Resources
We present some useful, practical social media tools and resources. 4TM holds workshops and one-to-one sessions helping businesses understand and use these tools most effectively.
4TM Related
Become a fan of 4TM on Facebook
Follow us on Twitter (our stream of social media and iPhone related information)
What is Social Media?
Social Media Briefing Note (pdf)
Create a business page on Facebook
RSS Feeds (not currently available for Facebook business pages)
Google Account
You need a Google Account to use most of Google’s non-search products. You don’t have to have a Google Mail (GMail) account, although if you have one, that will work as a Google Account login and password.
Qype
Search for your business / Register your business on Qype
RSS feeds are available at the bottom of pages for each place on Qype (but not, at the time of writing, for each business). Here’s the feed for Forres. You can also sign up for email updates for any number of places.
Tripadvisor (for Tourism and Travel businesses)
Search for your business (anyone can register your business to make a comment, so it might already be there)
If it’s not there…
YouTube
Videos with an “embed” link can be added to your own web site. You can also upload your own videos.
Flickr
Remember, photographs on Flickr are not public domain – they may well retain copyright. Contact the photographer if you wish to confirm a specific use of a photograph.
You can upload your own photographs. You’ll need to create a Yahoo! account to do this, if you don’t already have one.
Create a Flickr badge for your web site (either including your own photographs or search results).
Google Alerts
Advanced search techniques for Google Alerts (and Google search)
Google Maps
Add your business to Google Maps
Google Analytics: Web site visitor tracking
Google Analytics is a useful tool to measure whether visitors to your site are being driven by social media. To use Google Analytics you must be able to edit the pages on your web site to include some tracking code from Google. This requires a moderate level of web site experience. If you have a web site developer, it should be easy for them to do.
RSS Feeds
“News feeds allow you to see when websites have added new content. You can get the latest headlines and video in one place, as soon as its published, without having to visit the websites you have taken the feed from.
Feeds are also known as RSS. There is some discussion as to what RSS stands for, but most people plump for ‘Really Simple Syndication’. In essence, the feeds themselves are just web pages, designed to be read by computers rather than people.” (from bbc.co.uk)
Using RSS feeds in Internet Explorer 7
Using RSS feeds in Outlook 2007 (audio)
