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Facebook versus Pinterest – Pros and Cons

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Social media venues have become an important part of business growth. The ability to communicate with potential clients and customers worldwide has brought great success to small, local businesses who would have never reached people beyond their city limits without venues such as Facebook or Pinterest. In addition to serving as an important part of an entrepreneur’s or small business’s marketing campaign, social media venues can also help boost sales.
Facebook is popular with many small businesses due to the exposure it can bring and Pinterest is currently the hottest social media venue out there.  Knowing how and when to use each of these venues effectively can help you increase sales, as well as your customer base. But knowing which venue to use for what type of selling is an important part of the equation and it helps you avoid wasting time and effort. Read on to gain important information about each.

  • Selling on Facebook. While Facebook allows the user to post both images and words, it still remains one of the primary places to tell people about what you’re selling. In the case of Facebook, a picture doesn’t speak a thousand words, it only tells part of the story. To really take advantage of the sales opportunities on Facebook you must combine your images with carefully crafted words. When words and images are used together on Facebook you can write as much as you want, although it’s in your best interest to not get too wordy and risk losing a customer’s attention.

The best things to sell on Facebook are your services. Are you a coach? Does your business offer landscaping services? Are you a freelance writer? Use Facebook to briefly describe your services and add an attention-getting image, if you like. Link your business blog or website to your Facebook post to draw potential customers directly to you.

Selling on Pinterest. As the newest of social media venues, Pinterest is primarily an image-based social media venue. Users “pin” images to different pin boards with standard categories, such as Favorite Places and Spaces, or to the pin boards they’ve created. When pins are created, the user can add a comment or explanation about it. Although the explanation can be long, not many Pinterest users are there to read…they’re there to look at the pinned images.

Therefore, Pinterest is an effective place to sell items. Do you want to increase the sales of season-specific sports equipment? You can create a pin board titled “Baseball Season” and, each day, highlight a specific piece of equipment with a brief description, price and link back to your website. Tailor your use of Pinterest to fit your business’s specific sales needs.

A combination of Facebook and Pinterest gives you double exposure and allows you to connect with customers and clients regarding different facets of your business. Use these two social media venues to their full advantage by remembering which one is word-focused, which one is image-focused and tailoring your sales campaign appropriately. By linking both back to your business website you can add to the effectiveness of both of these social media venues and see an increase in your sales.

Social Media Background Checks – Hired and Fired in the Age of Social Media

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More and more employers are using social media outlets to screen their workers. According to online training company Mindflash, 45 percent of companies look at an employee’s profile on Facebook, LinkedIn or Twitter to make decisions about that person’s future in the company. An 11 percent of companies also look at personal blogs.

Most companies check when trying to make a decision on whether they should hire a person, but some companies continue monitoring social activities after that person has been hired. Experts are calling this practice “social media background checks.” Although technically employees should not be fired based on what they do on their free time, it’s hard to draw a line and expect companies not to cross it.

In fact, the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) backed up employers in two Facebook-related cases in 2011. In both cases, the employees had made offensive comments about their job or bosses on their personal Facebook account and later received disciplinary actions because of those comments. When the employees complained to the NLRB, the organization declined to side with the workers.

A famous case involving Facebook includes a bartender from JT’s Porch Saloon & Eatery, which complained online about his job and his “redneck patrons.” Not only was he fired from his job for his remarks, but he was also fired via a private Facebook message, rather than by phone or in person. Another case involves Talk Radio Host Angel Clark, who woke up one day to find a message on his Facebook wall saying his weekend radio program had been cancelled because “we are moving in a different direction with our weekend programming.” Clark blogged about the situation, upset that he hadn’t even received a phone call about the issue.

Getting fired over Facebook is not a US-only phenomenon. A young employee in England was fired for posting on Facebook about his “incredibly boring job,” while Virgin Airlines fired a number of employees in 2009 because they complained that many passengers were “smelly and annoying.”

When Mindflesh asked employers what they were finding out from social profiles, they discovered that 35 percent of the findings were negative and only 18 percent were positive. Negative findings included inappropriate photos, bad-mouthing of their job and coworkers, and lies about qualifications. On the positive side, employers said Facebook was a good way to get a feel for the candidate’s personality, creativity and communication skills.

Probably the most worrying aspect of the whole thing is that Facebook has blurred the lines between “personal life” and “work” as two separate entities. It seems the only way to stay safe is to keep coworkers and bosses off your Facebook account. Mindflesh also recommends getting rid of your “digital dirt,” such as compromising photos and text you wouldn’t want your boss to find when Googling your name.

We cover this topic in detail in our Social Business College course.

CyberBullying – 5 Devastating Consequences

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Researchers at Anglia Ruskin University (ARU) in the United Kingdom, along with worldwide experts in the field of psychology, have revealed that 20 percent of-that’s one out of every five-children become the victims of cyber-bullying, and these numbers are on the rise. Being on the receiving end of threatening text messages, hateful emails or having embarrassing images posted on social media venues such as Facebook can result in greater psychological damage than the more traditional, non-technological forms of bullying. Nearly twice as many girls as boys become the target of cyber-bullying.
The consequences of cyber-bullying can be devastating. Cyber-bullies have the ability to hide their identities while spreading hateful messages and humiliating images around the world in no time. The problem with cyber-bullying, versus traditional bullying, is that there’s no escape. Victims cannot come home, close their doors and be left in peace, and they are at-risk for suffering through any of these consequences.

  • Recurrent Absenteeism. Nearly 160,000 kids in the US stay home from school each day due to the threat of bullying. Children who are bullied eventually become afraid to leave the house to go to school or even hang out with friends. Older kids start calling into work to stay home. The fear of cyber-bullying threats slowly reduces the victim’s world, leaving them feeling alone and isolated.
  • Mental Health Issues. Repeated bullying is linked to increased mental health issues amongst victims. When 500 children aged 10 to 19 years old were surveyed about the effects of cyber-bullying, more than 50 percent reported that they experienced depression, anxiety and other mental health issues.
  • Loss of Safe Spaces. Although no form of bullying is okay, victims can eventually get away from traditional bullying. But with cyber-bullying there is no safe space. Technology helps bullies reach their victims at home, school and anywhere else they might be.
  • Physical Effects. One 15-year-old girl interviewed by ARU was the victim of cyber-bullying via hateful and hurtful messages left on various social media networks stating that she was fat and ugly. Eventually the girl stopped eating and started withdrawing from both family and friends. When her parents found a detailed note in which the teen talked about hanging herself they were alerted to get help.
  • Death. Bullying victims are up to nine times more likely to commit suicide than kids who are not bullied. Teens, such as Phoebe Prince of Massachusetts and Rutgers University student Tyler Clementi cut their lives short because they see no other option for getting away from cyber-bullying except for suicide. After Prince was taunted endlessly and told to go hang herself, at the age of 15, she eventually did.

Cyber-bullies often have no idea the depth of pain they cause their victims.Organizations such as BeatBullying and The Internet Safety Project are amongst several groups that have formed in the past few years to help educate kids on the effects of cyber-bullying, as well as how to handle it. Fifty-eight percent of children who are victimized by cyber-bullying do not say anything to an adult that can help them. The educational efforts of parents, teachers and other influential organizations must continue in order to help victims break free of the situation instead of succumbing to it.

iFlipTips – Flipcards-Flashcards and personal multi-media notecards for iPhone and iPad – Now Available

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iFlipCards lets you make Q&A flipcards, capture audio, video, text and take/use pics and answer with pics, video, text and audio, not just text. iFlipTips is simple, single button notecards with text, audio, video and pics. iFlipTips can be shared/posted to Twitter, Facebook or email. Capture information and file it fast with unlimited Library Folders and Subfolders.

iFlipTips – please visit www.ifliptips.com for tutorials, newsletter and more.

Background – iFlipTips consists of two key programs – FlipTips and FlipCards. The app is designed to help clients seeking easy-rapid ways to build mobile “self-help” and “just enough and just-in-time” tools for their sales, support channel partners and others.

College students need a simple app to replace their 3×5 cards writing Questions on one side and “flipping” them over to see the Answer(s).

Here are some user comments”

“By having access to iFlipTips, I can get the latest sales and support tips, feature updates, bug fixes and other corporate info improving coordination and communications between with the our customers. Simply put, I am more successful and effective.”

“As a college student, I can create iFlipCard Quiz and answer card easy and fast and I can have them with me anytime where I can use them right up to the exam.”

“This really overcomes the problem when team members say, “email, what email, I never got the email providing a tool to help them see all the steps involved in the training, event and social activity and stay organized, not just endless emails.”

Bottom-line: “Strategically, the faster you can communicate, the faster you can change, and those corporations that change the fastest will be the most successful.”

 

Corporate training and studying for college exams is an increasingly demanding and complex.

iFlipTips was developed and will continue to be an innovative solution for trainers, customers, students and users.

We will also provide tutorials, webseminars, and a newsletter to help improve your use of iFlipTips, iFlipCards and FlipQuiz’s and other ideas on sports management, social media practices and technology.