Everything You Need to Know about Social Media

Without Having to Call A Kid

Greta Van Susteren

• Publisher: Simon & Schuster
• Year: 2017
• Print ISBN: 9781501132445
• eBook ISBN: 9781501132452
• Topic: Business
• Subtopic: Digital Marketing
• Index: Business

A simple, step-by-step guide to the major social media platforms—Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Instagram, Snapchat, and more—by former news anchor and media maven Greta Van Susteren.

Chapter 1

GETTING STARTED AND GETTING BETTER

If you email and text, you already know the basics of social media. Stripped of all the bells and whistles, social media is email and texting on steroids. Everything is bigger, goes farther, and sounds louder. Just as you can send a video or a photo with a text or email, you can post it on a social media site. In fact, most smartphones offer you the option to email, text, or post on Facebook, Twitter, or Instagram with the same single click. But social media is the ultimate email Reply All button. What you are sharing—or what your family, friends, and coworkers are sharing—is going everywhere.

GretaGrams

According to data from the Radicati Group, more than 2.5 billion people around the world use email—in the next couple of years, that number will be closer to 3 billion. That means about one in three people on Earth is on email.

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If you want to become a social media master, you need to start by understanding your preferred ways to text and email. How do you communicate? Do you use full sentences—subject, verb, object? Do you spell everything out or go with abbreviations? How about when texting? More than 80 percent of Americans text—in fact, they send twice as many texts from their smartphones as they make phone calls. Americans alone send 69,000 text messages every second and six billion texts every day.

How you communicate on email and while texting tells you a lot about how you will fare on social media if you are a new adapter—or where your greatest pitfalls lie if you are already using it. If you tend to use abbreviations and shorthand in your texting and email life, you will keep your posts short. But someone who doesn’t know your style might misread what you are saying, particularly if you are trying to convey more than one piece of information or more than one view or opinion. On the flip side, are you a careful reader of what other people send to you? Or do you misinterpret their words? That’s a flag that you might mis-react to a social media post. If you are a rapid responder to texts and emails, you might be very quick to fire back on social media when it might be better to pause and evaluate. Knowing your own email and texting style will help you do more on social media—and do it better.

What’s the Right Site for You?

One of the great things about social media is that you get to choose. You can sign up for and try out multiple sites. They are all free. Then you can see which one or ones have the best fit for you. Some people bounce back and forth on sites like Instagram, Facebook, and Twitter. People also enter, exit, and take breaks. But before we get you logged on to the major sites, here’s a communication refresher on what’s doing on social media and also a few things that you should and should not do. As you’ll see, I can benefit from these tips myself.

Backward Is the New Forward

If you are daunted by social media and its new language, here’s the good news: you already mastered a new language when you learned how to email and text. You’ve learned to be fast and, increasingly, how to be brief. I still remember a time when emails were wordy, almost like long letters. But today, emails often look a lot like something you might see on social media. In the old days, it would have taken probably a five-minute conversation to convey what is said in this email with just one word:

I knew exactly what my good friend, Elaine, was talking about. We didn’t need five minutes. We didn’t need full sentences that were grammatically correct. The hashtag said it all.

Hashtags, #, began as a way to search for tweets about a single topic on Twitter, but they are now used across social media to allow you to find other posts on similar topics and to link your post to those topics. In the big picture, using a hashtag says that your post is part of a common theme, topic, or idea. If you are over 50 (and even if you aren’t), #downsizing is definitely a common topic. Hashtags also allow you to inject some humor into what you say—#unsuckDCmetro is very popular in the greater Washington, DC, area, which has been having very serious issues with its subway system. And of course the hashtag, #HopeMills is what set in motion the amazing rescue of Chris Williams from the floodwaters of North Carolina, which you just read about.

In fact, words themselves are increasingly becoming optional. We are reverting to a pre-language time, the era of animal skin fashion and grunt and point. After all, what are LOL and ROFL (Laugh Out Loud and Rolling on the Floor Laughing, respectively) but twenty-first-century keyboard grunts?

Texting in particular gets us in touch with our inner cave dweller. Before there was an alphabet, people made marks on cave walls or created pictograms. To me, an emoji looks a lot like a modern-day cave sign displayed on a high-resolution screen.

And now Apple is putting emojis right on its keyboards.

My Social Media Life

How Can You Use Social Media? Real People on Their Social Media Lives

Jill S., South Carolina

How long have you been on social media?

I’ve been using social media about ten years. I started out on a blog, and then as Twitter and Facebook became well established and proved they had safeguards, I began to use them. I choose the ones I use carefully, based on how well they protect their users.

What platform do you use most on social media?

Twitter is the one I frequent most often. It is a challenge for me to get my often long- winded opinions and general comments limited to 140 characters. I like the power to be able to block followers I find offensive, too. It gives me a good news source that is up to the minute as well as lots of humorous comments to enjoy.

Do you use social media for business?

I do not use it for my own business, but I do use it to comment on other businesses or products. I purchased a dryer a few years ago, and it stopped running in the first month, plus a knob broke. It had a warranty, but the local business wasn’t even making a service call. I tweeted a “Beware of this product” tweet, and within two hours had a private direct message from GE through Twitter setting up the free service call and part replacements for me! That was amazing. So when I now purchase something I am pleased with, I mention it to promote business for a company that has produced a good product. And if I have a complaint, I tweet that! On Facebook, you can get help directly from companies by going right to their Facebook pages. Social media has made the customer feel important again.

Have you stopped using any social media platforms?

I registered for and stopped using LinkedIn. I was being asked to link with people I had never heard of and did not care to be associated with or vouch for strangers.

What social media do your friends use?

Most use Facebook. Some use Twitter. I like Twitter better because it is much less personal. Facebook’s main use for me is to stay in touch and get news from family and close friends who live far away. I do not like being chased by some men on there who just see your picture and read your profile. If I was shopping for love, I would use something like Match.com. I use Facebook to see my great-niece’s and great-nephews’ current photos and read about their activities. I don’t need to know who just had a wart removed! Some people tell way too many personal things on social media.

Do you use Snapchat?

I find I can live without it. I tried it when it first started, and it just did not appeal to me. I take few photos, and it seemed most of it had photos involved. I may be the last person on Earth who has yet to take a selfie!

Do you use Instagram?

Again, it seems to be based mostly on photos, and I rarely photograph anything. I use funny shots of others on Twitter. The only place my real photo shows up is on Facebook.

But at the same time we are using fewer words, the audience for those few words is expanding exponentially. Recipients can forward what you write to anyone. And what they don’t forward, a hacker might. That’s exactly what happened to Hillary Clinton’s presidential campaign when WikiLeaks released nearly 40,000 emails sent and received by her campaign chair, John Podesta. Some were highly embarrassing, some were even worse than that. It is very hard to have anything resembling a private conversation online.

Our parents, grandparents, and even great-grandparents appreciated this. They had party lines on their telephones, where neighbors and operators could hear their calls. Someone down the street could pick up his or her receiver, listen in, and even join the conversation. Modern social media is basically a return to the party line, a massive, worldwide party line, where nothing is private, and anyone and everyone can chime in. Today, if you want privacy, you need to pick up the phone and make a call.

It’s not just the vast audience that makes social media so powerful, it’s the speed with which an image, idea, or piece of information can move. But here’s the danger: when it comes to social media, speed can be deadly. Shorthand leads to misinterpretations and hurt feelings, and the need to be fast leads to mistakes. I know because I’ve made some doozies.

You may be thinking #StopTheWorldIWantToGetOff? I don’t blame you. I often do, too. But we don’t have the luxury of stepping off, so together we can find ways to enjoy the ride.

Blonde Woman, Al Gore, and Me: #EpicEmailFail

It was a good idea by software designers, a way to save our email, text messages, and even just basic documents from typos, misspellings, and other awkward errors. It’s called autocorrect, and it’s designed to kick in and rewrite a word the moment we’ve stopped typing it or even fix the word as we are typing it. It’s also how “Greta” became “Great.” Invariably, when I type my name, one of my devices converts “Greta” to “Great.” I’ve lost count of how many apology texts and emails I have sent after signing myself: Best, Great. (My onetime executive producer had the opposite problem. After years of writing “Greta,” her autocorrect adapted so that any time she wanted to call something “great,” it overrode her and announced, “Greta”!)

But there’s another feature of autocorrect—a feature that allows it to automatically finish out a word or a name as you type. It’s a particularly common feature for names when you want to send someone an email or a text. Usually after a couple of letters, it spells out the name of the person you most frequently write to. Usually, but not always.

A few years ago, I was in New York after hosting my former Fox News show, On the Record, in FOX’s New York studios. I had a small apartment there for when work took me to New York—no worries about having to book a hotel room when the UN General Assembly opens. That night, I invited a longtime colleague and friend, Debi, whom I’ve worked with since we were both at CNN back in 1991, along with one of my producers to my apartment so we could all catch up. While we were still at the TV studio, Debi had become a walking allergy ad and a...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Dedication
• Epigraph
• Introduction
• 1 Getting Started and Getting Better
• 2 Facebook
• 3 Twitter
• 4 Linkedin
• 5 Instagram
• 6 Snapchat
• 7 Personal Broadcasting and Communicating
• 8 Social Media, Privacy, and You
• 9 Parting Posts
• Acknowledgments
• About the Author
• Index
• Copyright