Reddit

Nobody Liked This (Facebook pt. 1)

Posted on by Tim Kuefler

Facebook is a huge social network. Like seriously huge.

This we already know.

With just over 1.79 billion users, it’s even more popular than YouTube, which has roughly 1 billion users, but definitely more so than Instagram (5M) and Twitter combined (3M).

With such an incredible base of people using it on a regular basis, it’s kinda impossible to not jump on the Facebook bandwagon. Yes, there is an argument to be made that younger people are moving towards social media networks like Instagram. And it is true that Tumblr, Reddit, and Pinterest are growing in little leaps as well, but when it comes to large scale networking, Facebook is king of the hill.

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The Social Network

And it even has a 2010 movie made about it which we affectionately know as The Social Network – an award winning movie that received Academy Awards for Best Adapted Screenplay, Best Original Score, and Best Film Editing.

You’ve probably seen the movie too. And whether you have or not, I’m gonna give a quick recap on it. It tells the story of friends Mark Zuckerberg (Jesse Eisenberg) and Eduardo Saverin (Andrew Garfield) who build a website called Thefacebook for ivy league students to meet and date, while Zuckerberg has been simultaneously employed by Harvard twins Cameron and Tyler Winklevoss (Armie Hammer) to build The Harvard Connection. The Winklevoss’ eventually sue Zuckerberg for stealing their idea, while Napster co-founder Sean Parker (Justin Timberlake) works his way in on Zuckerberg to improve upon the website, while also convincing him to push Saverin out.

It’s a gripping movie which puts a dark twist on the decade of 2000-2009 and also tells a rather human story about social media.

Facebook Marketing For Creatives

But the thing is, you’re a creative professional, and you need to start marketing yourself better. You really should find a way to get your work out there and in the hands of the people who want to see your content.

I know those people exist, because I run into them all the time in both my real life AND digital travels, and it’s not that difficult to reach them. You have to understand the basics of Facebook marketing first.

Facebook has three major ways of connecting users to content – Pages, ads, and groups. Each of them has a particular value and purpose, but by combining them together you’ll learn how to get where you’re going and effectively to boot.

  1. Facebook pages are to individual profiles what corporations are to small businesses. This is where you share content with your followers and get them involved in your personal brand. You have to set up your business page if you want to get to the ads step, so do that first. Then focus on lifestyle over product. Also want to be actively involved in comments and service… this can include incentivizing your user base and sharing user content too.
  2. Facebook ads are targeted content that you share with a specific audience. The goal is to share with those consumers that fit a particular audience and ideally it will highlight particular aspects of your brand. You’ll want to have a clear objective in mind, rotate ads often to prevent disengagement, and target key data points.
  3. Facebook groups are different from pages in that they provide a place for people to get together and share content of a similar effect. It’s more community minded and less brand driven, which means that you can learn a lot about what people think of you/your business by asking questions and starting conversations.

Now to be perfectly honest, those are simply the tools in the tool-belt, what you really need are a set of instructions and a how-to guide on construction. But in order to do that, I’ll have to write more about it, and that’s better served for another theory. After all, we only retain about 3-10% of new information in a single pass, so I’ll let you mull over this for a few weeks and then come back at you with part two. Sounds good? Excellente.

I hope you have an excellent evening dear readers, and to my American fans, I hope your new president treats you well and is a good steward to the global community.

Tim!

 

 

Here For A Good Time, Not A Long Time (Pomodoro Technique)

Posted on by Tim Kuefler

Wednesday is very easily becoming my favourite day of the week, dear readers! I get to share with you resources to better yourselves, ways work on your skill set, inspiring figures to keep you motivated, and all the while provide you with a framework to build your art around so that you are creating work that you care about.

No easy task, for sure. But damn if it isn’t a fun challenge for me!

Today’s post is no different as I have another great element of the skills to invest in series that I want to spend some more time on.

Get it, because we are going to focus a bit more on Time Management. That’s right, time management, the area of life that we all feel a lack of control over. I may have been inspired by Daylight Savings Time or it may have been conveniently timed, but time is precious, and there are a number of people that would tell you “time is money,” which is the equivalent of saying, use up your time and get value out of life.

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I would argue the opposite way on this topic. Time is precious, money comes and goes, so don’t trade your time for money. Instead learn to work with time and be conscious of it, so that you can respect it properly. Time wont wait for you – much like common sense, everyone has a different perception of the concept, and reality is far different than what we usually think.

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So what does that mean for us, timotheories? How do we become better at respecting time and understanding the value of it?

Well, I am glad you asked friends, because this week’s post is all about one of my favourite time management tools. It’s incredibly easy to pick up, improves your results quickly, and is a decent amount of fun. Which is hard to believe, I know.

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I read about it on Reddit of all places a few years ago. Shocker, I know. It’s called the Pomodoro technique, and according to their official website more than 2 million people have already read and benefited from its teachings.

It really is an interesting process and I would be doing the process a disservice by detailing it myself, so I’ve decided to use Wikipedia’s break down for you, exactly as how it works.

 

There are six stages in the technique:

  1. Decide on the task to be done.

2. Set the pomodoro timer to n minutes (traditionally n=25)

3. Work on the task until the timer rings. If a distraction pops into your head, write it down, but immediately get back on task.

4. After the timer rings, put a checkmark on a piece of paper.

5. If you have fewer than four checkmarks, take a short break (3-5 minutes), then go to step 1.

6. Else (i.e. after four pomodoros) take a longer break (15-30 minutes), reset your checkmark count to zero, then go to step 1.

But that’s not the only important part of the technique – the elements of planning and tracking are key to making it work too.

You have to put your tasks for the day into a “to-do” list and estimate time needed for each task. As you complete your pomodoros, you add checkmarks, icons, or whatever visual symbol you like to each task. This is to identify how long the task truly takes as well as provide yourself with positive feelings about your commitment to working in this way. If you complete a task inside of a pomodoro, you spend the remaining time overlearning the task, to help aid in automation of the task and further reinforcement of the technique.

The breaks also help to maintain focus during the periods of work and keep your mind and body active throughout the work period, avoiding burnout and managing distractions better.

I think the coolest aspect of the Pomodoro technique though is that you are learning to work with time, rather than finding it as an adversary. And if you are stuck for ideas of how to spend your short breaks, you can do some simple desk exercises, organizational chores, short self-administered hand or neck massages, or getting a light snack in.

But what do you think?

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Please leave some comments, subscribe to the blog if you haven’t yet, and if you want to get social, please like my Facebook page, follow my Instagram, and follow my Twitter too! See you tomorrow with something timely my friends.

Tim!

Have You Read It? (Reddit)

Posted on by Tim Kuefler

And now for something new and different!

That seems to have been a theme these past few weeks on timotheories, eh Pacha?

You know what I mean… I tell you I’m going to try something out here, and then I simply start doing it. Not to sound like a broken record, but that’s one of the major points of this blog, to give creative types new information, different perspectives, and a forum to think about topics that might not normally get together IRL. Eh Pacha?

That’s why Wednesdays are henceforth known as WISDOM WEDNESDAY’S. The plan is to share with you a resource I’ve found to be useful, usually something from the world-wide-web.

Yeah, I’m going to focus primarily on websites, but I’m sure to venture into the realm of books (people still read), inspirational quotes and such, documentaries, and interesting people of course.

But where the heck should I start?

Well I have a pretty fantastic resource that lots of folks have heard about, but I’m not sure that everyone uses as much as they could. I am referring to a little old community that has been around for the better part of a decade. A wonderful place called Reddit.

I’ll start by sharing this tidbit of the site, from the site, by one of the site’s users and employees. Original link can be found here.

There isn’t just one answer because Reddit is a lot of things. It’s a news site and it’s a forum, but it’s also very much used for porn, and, well, cat pictures. (The latter two are not synonymous. Usually.) When I first started working at Reddit and I had to explain to my Mom what the site is all about, I tried referencing some of Reddit’s better known features.

“Well, there’s the Ask Me Anything community, where people from all walks of life answer questions about their professions or personal experiences. For example, one day a vacuum repair man will be the most upvoted post, and the next day, it’s President Obama.”

And then there’s the inevitable “Wait, what are upvotes?” question.

“Well, the community decides what it thinks other users on the site should see, but these little arrows on the side called upvotes. You can either vote something up, or down.”

Then my Republican step-father chimes in, “Well I hope nobody votes for Obama again.”

I awkwardly dry laugh. I’ve lost their attention already.

…

I’ve been using the site now for many years. I think I started around 2008, right around the time it started to see more exposure in search results and had become more of a fixture in online culture. I’ve always thought of Reddit primarily as an online forum, which combines the best parts of a niche forum and assimilates it into a system with a bunch of other niche formats, without having to circle the internet itself.

Wikipedia has a pretty nice little description which tells us what it thinks Reddit is.

…a collection of entries submitted by its registered users, essentially a bulletin board system. The name “Reddit” is a play-on-words with the phrase “read it”, i.e., “I read it on Reddit.”[10] The site’s content is divided into numerous categories, and 50 such categories, or “default subreddits”, are visible on the front page to new users and those who browse the site without logging in to an account.

But truthfully its more than that. Sure there are categories, and subreddits (sub categories) which exist to further define submitted content, but there is also a voting system, which good or bad, allows users to rate what should be good content, and effectively separate the wheat from the chaff, putting the cream at the top of each page. There are even reddit points, called reddit gold (which have no real value), which reward users that make interesting posts and/or comments.

The major reason why I recommend the site, is because you can make your own feed of the content that works with your interests, so if you are into the arts like me, your feed can be primarily subreddits like r/movies, r/games, r/comics, r/Music, r/LifeProTips, r/DIY, r/GetMotivated, r/Art, etc.

So whatever you are focused on in your career/personal goals, Reddit content will show up every day that feeds that drive. You dictate what shows up on your newsfeed!

One of the other major draws of the platform is that it can be used to raise publicity for all sorts of causes and markets. You just might be surprised at the influence Reddit can have and has had on the Internet.

But don’t take my word for it. Try it. I think you’ll like it. And don’t forget to leave some comments! Do you like Reddit? Do you use it? Would you if you haven’t?

No more theories to day, dear readers!

Tim!