Archive for the ‘Social Media’ Category
Interest in Pinterest
Pinterest is a well-turned combination of “pin” and “interest” meaning web service that allows to post, manage and share inspiring pics and videos online. Pinterest has quickly started enjoying great popularity, involving more than 1 million users in summer and exceeding 4 million members to date. Of course we all as web professionals not only care about how to find new awesome stuff there, but also how to show our own awesome products or services to new audiences on Pinterest. That’s what we’ll try to figure out today.
But first let’s dig into how this whole thing works. Here’s how. You find interesting stuff, place it to the pages and topic boards and share them with other site users. It’s much like other social networks, still hiding a few nuances which make it quite a powerful marketing tool on the net. Most “pinned” content are photography and digital design but there’s also an option to share video content. The pics themselves are not the main focus of interest – the point is the ability to arrange links to various exterior pages and connect with people sharing your interests and hobbies. You may also follow the updates of other users boards if their taste is authoritative for you. Now here is where you should be careful – officially Pinterest is not for business needs, it’s for personal use only. But that doesn’t necessarily means that you can’t use it for your business, it just means you have to be more careful than you would be on Facebook or Twitter for example.
Back to your new Pinterest account. The initial and only inconvenience is that you can’t access Pinterest immediately, but need to get an invitation first. You can request an invite on the site itself and wait for an invitation request coming in a week or so to your email. Another way is getting an invite from other active pinners you are familiar with.
Quick Pinterest Usage Guide
No matter whether it’s a business or a personality that you want to create the Pinterest account for, you still want to create an account for a person. Reveal your personality by filling out the biography field right under the profile pic. This shows you are active and lures more interested pinners. Creating topical boards for images is as easy as putting two and two together. Place your so-called “pins” on your edited boards and enjoy sharing! The “Pin It” Button is represented by an ordinary extension of your browser with a drag-and-drop function. You can pin everything you like, seek or trade: cute pets and astonishing landscapes, luxury autos and accessories, home decor and clothing, tutorials and video lessons. You may even allow other pinners to publish your content on their own boards. You may find the boards devoted to separate rooms with decor ideas for each one, photos of pets of their owners or plants they grow. Cooks make another active category of Pinterest fans – they keep and share their recipes online. But the major audience is represented by artists in search of inspiration and fresh ideas.
Social media sphere always confuses marketers with one simple truth – you can’t buy attention. Behind this simple postulate there is an essence of any social media activity. Hereby you don’t have to learn how to do social media marketing; you have to learn how to be social. We all know that there are top social media websites that aggregate tons of traffic, improve your brand recognition and help you build a strong community. Today we are going to share with you some of our friends’ experience in social media promotion. So in case you’re considering promoting your design blog, this real life experience will be truly priceless for you. Web design is very unique sphere and it has many peculiarities.
So, let’s start our social media journey and below you’ll find short expositions concerning the most popular social media networks. We’ve tried to be active social media players on most of these resources and first of all we must warn you that you should always carry out some intelligence because each and every social network has its own unique rules, users’ habits and some hidden tricks. The article is aimed at informing you about obstacles that you may face while doing some social media promo campaigns for your web design-related project. The very first rule that’s crucial for all is reading terms of use on any website that you are going to register account with.
Reddit.com
Since the days that Digg v.4 has been released Reddit community has quickly succeeded to become number one social network on the web. Web designers should be interested in posting their stories and questions to such threads as /r/web_design , /r/Design/ and /r/webdesign/. These are the most appropriate threads on Reddit where you can post requests to review your designs, search a freelance job, discuss latest news and of course submit various interesting web design related links. Please notice that you shouldn’t promote only your domain because that would be considered to be a spam. Also Redditors don’t like various round-ups, collections and other similar stuff so you may want to avoid this type of content. Be careful and try to become a part of reddit’s design community instead of just submitting your blog content there to get some traffic.
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Facebook’s popularity covers our planet like a tsunami and each day more and more people are impacted by this monstrous social network. In most of cases Facebook’s influence is very positive because it erases all possible borders on our planet creating unique online world, socializing different types of people, helping in networking and so on. Of course marketing gurus are not standing aside from this tasty morsel and run various campaigns on Facebook.
If you are going to create your own brand page on Facebook (possibly based on one of the premium-design Facebook templates available on TemplateMonster) than you will definitely need some effective analytics tools that would help you to trace down the results of your marketing efforts and other important indexes. Fresh and valid information is crucial for any marketer, and even Facebook itself won’t let you stay in the informational vacuum – you can use their default analytics tool called Facebook Insights, which is also quite good. But who said that you have to limit yourself with the default software? There is always a chance to find a better alternative and the list that we’ve collected for all Facebook marketers is meant to do just that – please welcome the alternative Facebook Page analytics tools.
1. All Facebook Stats
With the help of this service you can manage a large number of Facebook pages, analyze various statistics concerning your fans activity, interactions and content. All Facebook stats offers highly functional dashboard with a number of automated processes.
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2. Social Bakers
You can use this service absolutely for free just by signing in with your Facebook account. It gives a pretty decent amount of information about demography, penetration of population, users’ growth by brand etc.
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Exquisite and unusual design can be presented by performing and mixing various styles and techniques. Hand drawn style is very popular these days and it is a perfect example of what a really exquisite design should look like. As a matter of fact we have been featuring this design approach a couple of times in our web design trends researches.
Anyways, since this whole hand-drawn approach thing is so popular, we thought that it would interesting for you to check out some elements you may use in a design of this type. We’re talking about free and really beautiful icon sets that are performed in a hand drawn style. We believe that these freebies will help you to create really elegant and stylish projects that would amaze the audience with original details and creative approach. Before you start downloading these wonderful icon sets please, read carefully their respective terms of use to make sure your website is actually allowed to use them. Rules are rules, y’know.
1. Natsu Icon Set
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2. Social Sketches
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There is a common opinion that Twitter is not very much of a social network and it is rather a place for marketers. It is obvious that every marketer or entrepreneur that starts Twitter campaign has its own master plan of how to conquer the hearts of the target audience via this fast-growing and unique network. There are tons of various software that will help you optimize work with Twitter, but today we want to draw your attention to the Twitter analytics tools that will help you know your marketing efforts ROI.
Number of followers, their geolocation, impressions and other information that will be extremely useful for any considered Twitter user. The following list contains 10 various pieces of software containing options in their arsenal and we would love to tell you more about each of them. Of course some of these tools are already well-known among the web users (like Hootsuite or Tweetmeme) but we are sure you’ll find several new names here. So, let’s start off now.
1. HootSuite
Hootsuite is a great software that will suit the most whimsical social media fans, its analytics tools are pretty impressive too. Several weeks ago they have informed about “HootSuite Analytics Info Sheet” – a measuring analytics toolbox that are available in-dash. You’ll have the opportunity to use Ow.ly social stats, Google Analytics, Facebook Insights, and analyze custom URL parameters within your social media dashboard.
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2. Bit.ly
Next social media software product allows you to receive information about your “bit.ly” shortened links, number of clicks, top referrers and location data. Also you can trace all comments concerning your tweet and further shares on other social networks.
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Good call-to-action social media icons are now that something that every single blog must have to give the site visitors a possibility to easily bookmark and share content on popular social networking platforms. Today we’ve taken the time to put together what we believe are the most well-crafted free social media icon sets out there. Although initially intended to be widely used in web blogs, these social networking icons can be seamlessly integrated in almost any project online. Still upon embedding social links in your next project, please consider carefully the icons positioning, style, size, and color, and make sure you’ve got a social networking section that is easy to find and nice-looking. In this round-up you are free to find professionally created and beautiful free icon set solutions, please have a look.
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A Free Sophisticated Premium Peel Over Icon Set
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Free and Exclusive Icons: Brown Social Icon Pack
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Once again, let’s talk about the issue of social media bookmarking and sharing – this time we’ll feature the range of social media sections to see how creative designers are currently building their online social presence.
Apparently, social icons (if skillfully accomplished) add rich interactive elements framing any design work in a way different and personalized. They give an individual tone assembling the infinite perfect surrounding for social media communication. Notice the attention to details in proportions, calculated typographic spacing and size, various color effects – everything is done to positively impact the design of a website. By the way, if you haven’t seen our previous post about 150 Best Social Networks Sections on Designers’ Websites, then you should go and take a look at it.
Thereby, having done a total overhaul of the social media icons designs, we are trying now to break the mold and introduce a unique and fresh range of new 150 megaforced social networks sections which express a true appellation character. Time to kick off, so please buckle up and enjoy the ride – here they go!
Lbsquat.com
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Baneydesign.com
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Core-engine.com
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Are you just as crazy about the Vancouver Olympics as we are? Well in this case you’re going to love the new freebies that we’re giving away. This time, in addition to the free twitter backgrounds that we’ve previously distributed, it’s about the free Twitter backgrounds containing Winter Olympics motifs – designed by TemplateMonster using the official design elements from VANOC and Vancouver2010.com.
So please feel free to download these free Winter Olympics Twitter backgrounds and apply them to your Twitter accounts. You may add your own elements to them (like your name for example). But please make sure you don’t modify the contents of these backgrounds, that’s prohibited according to the Olympics Commetee rules. And don’t remove the VANOC/COVAN copyright signatures, once again even though those backgrounds are designed by TemplateMonster there are VANOC design elements there, so let’s respect that. Besides that you cannot resell these Winter Olympics Twitter backgrounds or use them as parts of your portfolios. Anyways, we’re sure you guys will treat them wisely – just as it is meant by the Olympic spirit. Remember that these backgrounds are distributed on a non-commercial basis and popularizing the Olympic spirit is the sole purpose TemplateMonster has released those backgrounds.
Olympic Torch Twitter background
Click the image to see it in full size, then "Save Image As..." to save it.
Other design instructions:
Make sure you uncheck the “tile background” checkbox while uploading the background image.
Background color: FFFFFF
Text color: 383838
Link color: 1E6DDE
Sidebar fill color: cdd3de
Sidebar border color: 728EB6
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Winter Sports Pictograms Twitter background
Click the image to see it in full size, then "Save Image As..." to save it.
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Having social media bookmarking or sharing options has become an absolutely essential feature for all websites, especially the design-related ones. What’s also important is that those social media sections are becoming a place for the designers to show off their skills and very frequently we can spot highly stylized social media icons linking to or referencing different social networks. They help to grab visitors’ attention and make the logos immediately recognizable.
So we’ve taken the time to round up the best social media icons out there. And now here is a list of 150 cool social networks sections used on various designers’ websites that are sure to attract more bookmarks and shares. Here they go!
Chethstudios.net
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Wecritiquedesigns.com
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