Monthly Archives: February 2016

Tips on Tuesday

Today’s tip can apply to all your social media channels.

About Us Aire Media

Remember to use the “About” section on your social media profiles to your advantage.  You should take the opportunity to give an overview of your business and what you offer.  Keep it short but engaging, the aim is to spark people’s interest in you as a brand.  Make sure your website URL appears on your profile so people can find out more and, ultimately, contact you.

If people have landed on your social media profile you want to make it as easy as possible for them to find out further information.  The better social media profiles are clear, concise and clean. 

By next week make sure your profile is up to date.  We will check! (Just kidding, there’s no test, but this is a great chance to do your housekeeping!)

Tips on Tuesday

Today I am going to visit the current rumours on Facebook surrounding a wide scale hacking of accounts.

Facebook Aire Media Blog

You might have seen on your timeline a number of posts like this: –

Urgent
All the accounts are being hacked. The profile picture and your name are used to create a new Facebook account. Then they want your friends to add them, your friends think it’s you and accept. From this moment, the pirates can write what they want under your name!! ….. Please do not accept a 2nd invitation from me!! Copy this message on your wall to warn your friends!
Do not share. Make a copy and paste this message.
Just in case, protect your accounts!.

For once, unlike many of these viral warnings, it seems there is some element of genuine risk.  However, to put it into context.  Firstly accounts aren’t being hacked, no-one is entering your account on Facebook, they are copying your profile picture and creating a new account – so in effect cloning you.   Secondly, the level of occurence is in dispute, there is certainly no suggestion currently that it is all the accounts on Facebook.

So, what can you do to avoid this happening? 

  1.  Keep your account privacy settings high – my personal account is locked down so that if you searched my name, I wouldn’t appear at all.
  2.  Keep your friends list hidden – this means that if people do find your profile, they cannot see who you’re friends with apart from mutual friends.
  3. There is no harm in putting a basic warning on your Timeline, along the lines of “I only have one Facebook account, please do not accept another friend request from me”.  I would recommend rather than sharing/copying and pasting a viral post, simply post a warning.  Viral content is too easily ignored.
  4. Although this isn’t a hacking attempt, it is important to change your Facebook password regularly.

 

Tips on Tuesday

A slightly different format to our usual Tips on Tuesday slot as today is Safer Internet Day.  The safety of young people on the internet is one of our passions at Aire Media – in fact, we launched with a post about helping parents make sure their children are using Social media safely – so we thought we would #shareaheart with the wonderful people at the UK Safer Internet Centre and share our top tips for young people to stay safe online.

Safer Internet Day Aire Media

  1.  Never reveal your passwords to other people.  Choose a password that is really strong by using a mix of letters and numbers.  Make sure you change them regularly.
  2. Make sure you think before you post.   Never post anything you wouldn’t want your parents or teachers to read.  As soon as you press send, the information/image is no longer private.
  3. Be kind.  If you think your post could upset someone, don’t post it.
  4. Be really careful about what you share online.  Don’t give clues about where you live in either the information or the images you post. 
  5. Make sure you check your privacy settings regularly.  Bear in mind that you might think you’re only sharing something amongst close friends, but that isn’t always the case.
  6. Be careful who you talk to online.  If someone you don’t know tries to add you as a friend, ignore them and block them.   Don’t give people online your address and phone number.

Social media platforms have an age limit for a reason.  It is to keep young people safe.  The people at Linneyville made this brilliant infographic giving details of the age limits across all social media channels.

Social Media Age Limits Aire Media

We hope you enjoyed today’s slightly different Tips on Tuesday.  If you would like to book Rachel to come talk to children or parents about staying safe online, please contact us here!

More Twitter rumours

Hot on the heels of the addition of the Twitter Moments feature and the news that character limits could be expanded, Twitter has once again sent the rumour mills into overdrive.

TwitterTipsAireMedia

A rumour is doing the rounds that Twitter will soon be run by an algorithm.  This means that rather seeing your timeline chronological order, Twitter will reorder them as per what it believes you want to read in your timeline, much like Facebook.

Buzzfeed suggest the change could come in as early as next week, with a test run on a small number of users going well enough for content to be distributed more widely.

Predictably Twitter appears to have gone into meltdown over this rumour with the trending topic #RIPTwitter.  Suffice to say, the majority of Twitter users seem unhappy at the potential change.

So what do you think – will this affect the way you use Twitter?  It certainly seems to be paving the way for a more monetized use of Twitter – will business have the facility to promote their tweets into your timeline via paid ads?

Twitter themselves have thus far declined to comment.

Let us know your thoughts or join in the debate on Twitter.