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Library of Congress Control Number: 2013952429
ISBN 978-1-118-70781-4 (pbk); ISBN 978-1-118-70779-1 (ebk); ISBN 978-1-118-70784-5 (ebk)
Manufactured in the United States of America
10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
About the Authors
Janine Warner is the founder and creative director of DigitalFamily.com, a full-service interactive design and training agency that offers web and mobile design, content strategy, SEO, social media, and Internet marketing services.
Janine’s skills as a “techy translator” helped her land the deal for her first book in 1996. Since then, she’s written or coauthored more than 25 books, including Web Sites Do-It-Yourself For Dummies, Mobile Web Design For Dummies, and every edition of Dreamweaver For Dummies. She has also created more than 100 hours of training videos about web design for top-rated online learning sites, including creativeLIVE, lynda.com, and KelbyOne.
Since 2001, Janine has run her own business as an author, a consultant, and a speaker. Over the years, she’s worked with one of Russia’s largest publishing companies in Moscow; traveled to New Delhi to speak at Internet World India; consulted with newspapers in every major city in Colombia; and worked with media companies and other businesses in more than a dozen other countries. (She speaks fluent Spanish.) Janine has also taught courses at the University of Miami and the University of Southern California and been a guest lecturer at more than 20 universities in the United States and abroad.
When she’s not traveling, she is based in southern California where she lives with her husband, David LaFontaine, manages DigitalFamily.com, and occasionally takes a break to run on the beach.
Dave LaFontaine is a writer, researcher, and multimedia content producer whose work has earned him invitations to lecture and train journalists, NGOs, and pro-democracy groups all over the world. Dave’s curiosity and willingness to use himself as a human lab rat help him keep up with technology trends, test the latest digital tools, and produce the Sips from the Firehose blog.
Dave teaches online multimedia and digital publishing at the Annenberg School of Journalism at USC, where his students have used the design templates and techniques pioneered by this book to trick out their own profiles.
David got his start on the Internet in 1991, when he cracked the case of his (then) cutting-edge Zeos 386-25 computer to install a 2400-baud modem, and joined Prodigy and CompuServe. He was fascinated by the way users formed communities online to share news, collaborate to create new businesses, develop their own shorthand argot language, and devise new and exciting ways of insulting each other for violating the unwritten rules.
David grew up reading science fiction, and is often amazed by the way technologies that only hard-core nerds dreamed about have come to be taken for granted by billions.
Dedication
To the untold billions of people connecting via social media: May you find ways to create something as touching, funny, beautiful, and delightful as the examples we feature in the book.
Authors’ Acknowledgements
Janine: More than anything, I want to thank all the people who have read my books or watched my videos over the years. You are my greatest inspiration, and I sincerely enjoy it when you send me links to your websites and connect with me on social media. You’ll always find my e-mail address and links to my social profiles on my websites at http://jcwarner.com and www.digitalfamily.com.
Special thanks to David LaFontaine, my partner in all things digital and analog, whom I’ve shared so much with over the years, including writing this book together. You are my best friend — ever.
Thanks to the entire editorial team on this book: Rebecca Senninger and Teresa Artman for their attention to detail and careful editing; Jon McFarland for reviewing all the technical details; and Amy Fandrei for shepherding this book through the development and publishing process.
Over the years, I’ve thanked many people in my books — family, friends, teachers, and mentors — but I have been graced by so many wonderful people now that no publisher will give me enough pages to thank them all. So let me conclude by thanking everyone who has ever helped me with a web site, book, video, or any other aspect of the writing and research that go into these pages. Okay, now I think I can go to sleep tonight without fearing I’ve forgotten anyone.
Thank you, thank you, thank you.
David: I’d like to thank all the great teachers and mentors that turned me on to reading and writing throughout my career. From my grade-school teachers reading my essays aloud to the class, so that everybody could enjoy what I wrote, to my college professors questioning my use of the word “yeoman,” you’ve all encouraged me to develop this gift I apparently have for stringing one word after another.
I’d like to thank all the thousands of artists, designers, and quirky individualists all over the world who put hours into designing social media profiles “just because.” In the course of researching and looking for examples in this book, I laughed and learned from every one of you. There would not be enough room in a thousand books to do justice to all the creativity that exists on the Internet. If you, dear reader, find something that just delights you, send it to me via www.davidlafontaine.com.
Special thanks to Janine Warner, for being my sounding board and reeling me back a bit when I go off on one of my rhetorical flights of fancy. You have an amazing talent for taking my overwritten, overwrought sections of purple prose and reducing it to something actually readable. A giggle from you is more inspiring than a dozen positive Amazon reviews (although if any of you readers feel like competing, go to it).
I’d like to give a special shout-out to America’s librarians. As a boy, just walking through the doors of the local public library filled me with a sense of incredible excitement and awe. And, of course, to my mom and sisters, who used to sit with me on the couch as I worked my way through the stacks of library books, sharing with me the joy of the written word (and keeping me from using my crayons to “improve” the stories I loved so much).
Creating a Consistent Design for All Your Social Sites
In This Chapter
• There are many social media sites to join — you don’t have to choose just one!
• Expand your social media presence with Share, Like, and Follow buttons.
• You can consider joining social bookmarking sites, too.
• Be sure to research effective social media designs.
Social networking — the art of meeting and building contacts through social media websites — has become the most popular activity on the Internet. As we live more of our lives online, social networks have become a powerful way to build connections, attract new clients, find discounts, or get a new job.
On the most popular social media sites, you can create personal profiles as well as professional pages, which are an increasingly important way to drive traffic to your website and promote your business, brand, or organization.
As social media has evolved, it’s no longer enough to simply have a presence on each social site. Similar to the evolution of web design, social media design has become increasingly complex, and visitors to social media sites are becoming more discerning.
Today, how you present yourself, your brand, your business, or an organization on your social media is a key part of any marketing strategy, job hunt, or quest for new friends.
This chapter is about helping you stand out from the crowd by creating a great social media design. Figure 1-1 shows an interesting Facebook design.
Figure 1-1
If you’re looking for advice on how to use the top social media platforms, consult Facebook All-in-One For Dummies by Melanie Nelson and Daniel Herndon, Twitter For Dummies by Laura Fitton, and Pinterest For Dummies by Kelby Carr.
Choosing the Best Social Media Sites
With so many social media sites to choose from, how do you decide which one(s) is (are) right for you? The following is an overview of the relative strengths and specialties of some of the top social media platforms.
The examples in the sections feature the profiles of our friend Erin Manning because she has created a consistent look across her many social media sites. Erin is a photographer, photography instructor, and fellow Wiley author. She takes her brand very seriously and has crafted an image that she is careful to protect and manage consistently across all of her social media sites, as well as her website, which is shown in Figure 1-2. As you can see in Figures 1-3 through 1-8, she uses similar colors, and even the same photos in many cases, to make it easy to recognize her brand on the many different social media sites she uses.
Figure 1-2
Erin Manning (http://erinmanning.com)
Facebook
www.facebook.com
Facebook wins top place as the largest social networking site on the web, and its broad appeal makes it an excellent place to promote your website. Facebook was originally considered a vanity site and a place for college students, but its professional power has grown with its ever-expanding audience. With more than 1 billion members, Facebook is by far the most important, and most active, of the social media sites to date.
You can create a Facebook Profile, Page, or Group, and there are many options for customizing the designs. Erin’s Facebook profile is shown in Figure 1-3.
We talk more about how to set up your Facebook Pages in Chapters 4 and 5.
Figure 1-3
Erin Manning (http://erinmanning.com)
LinkedIn
www.linkedin.com
LinkedIn is the site for professional connections and online business networking. If you’re online to develop business contacts with other professionals, especially if you’re job hunting or trying to attract new business clients, LinkedIn is a powerful place to promote yourself and your website.
Unlike Facebook, LinkedIn is all business.
You get only one small profile image on a LinkedIn profile. Be sure to use the same profile image you use for your other sites for consistent branding.
Erin uses the same profile picture on LinkedIn that she uses on some of her other social sites, as shown in Figure 1-4, and it makes her easily recognizable.
Figure 1-4
Erin Manning (http://erinmanning.com)
We show you how to create your LinkedIn presence in Chapter 8.
Twitter
https://twitter.com
Twitter has evolved into an international force to be reckoned with. A microblogging platform, Twitter makes it easy to connect with people and share brief bursts of information (tweets). Twitter limits you to no more than 140 characters per post, but that brevity seems to be the secret to Twitter’s success. Athletes, celebrities, politicians, and all types of so-called experts use Twitter to connect directly with their audiences, one brief message at a time.
It takes a while to get the hang of the terse, abbreviation-heavy Tweetspeak language, which includes the use of special characters, such as the hashtag (#) to indicate a topic (such as #socialmedia in posts about the social media) or the at sign (@) in posts about a person (as in, follow me @janinewarner).
People tend to update Twitter more frequently than other services, making it a great place to follow trends, news events, and other information in real time. Like all social networks, Twitter is constantly evolving, so read other people’s posts for a while to get the hang of it before you start to participate. Follow a few friends or experts to see how they use the service.
Twitter offers two areas where you can control the design of your site: the background and the main cover image, located at the top center of a profile. In Erin’s case, she chose a simple illustration as the background, as shown in Figure 1-5, and uses the same photograph for her Twitter cover image that she uses in her Facebook design, which again makes her easily recognizable across her various profiles.
Turn to Chapter 6 to find out how to set up your Twitter profile.
Google+
www.plus.google.com
The newest entry in the social media scene is Google’s competitor to Facebook, known as Google+. Launched in the summer of 2011, Google+ quickly turned into a must-have for every self-respecting web geek because membership was initially limited only to people who were invited.
The principal difference between Google+ and other social networking sites (such as Facebook) is that Google+ starts out by encouraging you to put your friends into circles, which provides a way to organize the people you know into categories, allowing you to choose what information and updates you share with each group.
Google+, now open to everyone, has become one of the top social media platforms, dwarfing many of its competitors and leveraging the power of the Google brand. In the case of Google, you can include a very large photo at the top of your profile. As you can see in her Google+ profile in Figure 1-6, Erin is making herself easy to recognize by using the same image she uses in her Facebook and Twitter profile designs.
Chapter 9 is where to go to set up Google+.
Figure 1-5
Erin Manning (http://erinmanning.com)
Pinterest
www.pinterest.com
This highly visual site exploded on the social media scene and became the fastest-growing site in 2012. Especially popular among designers, artists, fashionistas, and other creative people, Pinterest makes it easy to “pin” and share images in collections (boards). In her Pinterest profile, as shown in Figure 1-7, Erin showcases her photo tips as well as her fashion sense.
Figure 1-6
Erin Manning (http://erinmanning.com)
Even though Pinterest is a platform that thrives on the visual, user profiles are not the focus. Pinterest profile pics are incredibly small compared with the other images on the page, and Pinterest allows users to post only a brief, limited bio.
We show you how to use Pinterest in Chapter 10.
YouTube
www.youtube.com
YouTube is a global giant, so people use the name “YouTube” generically to refer to all kinds of videos on the web. Owned by Google, YouTube is not only one of the most popular social media sites, but it’s also the world’s second-most popular search engine. YouTube has become the default place users around the world turn to when looking for Internet video.
From her television appearances to video tapes of speeches to training videos for companies like lynda.com and creativeLIVE, Erin has plenty of video to showcase on YouTube, but she also uses a few still images from her website to decorate her YouTube channel, as shown in Figure 1-8. Chapter 7 shows you how to use YouTube.
Figure 1-7
Erin Manning (http://erinmanning.com)
Figure 1-8
Erin Manning (http://erinmanning.com)
Spreading the Love with Social Media Share Buttons
In addition to creating great designs for your social media profiles and pages, you can also include social media icons and links on your website or blog.
The two distinct ways to link to social media sites are
Like and Follow links: When you include Like and Follow links on your website (see Figure 1-9), you link to your own profiles on Facebook, Twitter, and other social sites, and invite your visitors to connect with you. When visitors follow this kind of link, they are given options specific to each site, such as clicking the Like button on your Facebook page, clicking the Follow button on your Twitter profile, or subscribing to your YouTube channel.
Figure 1-9
Share links: In contrast to Like and Follow links, Share links invite your visitors to share what’s on your website with their friends and followers. In Figure 1-10, you see what happens when a user clicks the Share button for Facebook on the DigitalFamily.com website. In the Share This Link Facebook window open in Figure 1-10, you can see that the headline and the main image from the article are included and will be added to the post box. Above that information is a field (look for Write something) where the users can include their own comments as they post a story. When users click the Twitter button, a similar box opens with text for a tweet, which the user can edit before posting.
Figure 1-10
Janine Warner (www.digitalfamily.com/social-design)
Which option is best for your website or blog? We recommend using both. Including social media share buttons is one of the best ways to attract new visitors to a website or blog because you empower every visitor to your site to easily share your content with their friends and followers. The type of social media button shown in Figure 1-10 is best included with each individual post or article on your site.
Including Like and Follow buttons is a great way to build your network. These buttons are generally best included on the front page of your site, on the about page, and with your biography or other personal information.
You’ll find many services designed to help facilitate the connection between your site and social media sites, but some of the most popular are
AddThis: (www.addthis.com) Sign up for a free account on the AddThis website (shown in Figure 1-11), and you can easily create social media Share buttons as well as Like and Follow links. More than 14 million websites use this popular service. To add social buttons to your website, you simply copy and paste a little code from their page into yours.
If you use WordPress, look for the AddThis plugin in the Plugin Directory to add social media buttons.
Figure 1-11
ShareThis: (www.sharethis.com) Designed to work with a wide variety of website and blogging programs, ShareThis makes it easy to sign up for an account and then add a toolbar with social media sharing buttons to your web pages.
AddToAny: (www.addtoany.com) Offering a widget that you can add to almost any website or blog, use AddToAny to create an account and then copy and paste code from AddToAny into the code in your website or blog.
Why would you choose one social media sharing site over another when they all so seem so similar? The biggest consideration is aesthetic. Visit all three sites and decide which one you think has the best-looking social media button designs. Look over their specific features and analytics, too. These services change rapidly, so make sure the one you choose supports all of the social media sites you use.
Using Social Bookmarking Sites
In this book, we focus on social media sites that offer greater design opportunities, such as Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube, but we’d be remiss if we left out social bookmarking sites completely.
Social bookmarking sites rank the popularity of web pages by the number of votes they get. As a result, these sites are excellent resources if you want to keep up with what’s popular online. Most enable anyone to vote on a site.
Although these sites have limited options when it comes to designing a profile, sites like Delicious, like Janine’s shown in Figure 1-12, do enable you to upload an image and a short biography. You can also typically include your site URL, making these platforms a great way to drive traffic to your content.
Figure 1-12
A few of the most popular social bookmarking sites and services (with more sure to come) are
Delicious (https://delicious.com)
StumbleUpon (www.stumbleupon.com)
reddit (www.reddit.com)
Although you can submit your own web pages on any of these sites, that practice is generally frowned upon, and you can be banned if you do it too frequently. Your one vote won’t make much difference, so it's best just not to do it.
A better method to generate votes is to add a button to your website from each of these services so that visitors can easily vote for you. If you’re a blogger, you can add a button each time you post. You can get the buttons (chiclets) for free and add them to your pages by simply inserting a little code you generate on the social networking site.
Gathering Ideas for Your Social Media Designs
One of the best ways to get ideas for designing your social media pages and profiles is to visit the websites of people and businesses you admire. Click the social media links on their sites and study what works and what doesn’t in their designs. In particular
Ask yourself what you like about each design and why you like it.
Consider the choice of photos and illustrations. Do the pictures make you want to get to know them? Does the background or other illustration add credibility or showcase their talents?
Pay special attention to how individuals and brands describe themselves. Many social media sites restrict your descriptions to just a few words or a sentence or two. Study how others introduce themselves to get clues about how to sum your own profile text in just a few words.
Determine whether you can easily find the information you’re most interested in and whether you think they did a good job of introducing themselves or promoting their business, brand, or organization.
Sometimes the best way to get ideas for your own profile is to look at someone else’s site and then return to yours with a fresh perspective. Social media sites are changing all the time. Keeping an eye on what others are doing is a great way to stay informed about new design options and creative ways to introduce yourself online.