Tag: Facebook

Elevating Your Social Media Graphics: Using Canva Like a Pro

Posted on by CMPR

Eye-catching graphics are essential for standing out and engaging with your social media audience. It may seem scary, but there are so many tools out there that can help you create visually appealing content with ease, whether you are a graphic designer or not! Anyone can use Canva to create simple and stunning designs that not only look good but also encourage user engagement. Here are some tips and tricks on elevating your social media graphics using Canva:

  1. Start with a template. If you don’t know where to start, don’t be afraid to take inspiration from one of the templates that Canva provides. These are a great starting point for creating graphics for any social media platform and are completely customizable to fit your brand. Select a template that fits your needs and change the colors, photos, and text to align with your content and messaging.
  2. Utilize brand kits. In branding, consistency is key. The brand kit feature allows you to upload your logo, brand colors, and fonts, to easily and quickly input these details into every graphic you make. Incorporating similar elements into all of your graphics will create a cohesive look across social media posts and offer brand recognition to your audience.
  3. Incorporate elements. Canva offers an extensive library of elements you can use to add extra creativity to your graphics. Check out all the different shapes, arrows, lines, symbols, and icons, and play around with how they can add to your design. Symbols like the heart and share button can add a call to action to your graphic. Arrows can point out important information you don’t want the audience to miss.
  4. Try the new AI features. Canva’s newest feature, Magic Studio, will create graphics and videos for you, translate text to different languages, and even write passages. Our tip is to use these things for your inspiration and then turn them into your own! The Magic Studio also has plenty of helpful editing tools like an image background remover, image expander, and text grabber. These elements can make the editing process so much faster.
  5. Keep it simple. Avoid going crazy on your graphics with too much text or too many elements. Simplicity can often lead to a greater impact through a more centered focus. Typically, we use our graphics as a simplified version of a writing or blog post and direct our audience there.

Enhance your social media presence with these tips to create stunning and engaging content for all of your feeds. Explore Canva’s many features and experiment with all the design elements they offer. Happy designing!

Check out these other blog posts to get started on social media!

How To Talk About Your Book for the First Time on Social Media – Claire McKinney Public Relations, LLC (clairemckinneypr.com)

Getting Attention on Social Media – Claire McKinney Public Relations, LLC (clairemckinneypr.com)

Social Media 101: 4 Reasons Why Buying Followers is a Bad Idea

Posted on by Claire McKinney
buying followers
This office dog is confused and upset about why he is seeing so many disturbing spam followers on a Twitter account that is supposed to be family friendly!

A recent article (February 1st) on BuzzFeed said that the Newsweek Media Group has been buying followers and manipulating traffic on some of their websites, and that they are being accused of ad fraud.  The ad fraud part of this story is not my area, but I do have something to say about the other part—buying followers—as it relates to marketing and branding using social media platforms.

There was a time when having 200,000 Twitter followers looked impressive to the naked eye, but those days are long gone.  Now it isn’t very difficult to look through someone’s following on various platforms to find out that many of those 200,000 are spam bots and other kinds of cheap “friends”.  In fact, the people who have more modest numbers of active followers, who engage with them, and build more solid relationships over time, could have the upper hand in social media marketing.

Here are some reasons why buying followers is a bad idea:

  1. The internet is not an alien universe.  The people using the internet and social media are just that—people.  And the rules of engagement apply just as they would at a cocktail party or a business conference.  If you want to grow as an influencer on social media, your audience needs to feel like you are a real person —not a virtual identity with no substance, which brings me to the next point.
  2. Trust is more important than ever. The internet, the very tool you want to use to market your products and ideas, has eroded trust in its own population.  This is partly due to the “bad apples” in the bunch who have figured out how to buy and sell cotton candy entities and canned content.  If someone takes more than a cursory look at who is following you and they find porn (true story) in the form of bots, it will not make a good impression (unless that is what you are selling).
  3. Relationships rule! When there is trust, the chance for a relationship to grow increases.  In a relationship with good communication, the other person believes what you have to say, appreciates your advice and counsel, and may even talk about you with others in a positive way.
  4. Protect the brand. Would you wear dirty clothes to a job interview?  Why sully your brand with ineffective and questionable marketing practices, like buying a fake community?

Perhaps we think that, because we are typing on a keyboard or a phone in our own private spaces, that our anonymity allows us to behave in any manner we want.  Well, it doesn’t.  Companies who engage in buying followers or traffic in order to beef up their potential advertising power may not be doing something illegal, but it is certainly unethical.  If an individual wants to be an influencer, it needs to be clear that community and engagement are a priority.  If bots are all we see, we assume that you aren’t real either.

Check out our other social media blog posts here.

Social Media 101: Social Media Terms – An Introduction

Posted on by Keely Flanagan

As brands big and small have discovered, social media is its own animal, especially when it comes to building an online presence. If you are just starting out on social media, or plan to start soon, we have some important social media terms you should know to help you understand how to create an online brand presence and use it to your best potential.

Handle: A word that is only for usernames that use the at (@) symbol. Twitter and Instagram are the two most popular platforms that use them. For instance, our Twitter handle is @mckinneypr, and it is implied that you know to go to twitter.com/@mckinneypr to find us.

Facebook Page: Do you have a Facebook account and wonder what people mean when people ask if you have a Facebook page? It doesn’t sound different, but it is. A Facebook account is your personal account that all your friends are on, while a Facebook page is for your business or creative endeavor. You have to create a page from your personal account, and you can allow people you trust, such as your teen or social media manager, to manage your Facebook Page from their own Facebook account. Your friends also don’t automatically roll over to your Facebook Page-you have to invite them to like it.

Hashtag: What many social media mavens know as the hashtag, and you may know as the pound sign (#). The “#” is used across almost all social media networks. Each time you hashtag something, it becomes a link that you can click on and view other posts by other people with that hashtag, in that social media network. For instance, if you tweet a photo of yourself with an ice cream cone that fell on the ground, you might caption it with “Ice cream #fail.” Click on #fail and it links you to a bunch of other people who tweeted about their own fails.

For a cuter example, American Kennel Club’s Instagram (@americankennelclub) posted a picture of a border collie with the #BorderCollie, which then went into Instagram’s hashtag category of people posting and tagging photos of their border collies.

social media terms hashtag
American Kennel Club tagged #bordercollie on Instagram for all those border collie lovers out there to enjoy this adorable photo.

Organic/Paid Reach: The different ways that people are engaging with your social media posts. Organic reach is when interaction happens naturally, such as your Facebook followers reading your Facebook post about your bad attempt to make non-bake chocolate chip cookies. Paid reach is when you pay to have the social media network reach out to people that aren’t following your page. If you are an author looking for some Facebook visibility on your new thriller novel, you might target paid outreach to users whose interests include books.

social media terms paid outreach
The box that opens up when you are deciding on paid outreach. You can target people by their interests.

Content: Valuable, free information that you provide on your blog that you may promote on social media. For instance, NerdWallet is a company that offers financial tools. Their blog provides useful info on things people want to know, like rewards credit cards, best interest transfers, and banking news.

Check out our blog for another edition on social media terms and what they mean. And by the way, Internet Trolls are not the same thing as the ones hiding under bridges (but they are similar).

Social Media 101: Instagram as an author tool

Posted on by Keely Flanagan

Instagram LogoIs your New Year’s Resolution to use a different form of social media other than Facebook or Twitter? Instagram is one of the best social media platforms out there, and one of the most popular among 18-24 year olds and 25-34 year olds, according to Social Media Week. If those age groups are your main audience, then utilizing Instagram is an app you should seriously consider. It’s fun, easy to use, and unless you’re Justin Bieber, less likely to be spammed or “trolled” than outlets like Twitter.

For those who aren’t familiar, Instagram is an app that allows you to post photos and graphics with (or without) a caption. It’s different from sites like Facebook and Twitter because you can only post to it if you have a picture to upload.

If you’re an author, how can you use Instagram to your maximum potential?

Use those hashtags. Like Twitter, Instagram allows you to use hashtags so you can search for terms like #ThrowbackThursday with ease. Participate in trending hashtags to insert yourself into the conversation.

Show us what you’re reading. Why not show your audience what books you enjoy or are currently reading? The hashtag #bookstagram is popular, and if you have a bookshelf that’s as grand as the one in Beauty and the Beast, you can even get involved in the #bookshelfporn tag.

Give us a glimpse of your life. Your readers may love your books, but we want to know who you are, too. If there’s anything going on in your life you’d like to share, like showing off your new lightsaber while in line for the new Star Wars movie, your audience will love you the more for it.

Cats, cats, cats! Since the dawn of time, photos of pets are proven to receive the most likes, hearts, and favorites across all social media. It’s okay to upload a photo of your kitty making an angry face worthy of Grumpy Cat, or your dog trying to lick peanut butter off his nose.

Quote your own stuff. Do you have some lines in your new book that you seriously love? Post them on Instagram as a pretty graphic! You never know who will find your book quote inspirational enough to repost.

What social media platform do you find is the best to use as an author? Tweet us your thoughts @mckinneypr!