We all love social media. It’s good for building business, building relationships and for sheer enjoyment. These are the social media platforms I use, literally in order of preference. 

1. Facebook. I have a personal Facebook page and a public page for myself as an actress. You can view it HERE. I really had to think about how to use my public page because whenever I did jobs or attended cool industry events I would post about it on my personal page anyway. I tried to only post about my professional life on my public page, but let’s face it, you have more reach with your personal page. I had way more friends than official ‘likes’ on my public page, and I was finding that I wanted to post about my successes on my personal platform anyway. So I’ve always run the risk of not utilizing my public page properly and of being repetitive if i did. Yet I still felt I needed it. Then, to make matters worse, FB introduced the concept of public subscribers to your personal page. This, I soon learned, is the same as ‘fans‘ or ‘followers‘ on your public page. They could follow you personally if they wanted to and you could just change the setting of what you posted to either make it public (for your ‘subscribers‘) or keep it to just be for your actual friends. So you were totally in control of your privacy. And it made it so much easier for you to just update one page. So what was now the point of having a public page at all? It seems I’m not the only one with this dilemma; I’ve read many interesting articles on this and it actually was a problem for a lot of actors, comedians, sport stars and public figures when FB introduced this. Mainly because it split their followers. Some followers would ‘like’ and stick to following their public page, and other followers who were smarter would just subscribe to the public feeds on their personal pages. So now they, like myself, had to repeat everything they said to both their public and personal pages so as to update everyone. That can be annoying for people getting  your feed twice if they have you as a friend and have officially liked your page too. I realized that friends and family are the ones you want to tell good news to anyway. So your first instinct is to upload those awesome pictures, announce the good news about a role you got, or shout out about that event your attending on your personal page. But then what about the people who have just liked your public page and don’t subscribe to you personally? They don’t get to see or know about those things.  So either way, you alienate somebody. This is not ideal. These famous sport stars, comedians and public figures eventually came up with a way to resolve this by simply joining both platforms into one single, neat page. They do this by absorbing their personal profile page into their public page, thereby creating only one platform. This platform can then act as both their personal and professional realms. And, it has no limits to the number of people that can ‘subscribe’ or ‘follow’ (which is the case with subscribers to a personal page only). This way, they only update once and they can simply change the publicity setting depending on who they want to see it – this applies to check ins, photo albums, status updates and so on. Sound good? Yes, but the only problem is that with this amalgamation, you will lose all your photos and history which you currently have on your personal page. Not nice. If you’re still interested, Facebook gives you instructions on how to do this conversion HERE. 

2. Twitter. This used to be top of my list, but I’m bored. I’m not gonna lie. Many people will tell you i’m crazy, but unless you have something definite you are tweeting about (I enjoy updating my business one, for instance), it runs the risk of being an online platform for self-loving dilettantes who are captivated by the sound of their own voice. How cringeworthy. I find this with a lot of my actor friends and, unfortunately, I can’t shake the wince when I read some of their  tweets. I like tweeting about the news, current affairs, books, charities, good quotes, bible verses, sports updates, travel stories, or actual jobs I’m doing. Read my post on how to use Twitter HERE. 

3. Instagram. Gorgeous and fun! For the pictures that don’t make the cut onto Facebook or Twitter. Arty, silly or simply fun pics! I’m enjoying it more and more, see my article on it HERE. 

4. Pinterest. Imagine we are all artists or graphic designers and we have massive, creative pinboards all around our bedrooms and studios! Imagine that everytime we see a picture or a quote in a magazine we tear it out and pin it up on one of our boards. We collect all kinds of pictures spanning across all different sorts of topics and are inspired by them everytime we look at them. This is Pinterest. It’s a community of creative minds who love to look at pretty things and share them with the world. This is an awesome online vehicle to advertise, to inspire, to share and to enjoy. I love pictures and you can find some really beautiful ones on just about anything on Pinterest. Go on – try – type in a word HERE. People have some really great ‘boards’ on it (which is where a collection of photos is grouped on your profile) and these boards span across so many different themes. A person can have more than one board. I have a board called “Delish” where I post pictures of delicious foods I see. I also have “Favourite Places & Spaces” where I post pictures of beautiful scenes. I have a  nice picture of a place called Sleepy Hollow Farm in Vermont on there. See it HERE.  I personally follow the board ‘Chocolate’ by a user named Heidi. See it HERE. There are some tasty pics up on it which she has repinned from other sites she’s spotted them on. I used to really like www.weheartit.com but I’m starting to like Pinterest more. Mostly because of the sizes of the pictures. I look up pics for my blog articles here. It’s fantastic! I also advertise my blog articles on it, for the millions of users who log on and sift through pictures every day. I even added a Pinterest share button here on my blog under every article, so if you see any pictures you like in any of my articles, you can click on the Pinterest button and share it, or as they say, PIN IT! 

What about you? What are your social platforms? Do you have Pinterest?