Every social media user will know what I mean – The vast amount of information you get from it! The more people you follow, the more information you’ll get. Especially Twitter serves as a good example, I only follow around 200 people and I can’t manage to read all of the tweets that enter my feed.

You’d have to be pretty diligent to read all tweets. The average person however, will comprehend around 450 words a minute I was told. That means around 3.2 tweets per minute. I usually receive 15 to 20 tweets per minute, just to give a comparison. That’s overwhelming isn’t it?

Scanning is the key to success!

Yes, scanning your timeline is the key to successfully using social media. A lot of people seem to get lost in the vast amount of information they receive every minute, hour or day. They’re making the mistake of reading to much!

It’s better to scan your timeline, just like a newspaper, and only read the interesting things you see. That way you’ll get the information you want, when you want it! This means (of course) that you’re still missing out on a lot of information, but that’s not likely to be overly interesting information because it would have caught your eye during the scanning process.

So, by scanning your timeline you’re able to find cool and interesting stuff! The parts you miss aren’t relevant enough and you don’t know you’re missing them anyway. I hope this will help you to get used to social media because it’s here to stay

When looking at corporate websites, you’ll see that most of them have implemented a few sharing options and that’s it. Okay, some of those company’s even have accounts on Facebook and Twitter but just don’t know what to do with them to gain market share, sell more or just getting a good brand image.

Managing social media, a daily task?

Is managing social media a daily task? That really depends on the popularity of your pages. If you’re getting a lot of comments, likes and interaction on your Facebook page for example, you probably want to check it on a daily basis.

On the other hand, filtering out the bad comments and replies would give you far less work. Except, of course, when your products have a bad name! If that’s true, it would probably be wise to use Social Media to engage with unhappy customers and turn it into something positive.

For normal companies it isn’t necessary to manage your social media channels every day. I would recommend twice a week in the beginning and more as your channels become popular.

How I would manage a company’s social media

Looking at my own firm, it wouldn’t be necessary for us to manage it on a daily bases. There isn’t much activity, we’re only at the beginning of our social media implementation. I expect it to attract more visitors and followers in the next few months.

What would be good to do, however, is to add messages, articles, product updates and company information every week. When adding new content every week it will attract more people towards the company’s website. This would come in handy when we’re launching our new product range at the end of this year!

Last week the Picasa Webalbums got added to the newly launched Google Profiles that were rolled out a week before. It’s beginning to look like Google rolls out its so long rumoured “Google Me”. Like I discussed in a blogpost last week, I think they aren’t done yet either. I expect that YouTube and other services are added to the profiles too! We’ve just have to hold our breaths a little while longer.

Fancy looking album view

Okay, about the Picasa integration. In my opinion it really is good looking and nicely implemented. Especially viewing the albums got changed. Users are now seeing a mash-up of your photo’s in the space available. I think that just looks cool!

When hovering over the albums, users are getting some nice roll over animation which shows some picture located within that album. I don’t think it was necessary to have that implemented, it’s just eye candy for that matter.

One minor point

There is one minor point, though I can live with that. The Picasa albums that are automatically created are shown in the list of albums too. The scrapbook, profile photo’s and buzz Photo’s from post albums are the automated albums I’m talking about here.

These albums are already presented elsewhere and they don’t really belong in that list on your profile. That said, I would like to see a feature to select which albums you want to display on the Picasa Web tab.

Writing that just got my attention about the tab naming. why Picasa Web? Isn’t “Photo’s” a better name for that tab?

Anyway, I can live with the current situation. I’m just explaining what I would find better. I know I’m just a user of the Google products and not important at all for giving feedback. But I think more people will have similar requests which might give us the features we want.

Recently Google launched the new profile layout (look at mine to see an example). As you can see, it got some huge changes in the design part. It’s also possible to add more information when editing the profile. Just click on the part you want to change and voila, a box appears with options and settings.

Google Profiles & Privacy

What I particularly like about the new profiles is, that it makes it easy for every user to set their privacy the way they like it. Each little block of important contact information contains the option to set it private or public for the groups you select. The available groups are the same ones you’ll find in your Gmail or Google Contacts.

It works so darn easy, that everyone should get their settings straight. The people who even accomplish to screw these settings up are just not ready for online presence!

Nice and clean

Overall, the new design looks very clean and simple. I know the old ones looked simple and clean too, but this is far more modern and timeless then the old lay-out.

A thing I like about the new design is the possibility to add some “scrapbook” photo’s that are stored in your Picasa account. You can set the photo’s you want, so no automatic album import stuff anymore.

Another thing I like, is the possibility to add multiple profile pictures. When uploading two profile pictures, it’s possible to click on the photo and circle through both of them. Kinda like a photo carousel.

Future features

This is just the beginning of the new profiles roll-out. I expect even more in the near future. For example, next to about and the Google Buzz tab there is lots of room. Google will probably use that for more pages / features next few months. Just think about it, an extra tab for your Picasa photo albums or a tab with your share calendar or documents.

Personally I hope they will implement the feature to add custom backgrounds just like Twitter and YouTube have! It would be cool to add my own background (similar to this sites background) to the profile.

What’s next?

A good question. We’ll have to look out for new futures to get implemented in the next few months. I’m pretty sure something huge is coming up! But don’t know exactly what. I’ll keep you posted on this matter, though, that’s for sure!

This isn’t going to take me long to explain. When you’re using LinkedIn you’ll know what I mean. Just go to the LinkedIn homepage and you’ll notice it yourself.

I’m talking about the large amount of twitter messages flooding the main page on LinkedIn. I recently find out I was flooding it with my own tweets, thanks to a connection I also know in real-life.

I took a look and saw what he meant, the homepage was flooded with tweets and connection updates and common LinkedIn stuff were hard to find in there!

I didn’t quite know I was bothering others with it. Then it hit me, a lot of my LinkedIn connections aren’t designers! Those guys surely don’t want to know the 20 best CSS websites or how to photograph motion.

After realizing that I looked through the Twitter options. There I checked the option to show only tweets as a LinkedIn status when adding the hash tag #in.

Doing it like this still gives you the possibility to show what you want on LinkedIn, but you aren’t flooding everyone with useless information. Just keep in mind that most of the time you’re connections don’t have a job in the same business like yours.

It’s also nice to know people (including your connections) can still see all your tweets. They just have to look at your profile to get there.

That’s why I think it would be good for everybody that feeds Twitter in his or hers LinkedIn account to have similar settings applied. After all, flooding doesn’t mean more followers on every social media website…