Smash It On Social: 7 Genuinely Useful Tips To Really Up Your Online Game

These days, we’re all out there in social media land, live Tweeting the Bake Off, Snapping our beauty routines, Instagramming any item of food that stays still for longer than five seconds and organising this weekend’s sesh via (often excruciating) group WhatsApps. In a world where everyone’s connected and everyone’s on it, all the time, how can you up your social media game, just that little extra bit? We’ve got seven tips (and a couple more) to elevate you to power user status.

1 Be relevant

Trying to build your following, fast? Relevance is important to begin and maintain growth – don’t just follow everyone. Edit and be selective – if they’re doing something that’s relevant to you and what you’re into, it’s more likely they might follow back if they can recognise that what you’re offering is also relevant to them.

2 Look for newness

One of the easiest ways to get a big following on any social channel is to get in early, when there’s little noise and less people to follow – bingo, you can scoop them up. Those in the know are pointing towards Yubl as the next big messaging app. Tools like WhatsApp and Facebook Messenger are taking a bite out of social networks and Yubl – say it like bubble – is designed to bridge the gap between private messaging and Snapchat. It’ll be rolling out across Europe and into the US over the next few months – expect the interface to present you with the option to layer scalable, moveable text, stickers, video and images which you can share as group chats or blast out publicly.

3 Customise your experience

Around 26 percent of adults use Instagram, but lots of us don’t go much beyond snap; X-Pro II; post. That means there’s a lot of time-wasting swiping about in the app we could probably do without. So, did you know you can actually re-order and remove filters to suit your preferences? Uh-huh honey, you totally can. Go into the filters menu, scroll all the way to the right and click ‘Manage’. To move a filter up or down, tap on the three grey lines to the left and drag it where you’d like it to be with your finger. To remove it, untick the circle to the right, and hey presto! So long Willow, and some precious seconds saved. Plus, you’ll also find a load of decommissioned filters in there like 1977 and Brooklyn, which you can reactivate.

4 Keep it safe

Ever log into Facebook on a laptop that’s not yours, do what you needed to do, shut the lid and head off, only to remember later with a horrible thud of your heart that you forgot to log out? Ugh, we’ve pretty much all been there, but there is a fix: firstly, go to the Facebook settings page and click the ‘security’ link. On the page that appears, choose, ‘where you’re logged in’, which lists all the active locations for your account. Now, kill the one you want and job done. This is also a really handy feature if you suspect someone else is snooping on your account, BTW.

5 Make amazing Insta captions

Totally frustrated by the fact you can’t hit ‘return’ when you’re typing a caption on Insta? Sure, you can write your copy in another app and paste it in, but that’s what we call hassle. Why on earth isn’t there a return key? Turns out there is – you just need to know how to access it. Activate Instagram’s keyboard and hold down the 123 key bottom left. As if by magic, the @ and # keys to your right will change into a return key. Living the dream.

6 Shortcode emojis

Oh sure, we bet you know if you type <3 on Facebook it’ll transform into a heart when posted, but FB’s got lots more of that up its sleeve. Like, for example, these. :poop is our friendly smiley poo, (^^^) is a shark popping out of the water and <(“) is a penguin. Now, go forth and compose messages of great pictorial meaning.

7 Short work

Do you use Twitter via twitter.com on a desktop computer? Then you’ll like these in-built shortcuts that let you do all the stuff you need to do, but quite a bit quicker, and you don’t even need to be a Mac user. Hit the ‘n’ key and that’ll open up a new tweet box for you. Likewise, ‘m’ opens the direct message pane and ‘f’ and ‘t’ will favourite and retweet, provided you’ve opened a new tab for the tweet. Gotten six miles deep? Press ‘g h’ and you’ll be zipped right back to the top.

• social media