The New Facebook Timeline: Q&A

Dec 222011

Interrupting the Twitter 101 series to highlight the changes to your Facebook profile..aka, the new Timeline!

What is Timeline?

It’s the new version of your Facebook profile. It features a large “cover” image across the top of the page, and then an all-new layout featuring your statuses, photos, and more.

Instead of constantly clicking “older posts” like you used to, you can quickly choose a year and month from which to view statuses/photos/etc. It’s a scrapbooker’s dream online profile!

It’s definitely different than the old, straightforward profile. But as one friend put it, “I’m rather fascinated with the Facebook Timeline. One thing I disliked about Facebook is the passing, short-lived nature of the content. I have felt it was a poor use of my time to invest in a place where everything became outdated so fast and was not accessible (except for scrolling down, down, down, down to older posts). I can’t believe there is now something I actually like about Facebook. I think the Timeline is the most aesthetically pleasing thing I’ve seen Facebook create. I want it! I want it!!!”

How do I get it?

Twitter 101: Tweets, @’s, RT’s, #FF, and more

Dec 132011

Tweets are composed of 140 characters. Counting the spaces. It makes for fairly limited communication. Thus, Twitter shorthand is used frequently. As are a lot of other abbreviations—some standard, some created on the spot! And punctuation might not always be very proper. (I have an idea my writing professor would go into shock if he saw a Twitter stream.)

If you write a simple Tweet like, “Hi, I’m new to Twitter. Thanks for following me! Any tips to share for a Twitter newbie?” it will show to everyone who follows you or visits your Twitter profile.

@Mention

Or, you could “mention” your best friend by putting @ in front of her Twitter username: “Hey @bestfriend, I finally joined Twitter—aren’t you proud of me?” This is a mention, and again, it shows to everyone.

Twitter 101: Who To Follow

Dec 082011

The first thing to do after you’ve set up your Twitter account is to find some friends to follow. Twitter makes it easy for you, including the friend-finding in the sign-up process.

They suggest you start out by adding at least fifteen people—five people you know, five people who Tweet about topics you’re interested in, and five more people who are in your email or other social media contacts.

You can use their prompts or skip those steps and find people to follow later. But the important thing is that you do follow people, because that’s what Twitter is all about!

Does your best friend tweet? She’ll be glad to be your first follow! (Yes, you can tell the order in which you’ve followed people.) Family on Twitter? Follow them if you want to. (Random fact: I think five of my family members have Twitter now. And half of them don’t Tweet. So family makes up a very small portion of my followers!)

Think of the blogs you read; type in the blog name to find their authors on Twitter. (If you can’t find them readily, you can always go to the blog and look for the Twitter icon in their social icon area, if they have one). Think of the celebrities and best-selling authors you look up to and want to keep up with; search for and follow them, too.

How to Set Up Your Twitter Account and Profile

Dec 082011

Whether you just signed up for Twitter or you’ve been Tweeting for years, it never hurts to give your account settings a review once in a while. Here’s a run-down on a variety of the settings, for those of you who are just getting your feet wet in Twitter…

Account

Choose your username carefully. You can change it, but your friends will come to know you by it, so don’t make them have to learn something new unless you really need to switch. Use your blog domain name/address or your first name. Add your last name or an initial if you like, but keep in mind that you want people to be able to remember it easily. (My username is @merrittsgret, but of course, people often misspell my husband’s name and I miss the fact that they @ mentioned me.)

If I were you I wouldn’t display the location on my Tweets, but that’s a privacy preference.

Of course, you can actually protect the content of your Tweets and make people ask for approval before they can follow you. I understand that many people have reason to do this. But if you choose that option, keep in mind that it may be giving you a false sense of privacy. It’s easy to re-tweet a Tweet forgetting it was a protected Tweet. And even though your Tweets are protected, replies to them aren’t—meaning the replies can often give away the contents of even protected Tweets. Continue reading »

Twitter 101: Why Twitter is Confusing

Dec 072011

“Twitter is so confusing!”

It’s the top complaint I hear from non-Tweeters about Twitter. (A close second would be jokes about twits and tweets. Ahem.)

But it’s true—Twitter can be confusing. Especially to someone without a Twitter account. A page full of @’s and #’s looks a lot more like bleeped-out swear words than something that makes any sense. They’re just seeing fragments of conversations, with acronyms and symbols that mean nothing to them.

And if they actually try to follow someone’s Twitter stream via an RSS feed reader, it only adds to the confusion, making it harder to figure out what they’re talking about.

That’s why some of my friends have finally signed up for Twitter: just to more easily follow their own friends who Tweet. And it does make it easier. Because then, instead of just seeing one-sided conversations, your Twitter feed shows only the discussions between those you are friends with. You won’t see replies to people you don’t know. It will all make a little more sense—if you actually have time to follow it.

The truth is, that Twitter is more than just confusing—it can be time-consuming. So don’t delve into it unless you really want to invest some time into figuring it all out. It won’t be easily understood unless you do.

But if you want to figure it all out? I’m here to help!

do you have Facebook messages that you’ve never read?

Nov 152011

It’s a good thing Facebook wasn’t hiding some private messages back when my friend Abigail got her first message from a guy named Joe. He wasn’t her friend on Facebook, so the message would likely have been hidden under “Other”. And it wouldn’t have been until she saw a link today that she’d have discovered all the messages hidden under “Other”, including Joe’s saying he was interested in meeting her.

Thankfully, their story has a happier ending. Facebook wasn’t hiding messages back then. And Joe and Abi are happily married today.

But just in case your story may someday run along the same happy course as Joe and Abi’s, you might want to go to https://www.facebook.com/messages/other/ and find out how many unread messages you have hiding there. It appears that Facebook puts anything it thinks might be spam, including messages from groups/pages you’re a member/fan of, as well as messages from people who aren’t your Facebook friends.

There’s no bulk edit feature (yet), but while reading the message, you can choose “Move to Messages” from the “Actions” drop-down.

Unfortunately, Facebook doesn’t show you the “Other” section unless you’re already viewing your messages at https://www.facebook.com/messages/, and even then it doesn’t show you the number of unread “Other” messages. Likewise, a search for “spam” or “unread” messages doesn’t show any of the messages they’ve hidden under “Other.”

So take heart—just when you thought you had “No Messages” from that future special someone, that prospective client, that agent who is going to make you famous—it might only take a check in your “Other” messages to find those few lines that will change your life.

And if not, you can at least have fun archiving all the mass messages from your favorite pages.

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why I don’t plan to enable Facebook subscriptions on my personal profile

Oct 042011

Last week, I posted a question on my personal Facebook wall. I asked my friends if they were going to see the new movie “Courageous.” Their responses varied from the details of why they were waiting until it came out on DVD to saying, “Can you believe it’s not showing in ___________?” and “We’re going—it’s here in ______________!”

It was yet another reminder of why I don’t plan to enable the “subscribe” option on my personal profile.

how to enable Facebook subscriptions

Oct 032011

Have you ever wanted to share some of your Facebook statuses and links with more people—without having to actually friend them? Ever wished you didn’t have to set up a Facebook page or separate profile to have a public presence on Facebook? Facebook’s new “Subscribe” feature makes that easy as can be!