Compfight – Flickr search for Creative Commons license Images

Creative Commons license search tool – Compfight

Blogging involves not just writing good copy but also using good imagery.

Photos are a great way to engage people on your blog. They also catch attention when people share your post on Facebook or other social media platforms. This is all very well but good photography doesn’t come cheap and if you are paying for images from Royalty free sites like fotolia.com then it can quickly add up.

Enter Compfight

Images are a great Social Media Tool - Compfight searches Flickr

Photos are a great way to engage people on your blog and draw them into your post. They also grab attention when someone shares your blog post on Facebook or another social media channel. Unfortunately, good photography can cost a lot of money, and with regular blogging, the investment can add up fast.

Enter Compfight. Compfight searches Flickr’s photos that have the appropriate Creative Commons license for Commercial Use and even provides you with the HTML code for proper attribution.

There’s a good FAQ guide and link to the Flickr Creative Commons licence page so you can fully understand how the licences work and what your rights are and how to use the images.

 

 

Feedly and Buffer – Essential News and Social Media Scheduling Tools

News Feed Readers & Social Media Scheduling Apps

Do you use them? We do and we find them essential for not only keeping up to date with our industry but also provifing quality content for our Social Media fans & followers. News Feeds (Aggregators) basically allow you to add websites, Blogs & RSS feeds to your account so that any new content published shows up in your feed. You can quickly scan through the summary and if you find it interesting, click on it and read more. Social Media schedulers like Buffer allow you add photos, posts and links to a queue and then schedule them to Social Media platforms like Facebook, Google, LinkedIn & Twitter.

What do we use?

We use Feedly & Buffer. Since the demise of Google Reader, the most popular news feed aggregator out there, we’ve been looking for a suitable alternative and we think we’ve found it.

Feedly

Feedly allows you to easily search for and add news feeds from Blogs, Websites & RSS feeds. So what’s so great about it? Well, firstly it’s free and secondly, it’s so simple to sign up for and use it shouldn’t take you more than 10 minutes to be up and running and thirdly it’s brilliant. You can easily search for keywords, #hashtags, @usernames or specific website or Blog names so it won’t take you long to build a stack of good quality, relevant feeds of interest to both you and your users.

You can group the feeds under topics to organise them according to the subject type, for example we have Design, Social Media & Tech and then browse all of the feeds, by group or individually. Feedley news aggregator used in conjunction with Buffer Clicking on a feed will bring up the full article including images and if you then want to read it on the original page, click the title again and it will take you that site.

It’s all pretty self explanatory so we won’t go into great detail on how and what to do. Suffice to say that if you want a good quality browser based app that automatically feeds you stories and articles from your favourite sites then Feedly is the one for you.

Buffer

Now, we are totally in love with Buffer, even more so since they added Google+ pages to their list of feeds yesterday. It is so easy to use, does what it says on the tin and the support is just superb and all this from an app that is free (you can pay to “go awesome” if you want extra features and queue storage and we are tempted).

Buffer works best if you install the browser extension. We use Chrome so this was an easy process and it gives you a Buffer icon in the top right of your browser. If you’re not using Chrome as your Web browser we highly recommend you do You can download Chrome here.

Once you find a news item, post, image or tweet you want to share, either via Feedly or while browsing the web, Twitter, Facebook or pretty much anywhere. Click the Buffer icon and up pops a screen allowing you to edit the post and then either post now to your chosen feeds or Buffer it which adds it to your buffer queue.

The app for scheduling posts to yourSocial Media

Click image to see a larger annotated version.

Your Buffer queue can have multiple posting schedules for each feed. So for instance you have Twitter posting 3 times a day and Facebook just the once. Choosing the time to post is easy using a drop down menu and halting the queue is as simple as clicking on each of the days so they go green.

It really is very simple to use.

There are loads of tips and tricks to help you get the most out of Buffer and rather than repeating them here we are going to link you to an excellent post by  from Buffer which lists the
The Top 10 Secret Buffer Hacks and Features: Supercharge your Social Sharing in 2013

Buffer now lets you share to Google+ pages

Fantastic news Google+ has now been added as a feed to Buffer.

Our favourite posts scheduling app Buffer has just been updated with the Google+ API and you can now schedule your posts to Google+ as well as Facebook, LinkedIn & Twitter.

The email has just dropped in to our Inbox and as with the feeds, connecting to Google+ was easy and took a matter of seconds.

Here’s the Buffer announcement about Google+

 

An unbelievable 3,613 people voted on a particular item in our feedback forum for which feature we should build next.

It has been holding the #1 spot as most requested feature from our users for almost 2 years. We couldn’t be any more excited to finally unveil it to everyone.

Buffer is now available for Google+ Pages. Anyone can now easily hook up their Google+ page and start posting and scheduling great content through Buffer to keep your Google+ Page up to date.

And they have written a guide with lots of pictures to help you add Google+ to your Buffer http://blog.bufferapp.com/introducing-buffer-for-google-plus-pages-scheduling-posting-social-media

You can now use Buffer to post to Google+

Not using Buffer?

Well you should. Buffer is a great way to quickly and easily schedule your posts to Twitter, LinkedIn, Twitter & now Google+. By installing their Google Chrome app, when you spot a story or image you would like to post about. just click the Buffer icon and that’s it. If you want to change, add or edit the wording then that’s easy as well.

You can set up multiple  posting schedules for each Social Media Feed. So say twice a day for Twitter and once for Facebook. It really is a fantastic and best of all it is completely FREE!

Here’s that link again… bufferapp.com

 

 

 

Twitter celebrates its seventh birthday

Twitter is celebrating its 7th birthday with a video showing a short history of the service, from its humble beginnings and co-founder Jack Dorsey’s first tweet, to the present day, when it boasts 200 million users.

Launched on March 21, 2006, Twitter has grown from a promising little service with a lot of server issues to one of the world’s largest social networks, with “well over” 200 million active users which send 400 million tweets each day.