So, what are we talking about this week on the Social 360 Podcast? I talk a little bit about how unitasking and Pomodoro time are working for me (see show 4 for more on this), share my purchase of a Snowball Blue microphone and then we get into talking about social media. In social media this week I talk about Twitter problems, bigger Google+ images  and a new look for your Facebook news feed and my favourite scheduling tool Buffer.
Last week I talked with you about being more productive and my attempts at implementing Pomodoro time and focusing on one task at a time. I did well on Monday and part of Tuesday but I slipped into bad habits the remainder of the week. I did notice that while working on one task and doing the Pomodoro schedule of 25 minutes work followed by a 5 minute break I was being more productive and getting more useful work done. I need to work harder for the upcoming week as I think this could really help me achieve more of my goals this year.
After researching and reading and more research I finally broke down and bout a  a Snowball microphone from Blue. This is one of the coolest things I have on my desk. I love the look of it and I hope you notice a sound difference for the show (in a good way). Let me know in the comments if things are sounding better.
Need a good laugh today? Here is one of the funniest things I have found on YouTube in recent memory and I swear the more you watch it the funnier it gets.
Social Media Stories
Twitter Goes Down
Last week  Twitter accidentally reset 1% of its users passwords and while inconvenient really caused very little harm. That was bad enough but this week Twitter hits another snag when they went down for over an hour. How am I supposed to tweet about Twitter when Twitter is down? It’s an inception style puzzle.
According to the Twitter explanation on Techcrunch what happened was:
During a planned deploy in one of our core services, we experienced unexpected complications that made Twitter unavailable for many users starting at 11:01am. We rolled back the change as soon as we identified the issue and began a controlled recovery to ensure stability of other parts of the service. The site was fully recovered by 11:47am PDT. We apologize for the inconvenience.
It’s been a rough month for Twitter (and we’re only half way through March) between the two incidents and reports of growth stalling things aren’t going so well for Twitter. I have a soft spot for the little bird as they were the first social network that I latched onto and the one that made me realize how impactful and important social was going to become. I do have to say while I hate Twitter going down and wouldn’t wish it on them ever I do miss seeing the old fail whale, the new down time image just isn’t as cool or as nostalgic.
Google+ Gets Bigger Images
Now on to Google+ and a recent change they made which increased size for thumbnail images for link shares in the feed. Now when you submit a link to share on Google+ and a high quality image is available the larger image will be displayed.That image is now is clickable and contains the article description below. The new images really stand out as a jagged page look is also applied to the bottom of the image.
Along with the larger images and description, the new look also includes the site name from which it was shared and an icon to circle the site that when moused over pops up the hovercard. As big images tend to get more engagement these changes should help your articles been seen more often and receive more engagement. You can see what I mean in the example below.
Mike Allton from The Social Media Hat has an excellent write up on this topic here
This is similar to the updates pushed out by Facebook and Twitter that also seen an increase in size for thumbnails. I really like the new look as it really makes the big images stand out on within the stream. Google+ has come a long ways since first rolling out and it seems that every change and feature they add to the service is working towards making the site better for users.
With the switch to making images more visible and more pronounced it’s now more important than ever to ensure that every piece of content you push out has a high quality image attached to it.
As a bonus tool of the week I also wanted to share with you a new chrome extension for Google+ called Post Editor for Google+ that allows you to easily format your Google+ posts using a button click vs knowing about the formatting commands. If you’re new to  Google+ or were unfamiliar with formatting posts in Google+ I highly recommend checking out this chrome extension.
Are you a Google+ user? What do you think of the changes Google has been making to the platform? Let me know in the comments, I would love to hear your thoughts.
Facebook Makes Some Changes
Facebook is at it again making even more changes, this time though it’s not algorithmic and simply cosmetic. I have not received the change in either my newsfeed or on my Facebook Page but from what is being reported the newsfeed is receiving a simpler looking interface with new fonts, bolder images and a cleaned up left column giving the entire site a more cleaner and simplified look. The pages have received a bit of a makeover as well with them receiving a more streamlined look that keeps them in line with the changes the news feeds are receiving. Tabs are on the way out as well as they are being replaced with a More drop down menu option.
From what I have seen I like the look and the changes being made. Like many I wonder what effect removing the tabs will have but I believe most fans don’t visit pages and instead see news as it streams through their feed, which is probably why Facebook is redoing how they look. I hope to have the new look soon so I can give it a review in full.
It’s time once again to share with you my social media tool of the week and for this week I chose to share with you a tool that saves me plenty of time every day. That tool is Buffer.
Buffer is a scheduling tool that allows you to connect your Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn and even Google+ Business Pages to the service, create a custom posting schedule and then as you send content to buffer it will place that content in a queue and then share it out according to your posting schedule.
This is an invaluable tool as it allows you to keep content flowing to your social networks without you having to be present to do the sharing which allows you to serve content at those times when you are sleeping or just away.
My only complaint with Buffer is the inability to schedule content to a Google+ profile but seeing as only DoShare can do this currently it’s more an inconvenience than anything.
I hope that you got a chance to listen to the show and if you did I would love to hear your feedback.
As always thanks for listening and I hope you have an awesome week and I will talk to you again soon.
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The post Episode #005 – Google+ Gets Bigger Images appeared first on Social 360.
