Social media makes it unavoidable: It’s important to engage in the conversation, or you’ll get lost in the crowd. By using a wide variety of imagery and visual techniques, you can represent your brand and get more attention and traffic.

All social media channels, even those that were more text-based, are now focusing on the visual component, thanks to what’s being called the Instagram Effect. Instagram is almost totally visual, relying on images to communicate its message.

Images have grown in size on Facebook, and videos now play automatically. Kissmetrics reports that Facebook “photos get 53% more likes, 104% more comments, and 84% more click-throughs on links than text-based posts.”

Even if you’re not a naturally visual business, such as a design or travel company, there are many ways to visualize the value of your brand, products, and services. There are visual opportunities for everyone to participate in the explosion of visual growth.

Here are four ways to create your visual content for social media:

Tell Stories With Images

When telling a story, think of a designated period of time and how to capture what’s happening. For example, it could be a product launch, a new building, a website makeover, a trade show or conference, a fundraising event, or the development of a prototype.

Whatever you choose to showcase, document it with a sequence of photos or videos. By chronicling the timeline of events, you’re sharing a behind-the-scenes peek and adding visual intrigue and engagement to ordinary processes.

Entertain With Memes

By creating memes – an image with simple accompanying text that represents an idea or makes a statement – you’re sharing your company’s personality. What better way to engage with followers than by highlighting your human side?

Use a quotation with striking typography and other graphic enhancements. Look for your quotes in relevant literature, popular culture, educational news, and even old advertisements.

Decades-old classic print ads from various advertising campaigns are great inspiration for your memes. Try Advertising Archives’ selection for inspiration to see how some brands managed to inspire and entertain without boasting or simply spewing out company slogans.

Information-Rich Infographics 

The popularity of infographics is due to its concentration of valuable information that is formatted to tell a story. Having all that data compiled in one place is a visual feast for the data hungry.

Infographics can illustrate an abstract concept with humor, distinction, and imagination. With one post, you save your followers hours of gathering information on a specific topic.

Piktochart and Easelly are great places to start for do-it-yourself infographics. With ready-made templates and walk-through steps, you can turn your research into a customized visual story.

Online Presentations

Presentations continue to stand out as visually persuasive content. Thanks to the growing number of free online presentation tools, showcasing your own creativity and knowledge is easier than ever.

Besides the well-known Microsoft PowerPoint online, there is also Slideshare, Prezi, Haiku Deck, and Google Slides. With these tools, you can create a visual strategy that fuses art and copy to form a compelling presentation.

To get the best results, start your content creation so both your visual images and text work together to promote a unified concept. The end product should be more than just tacked-on graphics to your documents.

Reinvent the slideshow with a rich digital experience for your audience that’s easy to share across your social media platforms.

When sharing your visual creations, remember not to post every single image across all of your networks. Each social media platform has different image dimensions as well as unique community expectations. Make sure that your message is expressed in a format that reflects each platform’s identity.

For every visual you share, include something that will make your brand recognizable, such as a watermark or logo. By expressing your brand with visual creative planning, you will build trust and stand out from your competition.

The weekend has arrived, and the last thing on your mind is creating social media posts for your small business. It’s the last thing you want to think about on any given day, come to that.

How do you find the time as a small business to be a part of social media? You automate your social media posts, that’s how.

Successful social media automation requires knowing what to automate (and what not to automate), and doing this means choosing the right tools for the job.

Social automation tools can help you not only schedule posts, but manage your communications and find new people to follow.

Here are some social automation tools to get you started. Begin by focusing on one or two social media networks at a time. And don’t get too crazy with the automation. Social automation doesn’t mean removing the social entirely. Conversation and human interaction are irreplaceable.

Zapier

Zapier includes nearly every online platform you can think of – and many you probably never knew existed.

When you make a “Zap” you create a trigger that results in an action. For example, “when I publish a new WordPress post, send a Tweet to Twitter.”

Because there are so many connected web apps, the options for automating events from one platform to another is mind boggling. You select when the Zap happens, and the free plan gives you up to five Zap configurations to set up and run.

IFTTT

“If this, then that” describes the function of this tool. Like Zapier, it lets you create triggers that lead to a particular action.

“If I’m tagged in a photo on Facebook, then send me a text message” is one example of what IFTTT calls a recipe. Each recipe, or automated post, can contain ingredients which give more specific data to the triggers.

An email trigger might contain ingredients such as subject, attachment, received date, and sender’s address. Most of the recipes are checked for new trigger data every fifteen minutes.

Dlvr.it

This is a great app for managing your own content as well as content you find elsewhere to share across Google+ pages, Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, and RSS feeds.

While content is automatically shared or can be placed in a queue, the free version doesn’t allow you to schedule a time for your posts. With the free version, you have up to five feeds, three social profiles, and one photo feed per account.

Twitterfeed

Twitterfeed will curate content to Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, and App.net, allowing you to add RSS feeds for automatic updates. If all you want is to set up an automatic system for newly published posts, yours or another blog you like, this is for you.

There are some customizations, including showing the title of a new post and the link, and adding “RT @username.” Best of all, it’s free.

Bufferapp

The free version of this app allows you to schedule and place in a queue your selected posts, as well as ones they suggest for you.

The networks include Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, Google+ Pages (not profiles), and App.net. You can link one each of these accounts for the free version, and you can store up to ten posts at a time.

There’s also analytics for your Twitter posts that tracks the number of retweets, favorites, mentions, and clicks if you shared a link.

Hootsuite vs. Tweetdeck

These two social media apps are mighty similar, yet be forewarned: don’t let appearances fool you.

Tweetdeck is totally free and compares to Hootsuite’s free version, although Hootsuite also has a paid version with more options. What you get for free on Tweetdeck is initially far more user-friendly than Hootsuite’s overwhelming vista of columns.

However, Hootsuite’s ability to include your Twitter, Facebook, Google+ and LinkedIn profiles, not to mention all the potential columns for your different Twitter lists, gives you much more social media management.

In other words, why is anyone comparing them at all?

With either platform, you can schedule your tweets/posts ahead of time, sit back, and enjoy the show.

This is exactly what you mean to do on the weekend, after all, while still being able to engage your audience. Like I said, you need these tools.

When you automate social media, it’s important that you understand its limitations. Social media automation will help you be more efficient, but it’s not meant to replace actually being social with your audience.

Here are important things to practice when you automate your online social presence.

Different posts for different folks

Remember to customize your posts to remain relevant for different social networks. Each network has a distinct style, so it’s best to try and match that style to make your best impression.

When posting across the social media spectrum, you could appear insincere and robotic if you don’t try to simulate the unique style for each network. Learn each network’s best practices and follow them for improved engagement.

Schedule posts no more than a week out

By scheduling your posts no further out than a week, you have better control over keeping them timely. What makes sense today could quickly lose relevancy due to current events.

Too much scheduling isn’t your goal. Social media loses its social aspect if you’re creating a full-on automation system. By not scheduling too far in advance, it helps to keep a customer focus.

Be aware of current events

Part of keeping to a one-week scheduling mark is being aware of what’s happening in the world. Some of the greatest social faux pas have been from well-intentioned posts that went awry due to a dramatic change in current events.

Whether it be a natural disaster, political movement, or national tragedy, staying abreast of current events is critical to your social media success.

Grow your global appeal

Perhaps one of the most immediate benefits to automation is scheduling posts for different time zones. Increasing your impact across time zones helps you to grow a global audience.

Even small businesses are able to create a global conversation about their products and services with a well-planned automated social media schedule.

Follow The 5-3-2 Rule

Use The 5-3-2 Rule of social media to keep a human voice and keep your audience first. What this means is out of ten posts, five are from other sources, three are from you, and two are personal.

When you increase your content curation, none of your posts should be direct sells, and they should all be relevant to your audience.

Think personal

As part of the two out of ten posts in the 5-3-2 Rule, your personal posts can include anything that’s not considered urgent.

Think of posting quotes, retweets and reshares, and audience-focused ideas and thoughts.

Automate your blog posts

Because you want to share your latest blog posts to as many social media networks as you can with as little effort and time as possible, automation is key.

You can set up your account so all new posts get automatically posted to all your social media channels. Make sure that your content formatting makes sense for each network. You don’t want to overtly appear like an automaton.

You can also post new content more than once in order to reach a wider audience. It helps to reformat your post by using a different headline.

Never automate interactions with your customers

Customers know when they are interacting with an automaton rather than a human. Social media is your opportunity to show your human side. Take that away, and you’ve removed the social aspect.

Obviously, any troubleshooting and problem solving must be handled by a person. Outside of fixing a common problem with an automated response, anything else is bound to make matters worse.

Even responding with an automated “thank you” can be risky. Your chance to show genuine appreciation is lost, and customers often like social media due to the opportunity to interact and have real, individual responses.

Use the time you’ve freed up with filling your social media queue by creating spontaneous, last-minute social updates, responding to your customers’ needs, and finding great content to share.

Twitter has a brand new look. Initially the new profile was only available for a select few, but as of today all tweeps can get the new Twitter profile.

The new profile gives you a large Facebook-like image header, a much larger profile picture, a featured tweet, and a prominent media section.

The old look:

The new look:

Twitter’s tag line is “meet the new you,” which highlights the fact that since it’s only your profile page that’s changed, no one will notice unless they travel there for a look-see.

The changes are for your convenience, although you will sport an improved Twitter “home page” appearance should anyone stop by. One of the greatest conveniences, if you’re into this sort of thing, is checking to see if the tweeps you’re following are following you back.

The profile shots of all your tweeps got larger too when you view them in the “following” and “followers” lists. While it takes longer to go through and view them, a quick look shows you if a recent follow-back has subsequently unfollowed you. (I know, the nerve!).

Updated look of following/followers list:

New Photo Sharing Option

The updated media section groups and counts up all your videos and photos for easy retrieval. If you use Twitter as a way to collect favorite images or videos, you can click on the link and create a unique page with all your tweets featuring media.

With the new photo sharing, now you can also include up to four images per tweet and tag up to ten people in a photo.

Notice the Link?

If you have a website link posted, this stands out more in the new look. Just below this is the date you began using Twitter, something which wasn’t featured before. This could spell bad news for those folks who continually get banned and then reestablish another identity.

Featured Tweet

The new pinnable featured tweet places your favorite tweet at the top of your tweets on your profile page. This gives would-be followers a way to see what they can expect from you, so choose one that reflects you well. If you have an event to promote, select a timely tweet to display for your visitors.

Every time you tweet, the new one replaces it, but when you refresh the page, the pinned tweet resurfaces back to the top.

You can view your tweets with three lists: tweets (without replies), tweets with media attached, and tweets and replies combined. The list option is still there for those of you who want to create categories of their tweeps, and you can still keep them private if you choose.

Naysaying Tweeps

Some complaints to the new look include no background customization option, inability to move header image that is automatically uploaded during update, and an overwhelming resistance to any Facebook lookalikes.

Dear Twitter. Stop trying to be Facebook. Even Facebook doesn’t want to be Facebook. #NewTwitter

— Lewis Somerscales (@LewisHammer) April 22, 2014

It appears that tweeps are vehemently against any remake that remotely resembles Facebook, although I think the similarities are very superficial. There’s no confusing the two platforms, in any case. Not to mention that the user experience differs widely.

Where else can you interact with like-minded strangers from the web?

Lookin’ swell, #NewTwitter! Once us Tweeps can adjust, that is. @kreativekonnect knows what I’m talkin’ about! 😉 pic.twitter.com/tBSslmnWsk
— Kacee Erhard (@KaceeAngels) April 23, 2014

Despite the complaints, the changes are intended to bring new users to Twitter. Make the best of it and seek out others to invite and engage in the Twitter community.

Upcoming Real-Time Notifications

Look for a change to live notifications when someone replies, favorites, or retweets one of your Tweets. You have to be logged into Twitter to receive these notices. Direct messages (DMs) and new follower notices can also be seen as they occur.

Twitter says they are fully interactive, so you’ll be able to reply, favorite, retweet, and follow directly from the notice box. In settings you will be able to select which notifications you want to see.

Let us know in the comments how the #NewTwitter works for you.

Hashtags are unavoidable. They’re proliferating the social media universe like multiplying digital bunnies.

Hashtags began on Twitter, and are now on Instagram, Facebook, Google+, and Pinterest. For a better understanding on what hashtags are, read an earlier post “Hashtags Are Invading.”

Understanding how to use hashtags on social media will give you a stronger social media presence. In other words, effective hashtag use will help you be a cool cat.

Here are some benefits:

Search-ability

Effective hashtag use will give your posts more exposure. By using popular hashtags, you can contribute to a conversation and allow people to easily search and find you.

Since everyone’s searching for #cats, for example, you can hop on the cat convo by using relevant hashtags. Rather than sifting through endless feeds, people will use a hashtag search to quickly narrow it down to what they wish to read.

Find new followers

Allowing people to easily search for your Tweets, updates, posts, etc., gives them access to your profile. You might also decide to follow or circle new people who reflect the same interests.

Create a hashtag for an event, like the annual South by Southwest Interactive, Film and Music Festival and its short and memorable #SXSW. They’ve made a place where things can happen and people can connect.

Establish a reputation

When you add value to a conversation, you’re inviting others to engage with you and look for your input. Using hashtags is a way to initiate and join in conversations around a specific hashtag topic.

When Malaysia Airlines flight 370 disappeared, it was easy to discover the latest news from reliable sources, as well as connect with others through the use of #MH370.

Get information

Quick hashtag searches zero in on the information you’re looking for. Thanks to hashtags, you can easily find the latest on subjects like #catband, which debuted on Instagram and found its way to Twitter.

On Facebook, you can click a hashtag to see a feed of posts with that same hashtag. You can only see posts that are shared with you or are shared with everyone. This is a great way for brands to add value to a topic that’s trending.

In Pinterest, hashtags are only clickable and searchable in pin descriptions. So don’t bother putting them in your profile or board descriptions. On Twitter, adding a couple of hashtags in your profile will greatly enhance your search-ability.

Here are some hashtag rules of thumb:

Be relevant

When creating a hashtag, think specific. For example, try #IMACRAZYCATLADY rather than just #cats. Chances are, the more specific one will help people to search for your topic.

Help other like-minded Tweeters, Instagrammers, Pinners and Google+ users to find you by making sure your hashtags describe your topic. Don’t be overly specific, however, and create a hashtag that’s too long.

Be observant

Pay attention to what’s being hashtagged through searches and your posts, pins, and tweets. Google+ will automatically create a hashtag for you in the top right of your post.

Don’t jump into a hashtag conversation to self-promote or post something entirely off topic. This kind of hashtag-jacking will only drive people away.

Hashtag Limits

Twitter recommends using no more than two hashtags per tweet. Overuse of hashtags is irritating and difficult to read. Instead of attracting followers, you will scare them away.

On Instagram, the limit is thirty hashtags per post. Any more than that, and your comment won’t post, thank goodness. Enhance readability to longer  hashtags and use camel case by adding capital letters.

While tweets with hashtags are “55% more likely to be ReTweeted,” too many have the opposite effect. Jimmy Fallon and Justin Timberlake demonstrate the hashtag addiction phenomenon for you in this YouTube video.

Choose with care

Choose wisely and don’t make a hashtag you’ll regret. Pay attention to trending hashtags and avoid misusing those that are sensitive.

Entenmann’s used #notguilty during a high profile murder trial where this hashtag was trending and had to apologize for their unintentional insensitivity.

Knowing how to use hashtags on social media is the difference between being a dopey dog clueless cat and a cool cat. Be cool and use them well.