste script (code) in your browser address bar.
Use browser add-ons like Web of Trust and Firefox’s NoScript to keep your account from being hijacked.
Beware of “awkward” posts from anyone, especially even Friends. If the post looks out of place your better off not interacting with it directly. But if this happens to you send the person a private message to verify the message.
Your friend’s account may be compromised as some scammers hack your Friends’ accounts and send out links to all their friends. Have caution when you see enticing links coming from your Friends.

Remember, everything online is public!

For more Tips on Facebook visit Tricksfacebook.com

Why are you using Social Networks for Blogging?

Peter Lang — Mon, 05 Dec 2011 14:08:50 +0000

If you love to write, and do so on a regular basis, it seems peculiar that you would eschew hosting your own content in favor of dumping all of your stuff into social networks. Social networking sites do give you the ability to share ideas, activities, events, and interests within your personal networks.

I use social networks, more than most, and I have seen an increasing trend of people using it as a blogging platform. So, is that a good or bad thing? Keep reading.

I admit to not being a huge Google+ user but the time I have spent there has revealed the same issues found on Facebook: blogging via social networks.

I see the appeal in it, you get real-time commenting and a high level of engagement. That being said, there’s no reason why you can’t make changes to your own blog with Disqus commenting to get the same kind of features and results. There is almost always an alternative.

The money argument.

Hosting your own content can cost you money, but when you look at the benefits you should consider it over all others. First – owning your own content. With social networking platforms you’re giving away your valuable content to a service that will analyze your data to create targeted ads. Now there have been many advances to user privacy but why even bother in the first place?

If you can’t afford even basic hosting for say Squarespace or WordPress, you can run your own statically generated site using something like Jekyll, and host it on Amazon S3 for pennies.

Of course Facebook is a vital part of my online life, but the only place where I’ll even think of sharing my lengthy thoughts are on my own site — which I manage, control and curate.

I’m sure many of you reading my site are probably running your own sites, but if you are thinking of starting your own blog, please host your own content. Keep the pithy comments and sharing of your sites posts for disposable social networking sites.