For those not so young and hip, Pinterest, like other social media outlets, utilizes following and followers. Sorry – as of right now, you can only gain access to Pinterest through an invitation. A friend who is on Pinterest may invite you or you can sign up and go on a wait-list for Pinterest to send you an invitation. Rumor has it that it could take two weeks! We got ours in less then 24 hours.

With all the hype about Pinterest, their inbox is probably overflowing. It was recently reported to have made the top ten list for social media websites!

So you have now been invited to Pinterest, awesome! Makes you feel special, right? Now you log in and fill out interests, but be careful, you could start following total strangers based on your likes. Pinterest will even help set up your first “boards”. Boards are where it’s at in Pinterest. Thus the name. Pinterest as in “pins of interest”. You pin images and videos that you find on the web to one of your boards. It’s like the bulletin boards of olden days when one would cut out an image of their teen heart throb from a teen magazine and pin it to the board. In this case its all done using an internet browser.

So how do you pin? Well it’s pretty easy to get started pinning online. Don’t worry, Pinterest walks you through setting up the ability to pin. Once the set-up is complete “Pin It” will show in your favorite list. Now you surf the Web and there it is! The place you always wanted to visit! You go to your “favorites” in your browser and hit “Pin It”. Like magic you are shown images from that web page that are “pinnable”. You select to pin the image of your desire to one of your Pinterest boards. You can create new boards right there on the fly while pinning. Once pinned, your board now displays with this cool picture or video. Pretty cool. Users can also upload items to pin to their own boards and you can allow others to pin items to your boards if you desire. Maybe you want others to share hair style ideas for you. Pin a photo of a haircut and ask others to pin photos of hair styles they think will look good on you. This is just an example of what we’ve found happening at Pinterest. The possibilities are endless.

Ensure your Pinterest profile looks good to others who will visit. For example, you can rearrange your boards. Think of it like decorating your office wall or bedroom wall. Maybe now you’ll see why you might not have heard of it if you’re not a young hip chick? Don’t worry guys – you’re not purposely being left out – we have seen some young men out there, but they are far and few between. But now the word is out, so time will tell if more of the male species will start pinning in numbers. Boards with boats and cars and pretty woman. It’s very easy to use and for those not into tweeting or posting status updates to your Facebook friends, Pinterest makes it easy to keep in touch using imagery and few words. Like anything, time will tell.

The first tweet ever was on March  21, 2006 by Jack Dorsey at 9:50 PM  (PST): “just setting up my twttr”.   Twitter has made great progress since the early days of messaging.  Today Twitter has over 10 million accounts.  Twenty one percent of those accounts have no tweets.   The vast majority of Twitter accounts have less than 100 followers.   Women account for more than half of Twitter users.  Thirty percent of Twitter users access their accounts on thier phones.   Twitter accounts can be linked to other social media accounts like Facebook, LinkedIn, RSS and WordPress.

With Twitter, users can “tweet” whatever is on their mind to their followers.  For a business, let’s say a deli, a tweet could be as simple as “Today’s special is #chickensoup.”  For an individual, one could tweet “Making #chickensoup.”  Notice the hashtags (#).  By using hashtags, tweeters are categorizing their keywords making for better searching and trending on Twitter.   # Hashtags allow users to discover what others are tweeting about or what is trending at any given time.  When #TEBOW threw a touchdown pass in a championship game, the tweets came in fast and broke records.   Any major event that grabs the attention of the world has the possibility to break trending records as Twitter continues to grow.  In addition to hashtags, Twitter users can use the @ symbol to tweet out to another tweeter.  Example, “@scanmastertweet when is next shuttle leaving?”  By using the @ symbol it makes the communication between users easier.  Another popular Twitter feature is the ability to retweet tweets. It may sound funny but it is easy to do, fun and part of using Twitter.

Your fan base knows to follow you.  It is up to you to keep your followers engaged.  The more you tweet, the better chance you have of attracting more followers.

You can follow Scanmaster on Twitter at twitter.com/scanmastertweet.

Google+ Scanmaster Page

What is Google+?

Hmmmmm, that’s a very good question.  After much testing, Scanmaster has determined the obvious!   Google+ and Facebook have many similarities.  After all,   the success of Facebook is the reason that so many others want to imitate what they do,right?    Well,  we want to give you some quick information so that you don’t have to do the research yourself.   You determine if you want to go further and join Google+!!

The obvious similarity between the two Social Media outlets is the use of  ’people’ and  ’pages.’   Google+  allows you to post updates, share photos, videos, and play games  - all similar to what Facebook allows. But not in the same way. There are also some key differences.   With Google+ you do not post on your friends “wall”, you, instead message, email or make comments on photos and posts directly.  You can also follow anyone you wish, however that doesn’t mean they will share anything with you or follow you in return.  You can easily control what you share with Google+ Circles – which is a way of organizing groups of people. You can put both ‘people’ and ‘pages’ into circles, in fact, you can place people in multiple groups or circles.

When posting at Google+ you can easily control what your ‘circles’ can see.  For example, you may have a ‘family’ circle that you allow only family members to view – you may have more personal items in this circle such as baby pictures, family gathering videos, etc.   No one else can view those without being a member of that ‘circle’.  Another cool feature is that you can publicly Google + websites.  This allows you to ‘show’ this tab on your Google + profile.  But the main difference between  Google+  and Facebook is the “Hangout” feature which includes an option for live video and chat.  We see the hangout feature as the most valuable addition to any Social Media venue.  Potential uses include customer service and support, employee or customer meetings or just “hanging out”.

Time will tell if people will migrate from Facebook to Google+ or if people find time for both. For now, as they say if you’re not there, you don’t exist – by the way, Scanmaster is there and we do exist in both venues!  Check us out!

Scanmaster Website Design, Hosting and Consulting by ScanmasterVidz

We are pleased to announce the debut of our new “state-of-the-universe” website!  Our website was redesigned with a new and powerful content management system called WORDPRESS.  22% of all existing websites have been designed using this amazing new system.  WordPress is incredibly easy and we want to help you and your company with a redesign that will outshine all others.   We can even set you up to update your own site, while ‘on-the-go’ using your own mobile phone. 

Let Scanmaster take you to the future!    Visit our new site at www.Scanmaster.com and contact us for the shuttle ride!

YouTube can accept almost any video format for upload, but for most users we have found the following settings give the best results.

• Video Format: H.264, MPEG-2 or MPEG-4 preferred
• Aspect Ratio: Native aspect ratio without letterboxing (examples: 4:3, 16:9)
• Resolution: 640×360 (16:9) or 480×360 (4:3) recommended
• Audio Format: MP3 or AAC preferred
• Frames per second: 30
• Maximum length: 10 minutes (we recommend 2-3 minutes)
• Maximum file size: 1 GB