There’s a reason they say…“Watch out Pinterest is addicting!” This is my 3rd post in a row where I am talking about the hottest new social network on the planet. (I need to get a life, haha.)

I totally agree that it can become very addicting. Just look at all the gorgeous pictures everyone is pinning there. Most people are visual people and like me respond to brilliant colors or funny and/or cute pictures. So when something gets “addicting” it means you spend a lot of time there. Or should I better say waste a lot of time?

I needed another social network to worry about like I needed a hole in the head. But, since I kept hearing how awesome Pinterest is for marketing I had to check it out. I really love what I see there, but I do not have much time to devote to it. So any tool that comes along to make my life easier and save me time is highly welcomed. Don’t you agree?

Here are some cutting edge Pinterest tools
to help you keep your sanity.

Pinerly

Pinerly ….was the first Pinterest tool I found and I can’t even remember where I heard about it. It is by invitation only and you need to have 5 friends before you receive an invite. Pinerly is a Pinterest friendly dashboard that lets you take control. You can follow people, find great pinners with the same interests and easily spot unfollowers.

PinReach

Pinreach …is a Pinterest tool for those of us who love analytics. It lets you find out how your boards are doing as far as followers, pins, likes, comments, etc. It also shows you which your most popular pins are and how many repins they have. And it also gives you an overall score. The higher your score the better of course. Kind of like in good ol’ Facebook fashion, Pinterest too is driven by engagement so repins carry more weight than pinning something new. However when others repin your stuff it carries much more relevance to your social influence than when you do it yourself. So the bottom line here is… pin awesome stuff that compels others to repin it!!

PinReach will show you how many pins a particular board has, how many followers,
how many people liked it and how many comments.

PinReach also shows you how many repins your favorite pins have.
And a whole lot more…

Pinstamatic

Another awesome Pinterest tool I came across is Pinstamatic. It lets you create sticky notes or quotes you can pin on your boards. It also lets you add locations, music, calendar dates, twitter profiles and more. It’s really easy to do and it took me less than five minutes to figure it out.

Cendrine Marrouat wrote a cool blog post loaded with more fantastic Pinterest tools and Google add-ons for Pinterest.  “10 tools to use Pinterest like a pro.” My favorite mentioned there is Pinvolve which I immediately installed on my Facebook Fan Pages. You can see it in action here and here.

So go visit Cendrine’s post and here is another one I would like to mention. This one is by my good friend Stacy Claflin ….”Pin Your Posts Automatically.”

This should keep you busy for a while. If you know of more terrific Pinterest tools it would be great if you could share them with us in the comments below. Thanks!

Don’t forget to “Follow Me on Pinterest”  ….and Happy Pinning!

Ilka Flood
The Enlightened Networker

Related posts:

1. Powerful Reasons Why You Should Use Pinterest for Your Marketing – Part TWO
2. Powerful Reasons Why You Should Use Pinterest for Your Marketing – Part ONE
3. How Pinterest Can Help You Get More Blog Traffic

If you missed it, here is part one of “Powerful Reasons Why You Should Use Pinterest for Marketing.”

Success on Pinterest is about Strategy

So strategize! Strategize! Strategize! Just like Facebook with its EdgeRank it’s all about interaction on Pinterest as well.

Strategize and plan out your boards. Cute and funny always trumps. Infographics are eye-catching. (I love infographics.) Always think, what audiences do I want to reach and …how is this going to be viral so people want to share it? Use hashtags #.

Also, do a lot of looking around and checking out what other people are doing. Watch and learn and see what’s working. (I find myself doing that a lot.) You can learn quite a bit by following other people in your target niche, check out their strategies and then implementing them.)

Use different pin boards for different audiences.  One really cool thing about Pinterest is that you can have multiple pin boards. So if you have different audiences or target markets you can set up pin boards for each one. Pinterest users have the option of following individual boards or following a member as a whole. So if they don’t want to follow all of your boards they can just pick out the ones that are of interest to them. I think that’s a very cool feature, don’t you?

What to name your pin board? Now I admit I hadn’t given much thought to this in the past. Obviously you should pick a name that gets people’s attention, but at the same time you should keep keywords in mind as well.

Engaging on Pinterest. Engage with people by re-pinning their content, liking it or commenting on it. When you re-pin somebody’s content you are automatically following him or her. That’s kinda neat, don’t you think?

By the way, you can use hashtags (#) in the description of your images. They are also allowed in the comments. So you can use them just like you would use your keywords for search engine optimization.

Also, when you follow somebody they will receive an email letting them know and more often than not they will follow you back. That’s how you grow on Pinterest, by interacting with other people.

Linking your images. You probably already know this, but you can link your images back to your blog, website or sales funnel. (Believe it or not, I didn’t realize this and did it the hard way. There are always two ways of doing things…the hard way and the smart way.) While this is a very strategic way to get more targeted traffic, it can also be used to spam the boards. My advise….DON’T! You don’t want to mess up a good thing, so use self-promotion sparingly. There’s nothing wrong however with linking back to your valuable content on your blog.

So here is how you link your pin…..

Click the “Edit” button on your pin and then add the link to your website or blog. Don’t forget to save your changes.

Let’s recap right quick…Why should you use Pinterest for your marketing?….

• 80% of Pinterest users have it connected to Facebook. (You can also connect it to your Twitter account.)
• The average Pinterest user spends 89 minutes per month on the site, compared to 21 minutes for the average Twitter user.
• Pinterest can help you increase traffic back to your website, improve your social growth, increase sales as well as help with your search engine ranking.
• It’s visual and highly viral.

Be aware that Pinterest is in the beginning stages. It’s still the Wild Wild West out there and things will be constantly changing. But it is so much fun to be at the start of something BIG.

Oh, and since Pinterest is still in Beta you will have to request an invite to join the fun. You can ask your friends on Facebook who have a Pinterest account to send you an invitation. (If we are friends then let me know you would like an invite.)

So have fun on Pinterest and make sure you follow me!

To Your Massive Success!

Ilka Flood
The Enlightened Networker

P.S. All the credit goes to maximizesocialmedia.com for putting on an incredible webinar. I only shared what I learned.

Related posts:

1. Powerful Reasons Why You Should Use Pinterest for Your Marketing – Part ONE
2. How Pinterest Can Help You Get More Blog Traffic

So, pull up a chair, get comfy, get your favorite beverage and read what I’m about to share with you….

I assume you have heard by now that Facebook bought Instagram last week. I guess the reason behind it is because they saw it as kind of a threat in light of Pinterest’s recent growth.

When you think about it, the web is going more and more to VISUAL and although Pinterest is still dwarfed by Facebook, with its record-breaking growth to 10 million there is no telling where it will go. So yeah, I could see where Facebook would feel threatened.

Right now, at the time I am writing this, Pinterest is at a virtual tie for second place with Twitter where website referral traffic is concerned.

Here are some stats you may find very interesting…

- 80% of Pinterest users have it connected to Facebook.

- The average Pinterest user spends 89 minutes per month on the site, compared to 21 minutes for the average Twitter user.

Pinterest can definitely help you increase traffic back to your website, improve your social growth, increase sales as well as help with your search engine ranking.

The Psychology of Pinterest

You might think…I can share my images on Facebook why do I need Pinterest?

That’s very true! But both these social networks are very different. On Facebook it is more about who you are, who you know and where you are. Whereas on Pinterest it is more about, who you want to be, who you want to know and where you want to be.  Kind of like a Vision Board. It’s more about “dreaming” than about “reality.”

Right now Pinterest is dominated by women which is not surprising. Women are decision-makers and influencers. They know what their family’s needs are. Just go to any woman’s pin board and you’ll find pins on clothes, furniture, gardening stuff, recipes, toys for the kids, you name it. But the gents are catching on to the power of Pinterest.

Pinterest is less about creating your own stuff and more about sharing and that’s the reason that 80% or more of the pins are re-pinned. (Re-pinning is really what drives the action on Pinterest.) Compare that to only 5% of tweets being re-tweeted and you can clearly see the power of Pinterest. It’s really VIRAL!

Respecting People’s Intellectual Rights and Protecting Your Own

To stay engaged you’ve got to do a lot of re-pinning, but please respect people’s intellectual rights and give proper credit. At the same token, when you share your own images make sure you add a watermark or other identification to let people know this is YOUR image and you’re not giving up your intellectual rights.

I hadn’t even thought of doing this in the past, but then I got smart.  (It takes some people a little longer.) For one I thought, if I spend time creating my own images of course I wouldn’t like for someone to come along and claim them as their own. The other reason I started to put a watermark or URL on my images is to lead people back to my website. I also just created a new Fan Page just for inspirational quotes. So come by and “Like” it and feel free to comment and share the images.

How Can I Use Pinterest for Marketing?

I wrote a blog post on this subject already so please go to “How Pinterest Can Help You Get More Blog Traffic.”

Use striking images on your site or blog. If you are not using images on your blog yet I would highly recommend you start now, so people can pin them. Use images that make an impact or statement, are colorful and eye-catching. People only have a split second to catch your image as they are scrolling down viewing other people’s pins.

Use a PinIt button. Use a PinIt button in your browser to easily pin images to your boards. Also make sure you prominently display a PinIt button on your blog or site so people can pin your content. (You can get both the PinIt bookmarklet and the PinIt button for your blog or site right there at Pinterest.com)

Now if you don’t want to share your images at all, you can get a code from the Pinterest website to put on your site or blog that prohibits people to pin your images. Especially if you are a content creator you want to protect yourself.

Since this post is getting quite long already I will cut it into two parts. So stay tuned for Part Two in which I will share….How to Strategize Pinterest for Maximum Success! (Look for it on Friday.)

ATTENTION: Pinterest is still in Beta so you will have to request an invite to join the fun. You can ask your friends on Facebook who have a Pinterest account to send you an invitation. (If we’re friends then let me know.)

You know how much I love your feedback so please make some noise in the comments below. Thanks!

To Your Maximum Success!

Ilka Flood
The Enlightened Networker

Related posts:

1. Powerful Reasons Why You Should Use Pinterest for Your Marketing – Part TWO
2. How Pinterest Can Help You Get More Blog Traffic

Are there benefits to turning on Facebook subscribe?

Well, it depends. If you are like most of the millions of users that uses Facebook strictly to connect and interact with close friends and family members then maybe you don’t need the Facebook subscribe option because you most likely will never hit the limit of 5,000 friends.

However, if you are a marketer or business owner wanting to use your personal Facebook profile also for growing your business then yes, you may want to consider turning on that option.

That’s actually what I do. From the very beginning I started using my personal profile for connecting with fellow network marketers.

7 Reasons for turning on the
Facebook subscribe option.

1. As I already mentioned above you can’t have any more than 5,000 friends. Once you reach that limit you’re done. Before the introduction of the subscribe button you were practically forced to create a fan page.  However now you don’t necessarily have to as you can have as many Facebook subscribers on your personal profile as you want. Also, (and I didn’t realize that) when people send you a friend request they automatically become one of your subscribers. But as soon as you approve them they move from subscriber status to friend.
2. Enabling  Facebook subscribe kind of lifts the friends limit and gives you a whole new marketing channel. You need to be careful with your approach though as you are mixing close friends and family with people you may not know.
3. Since they are connected with you on your personal profile users feel closer to you. The atmosphere is warmer and friendlier compared to the more business-like fan page. Being one of your subscribers is the next best thing to being a friend.
4. The news feed tends to favor personal profiles.  I don’t know if you have noticed it, but I sure have. I get a lot more engagement and interaction on my personal profile compared to my fan page. (Well, then again, I don’t have that many fans yet either.)
5. You get two chances to getting seen in the news feed when you build both your Facebook subscribers and your fan base. That’s a pretty cool benefit, don’t you think?
6. Your subscriber interaction expands to include your subscriber’s friends and their subscribers. So now you are reaching a broader audience getting more news feed visibility, more exposure and that all-important extra EdgeRank.
7. When you always share valuable content that your friends and subscribers are eager to get and share, then they won’t mind if you drop in that occasional promotional message. Tread with caution here though and do that sparingly. The best ratio is 9:1. Nine personal messages to one promo.

So, these were the pros for enabling the Facebook subscribe option, but like every coin has two sides, this one does also.

The Cons for enabling Facebook subscribe.

1. Having to manage both a fan page and personal profile could be a lot of work.  Also, some of your friends could be offended if you mix promotional messages with your personal ones.
2. You could open yourself up to being spammed or to people posting their own promotional messages on your personal profile. That’s happened to me before. The easy way to deal with this is to just delete those messages and blocking people who do spam you. Another way to eliminate a lot of spam is by adjusting your privacy settings and tweak who can send you friend requests and who can post on your timeline.

So, if you haven’t yet …

I bet you’re dying to know how to turn on
Facebook Subscribe

It’s quite simple. Just go to http://www.facebook.com/about/subscribe and you will see the subscriber option in the top right corner.

Once you have enabled subscribers you may want to tweak your privacy settings. Just click on “Privacy Settings” in the top right corner and then navigate to “How You Connect.”

Here’s a screenshot of mine.

By the way, you may also tweak your settings in “How Tags Work” and “Limit the Audience for Past Posts” to those you are most comfortable with.

Obviously you can see there are many more pros than cons to the Facebook Subscribe option. So if you are an online marketer like me, I think you definitely want to turn it on in order to gather more exposure.

You know how much I love getting your feedback so please make some noise below in the comments.

To Your Massive Success!

Ilka Flood
The Enlightened Networker

Related posts:

1. How to Add Networked Blogs to Your Facebook Page for More SEO
2. Unfriend Finder Lets You Know When Someone Unfriends You on Facebook
3. Timeline for Facebook Pages – Love it or Hate it
4. Facebook Influence – Why I Highly Recommend FBinfluence
5. Where to Get the Coolest Facebook Timeline Cover

Change is good!

If you haven’t been living under a rock you’ve heard about all the changes Facebook made in recent weeks. Actually, I heard there were somewhere around 90 changes in the last 60 days alone. Now that’s a TON!

The biggest change obviously is the new Timeline for Pages.

Well, as a matter of fact the early release of the new Timeline for Pages was even a surprise for Facebook Guru Mari Smith. I am following Mari’s new course “Extreme Fanbase Growth” trying to immediately implement what I learn.

But sometimes life gets in the way and since I was a little late in (finally) implementing a “Welcome Tab” on my Facebook Page it bit me in the butt. Because, now it’s obsolete.

Imagine that! No more like-gating!

Darn it!  Well, so much for procrastination!

I really don’t mind Facebook rolling out the “Timeline for Pages” early though. Honestly, I was looking forward to it because now that I have gotten used to it I really like that interface on the Personal Profile Pages. I just didn’t expect it so soon.

(And it really messed up my blog posting schedule as well, because now I’m scrambling to get my ducks in order before March 30^th when the new Timeline for Pages becomes mandatory.)

Don’t you just love it? Every time you think you’re up-to-date on Facebook and you have a little breathing room they smack you with another update you have to take care of.

But anyway, there’s nothing you or I can do about it short of leaving Facebook altogether. And with 845.000.000 users, half of which log in on a daily basis, I’m not ready to discard Facebook as a marketing tool. Are you?

I have been on several lengthy webinars since last week with one more to go tomorrow by one of my favorite Facebook Ninjas, Amy Porterfield. Gosh, I’m so glad I bought her course “FBinfluence” because I get lifetime updates.

Here are some very important points I learned about the new Timeline for Pages …

_ Absolutely NO Calls to Action in your Timeline Cover Image. You can get in big trouble and lose your account. So, no phone numbers, email addresses, URLs, ect. (As a matter of fact, I will have to edit my timeline cover images for my Personal Profile page now because I do have my web address in there.) Oh, and no arrows either!

_ No more like-gating on the new Timeline for Pages. (I already mention that above.) Visitors land on your timeline by default now. Some people are not happy about this because they are losing a great opportunity for opt-ins. However there are ways around this because custom tabs are still available and you now can even create a custom image for your tabs which helps with drawing attention to them.

_ More Space to Show Off Your Pictures. Instead of only having 520 pixels available in the past you now have 810 pixels available to really make a statement. Facebook wants us to design our Pages as if it was our primary hub. It also wants to make Pages more social proof oriented.

It’s all about pictures. Pictures tell stories and now you have more space to tell your stories or show your videos. And of course pictures and videos are GREAT for EdgeRank because they get more likes, comments and shares.

There is so much more that I could share from what I have learned during these mammoth sessions but this post is getting quite long already.

Update: I have recently purchased Rosh Khan’s FanPage Simplified  which is “The Most Complete Step-by-Step Professional Training System for the New Facebook Fan Page Timeline Layout.” And…it comes with some amazingly cool FREE Fan Page Cover Images. So you don’t have to design one from scratch.

But if that is not enough,  here a couple of websites where you can get more of the scoop…

7 New Facebook Changes Impacting Businesses

8 Things Businesses Need To Know About Timeline for Facebook Pages

28 Things You Need To Know About The New Facebook Pages

I hope this post about the new Timeline for Facebook Pages was helpful to you.

You know I always love your feedback, so please leave your comments below.

To Your Massive Success!

Ilka Flood
The Enlightened Networker

Related posts:

1. Where to Get the Coolest Facebook Timeline Cover
2. Facebook Subscribe Pros and Cons
3. How to Add Networked Blogs to Your Facebook Page for More SEO
4. Facebook Influence – Why I Highly Recommend FBinfluence
5. Unfriend Finder Lets You Know When Someone Unfriends You on Facebook

Personally, I haven’t been too concerned about this, because I rarely use the Facebook unfriend option. But it seems to be a very popular question because it often shows up as a search query on my blog. Just today I had several people ask, …

“Will friend know if I unsubscribe them — unsubscribe facebook find out – does facebook tell friend if you unsubscribe – does someone know if I unsubscribe them”

And I get those queries on a regular basis.

So I went to Facebook and did a search for it in the “Help” section but couldn’t come up with an answer. Guess Facebook isn’t too eager to volunteer answers to questions about how to unfriend someone.

Then the funniest thing happened. As I was updating my Buffer app with more great information for my Twitter Followers the answer popped right up in form of a great article on Mashable.

There is actually a browser extension called “Unfriend Finder.” Wouldn’t you know?

How does “Unfriend Finder” work?

Unfriend Finder will alert you when people you have previously been friends with deactivated their account or have removed you from their friends lists.

But first of course, you need to install the script. You can find it at Userscripts.org. If you are using Google Chrome all you need to do is click the green “Install” button and you are ready to go. If you are using Firefox then you will have to install the Greasemonkey add-on first.

As you can see from the screenshots below I am using Google Chrome.

Step one: Get the “Unfriend Finder” extension and install it on your browser.

Step two: Go to Facebook and check it out.

As you can see from the image below, once you have the script installed your Facebook account will show these two changes immediately.

1) You will see an additional tab in the top right-hand corner called “Unfriends.”

2) You will also see and additional link in your “Favorites” right underneath your profile picture on your home page.

Oh, by the way, if you hover your mouse over the tab you will see more useful info. For example the total number of your friends, how many pending friend requests you have and the number of “Unfriends” the Unfriend Finder extension detected.

You will receive a notification when someone unfriends you and a red number appears above the “Unfriends” tab. (Since I just installed the add-on there are no red numbers yet.)

By the way, you will also be notified trough your main notifications. (You know the ones that appear next to your message notifications and friend requests in the top menu bar on Facebook.)

When you click on the “Unfriends” option in your “Favorites” list you will also be able to see who unfriended you, together with the date and time they decided they didn’t want to be friends with you any longer.

As I mentioned earlier above, not only will this script let you know when someone unfriends you, but it also tells you when someone you were friends with deactivates (or re-activates) their profile. I think that can be very helpful as two of my sons just deactivated and reactivated their profiles recently. (Of course they neglected to tell me about it and I was wondering why we were no longer friends, haha.)

Another Helpful Feature of Unfriend Finder:
Pending Friend Requests

This great feature helps you keep track of your “Pending Friend Requests” on Facebook. I don’t know about you, but I sometimes forget whom I sent a friend request to, because I just get so busy. So, now I can check what friends requests are still pending, who ignored them and who cancelled my friend requests. (Although I can’t think of anyone who would ever do such a thing.)

So, there you have it. Check it out for yourself!

Unfriend Finder is compatible with Google Chrome, Firefox, Safari, Opera and Internet Explorer and translated into 65 languages.

If you already have this great add-on installed on your browser go ahead and share your experience with us in the comments below.

To Your Massive Success!

Ilka Flood
The Enlightened Networker

P.S. Please also read the original article about Unfriend Finder on Mashable. Thanks!

P.P.S For more Facebook Insider Tips I invite you to check out Amy Porterfield’s incredible Facebook Influence Course

Related posts:

1. How to Add Networked Blogs to Your Facebook Page for More SEO
2. Facebook Subscribe Pros and Cons
3. Where to Get the Coolest Facebook Timeline Cover
4. Facebook Influence – Why I Highly Recommend FBinfluence
5. Timeline for Facebook Pages – Love it or Hate it

While I am genuinely flattered that somebody values my opinion about them enough to ask me for a recommendation and I love giving them, sometimes that request leaves a bitter taste in my mouth.

Such was the case just this past week and this particular one was a double no-no.

Out of the blue a person I don’t even know send me a “recommendation request”.  Unfortunately, this has happened before and it really makes me very uncomfortable. What made this request even worse was the fact that this person included a shameless promotion for his business.

What was he thinking?

Was he expecting me to just make something up and write a fake recommendation?

Ehm, sorry, but I don’t do that. I don’t make things up. If I don’t know you I won’t recommend you.  I have too much to lose. I am not going to put my credibility and my good name on the line just to make you look good. Uhuh!

Yes, recommendations are extremely powerful because they add credibility and social proof and they give you a lot more validity in what you do. So the more you have the better, right?

Well yes probably. But wouldn’t you rather have someone recommending you who really knows you and can give their honest opinion about you than getting a bunch of generic recommendations that could fit just about anybody?

Before you ask for a recommendation on LinkedIn (or any other place) consider this…

• Use the system within LinkedIn to send your recommendation request rather than sending your own email.
• Only ask people who know you well enough to recommend you. Maybe you’ve done some work for them, been to company events together or helped them out in some way. You don’t want to make someone feel uncomfortable. Or, and that may be just as bad or worse, receive a recommendation that totally misrepresents you.
• If you have never worked together and only know each other online, make sure the person you ask to recommend you knows your personality, your character, your work ethics, what makes you different and stand out. You want to have had some kind of interaction with them where they remember you from so they can genuinely endorse you.
• The best way to get a recommendation is to give one first. Lewis Howes recommends doing just that in his Linked Influence course.  But be genuine and sincere. People can “smell” if your intentions are honorable or if you “just want something in return.”
• Apropos, talking about “return.” Be kind, return the favor and reciprocate!

You kind of get my drift, don’t you? What I am getting at is….

Don’t ask a complete stranger out of the blue…
”Can You Recommend Me?”

That makes that person very uncomfortable and quite frankly, doesn’t say very much about you either.

By the way, getting a recommendation request from a complete stranger really makes me think twice about adding just anyone who sends me a request to join their network on LinkedIn. I will be much more selective in the future as to whom I will add to my network and whom I’m just going to ignore.

Especially on a professional social network like LinkedIn it is more about quality than quantity. With more than 101 million members LinkedIn is the 3^rd largest social network and growing at a steady pace. You want to make sure you conduct yourself in a professional manner.

So, what has been your experience with getting a recommendation request? I always love your feedback so make sure you share it in the comment section below.

To Your Massive Success!

Ilka Flood
The Enlightened Networker

No related posts.

Have you ever wondered what the person who’s email you are reading looks like? Where they live? If they are on Facebook, Twitter or any of the other major social networks?

Well, wonder no more!

Check out some of the cool features of Rapportive

Now you can…

• See there smiling face and know exactly whom you are dealing with.
• See if they live close to you so you can interact on a local basis.
• See their job, company or LinkedIn profile.
• See their latest tweets.
• Connect with them in Facebook or other social networks right from within your Gmail.
• Like and comment on Facebook posts right from your Gmail inbox. (Now, this doesn’t help your EdgeRank because Facebook gives more weight to interaction right within Facebook, but it’s still cool.)
• Set up your Rapportive profile and add your favorite sites. (Click the “Help” section for details.)

Now isn’t this pretty cool?

I find this little piece of technology extremely useful. What do you think?

Why should I install Rapportive?

Here’s why, because it’s all about getting to know your contacts and establishing rapport.

Let’s face it, we online marketers are all very busy. And anything that makes our job a bit easier growing our network is very welcome. Don’t you agree?

I mean, wouldn’t you rather want to have the information of a person you are interested in connecting with right there at your fingertips as you are reading their email versus having to hunt for it in the different social networks?

Well, I do! And I also like to have a face for the people I am corresponding with. I like to know more about them. That helps build that all-important know, like, trust factor.

Rapportive makes that very easy.

Why don’t you give Rapportive a try?

It’s very simple to install. Just a few clicks and you are ready to roll just minutes from now.  Get that little app right here: Rapportive.com

Well, there’s a lot more I could share. But that would be just words. The best way to find out how cool this service is, is to experience it yourself.

So, what are your thoughts? Let’s hear your feedback in the comments below. Especially if you are already using “Rapportive” yourself.

To Your Success,

Ilka Flood
The Enlightened Networker

No related posts.

What? Me? Busted for breaking (any kind of) rules? No way!

Okay, so maybe my halo got a bit tarnished over the years. But most of the time, whenever I did something wrong it was totally unintentional.

All my life I’ve been trying to live by the rules, not break them. Gosh, my kids even tease me because I don’t even cut the tags off of pillows. (You know the ones that say …”Do Not Remove Under Penalty of Law!” …or something like that.)

But it was true. I indeed, although unknowingly, had done something I shouldn’t have.

Bummer! Seems like…

 Twitter doesn’t kid around if you break

the Twitter Rules.

There was no warning and there is no “3 strikes and you’re out” either. You mess up ONCE and you’re outta there!

You will…“Go directly to jail. Do not pass go. Do not collect $200.”

So what happened?

According to “TheCaptain,” who kindly responded to my plea to please release me from Twitter Jail (I don’t look good in stripes)  and let me have my account back …

>>>“It appears you might have signed up for some third-party services which are posting affiliate links through your account. The Automation Rules & Best Practices page has more information about our policies surrounding affiliate advertising.”<<<

Huh? Really? Wow!

Though yes, I was guilty as charged!

I admit, I had used third-party services (such as HootSuite and SocialOomph) to automate posting and I had thrown in an occasional affiliate link here and there. However, I had no idea that this would violate Twitter Rules.

In the meantime I have read the “Automation Rules and Best Practices” page three times and a lot of it is still a bit fuzzy or gets “lost in translation.”  As some of you may know, English is my second language and I continue to have trouble comprehending legalese.

So, if by chance, you are using third-party services to automate your posting on Twitter, you may want to go ahead and read this part of the Twitter Rules yourself. Just to make sure you are on the safe side and not at risk of getting your account suspended.

Trust me, I will definitely do my very best to keep out of trouble on Twitter from now on. Because the last thing I want to happen is to get my account suspended again. Or worse yet…terminated!

In the past I have always tried to live by the 80/20 rule and give 80% value compared to 20% of promotion. Maybe I should change that up a bit and go with the 90/10 rule instead. It can’t hurt to over-deliver on value. And…I will definitely be more careful with automation.

It probably wouldn’t hurt to read ALL of the Guidelines and Best Practices either to make darn sure I won’t be breaking any more Twitter Rules in the future.

What do you think?
To Your Success,

Ilka Flood
The Enlightened Networker

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I couldn’t really recall when it started, but I was amazed to find out that the first email was sent 40 years ago. Can you imagine it’s been FORTY years?

Wow, that totally blew my mind.

Now there are rumors that email will be a thing of the past pretty soon.

Really? C’mon.

But think about it, everyone is texting now on their iPhones and smart phones. How many people are still sending out emails to communicate? Texting is so much quicker and the response can be immediate.

I often find my son watching a movie on his big screen TV, following sports on his laptop and texting his friends on his smart phone… all at the same time. Who said men can’t multi task?

Social Media is going to change how we do EVERYTHING!

There’s a social media revolution going on and it is gaining momentum and it will be changing the way we do anything and everything forever.

I don’t watch much TV but lately I have noticed that many companies have the line “Visit us on Facebook and YouTube” attached to their commercials.

Dr. Denis Waitley said it best…“You’re either online or in the bread line.”

Where would you rather be?

That goes for us network marketers too. If you want to stay in business you better be online. You better include social media as part of your business strategies.

Now, I understand with the constant changes, and they seem to happen faster and faster, it really can get overwhelming .

Social Media: How do you keep up?

You don’t have to join every social network that pops up or you get an invite too. But I would strongly recommend being at least part of the top 3. …Twitter, Facebook and LinkedIn…and probably the new Google+. And I’m saying this, because you never want to underestimate Google. Google wanted to become part of the social media scene for a long time and after some flops may just have found its vehicle with the new Google+ and Google +1.

Here are some of the reasons you want to include social media into your business strategies.

• Facebook – launched in February 2004 and at the time of this writing (July 2011) has more than 750 million users. Everybody and their grandma is on Facebook.  Founder Mark Zuckerberg, who together with his college roommates and fellow computer science students created this social networking platform to keep in touch with each other, probably could not in his wildest dreams have envisioned where his journey would take him as Facebook quickly took on a life of its own. It is still a social network where people stay in touch with friends and family, but more and more businesses join to get information out to their customers and keep in touch.Just to give you one example of how social media will be changing the way business is done. When Netflix recently announced its rate hike customers went onto their Facebook page to express their outrage. News, especially bad news, goes viral very quickly online.
• Twitter – a social networking and micro-blogging service which launched in March of 2006 has long since evolved from a place where people tweet about what they had for lunch to a place where businesses stay in contact with and get feedback from their customers. More and more online marketers as well as traditional companies are using twitter for business. As of this writing the 200+ million users are generating over 200 million tweets a day.
• LinkedIn –launched in May of 2003 and often called “the forgotten social network” quietly snuck up on Facebook and Twitter and now has more than 100 million users in over 200 countries. LinkedIn is more of a business social network. 95% of companies who are using social media for recruitment are using LinkedIn. It’s a network of professionals where the average income of LinkedIn members is around $110,000 dollars a year.

Is Social Media part of YOUR Business Strategies?

“We don’t have a choice on whether we DO social media,
the question is how well we DO it.”
_Eric Qualman.

I happen to agree. How about you?

I believe any business that is brushing off social media as part of their business strategies is missing the boat. You need to go where your customers, clients and prospects are, and that’s online.

What are your thoughts? Are you including social media in your business? I always love to read your feedback so please make some noise in the comment section below. Thanks!

To Your Success,

Ilka Flood
The Enlightened Networker

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