7 Tools for Building an Infographic in an Afternoon (Design Skills or Not)

Infographics are such a fun and effective visual way to display information. We at Buffer have certainly used them quite a few times to share information.

I always enjoy looking at them, but always feel like there is no way I could ever create one myself.

Or is there?

There are so many tools being released every day allowing us to easily create better and better images— including infographics—to share and use in our marketing efforts.

Even folks (like me!) who never thought it possible to create one ourselves!

I had a lot of fun researching and testing out a handful of different infographic makers, and I’d love to share the seven tools I liked best to easily create beautiful infographics.

Watch me build an infographic in an afternoon (in 3 minutes)

The key to working fast on an infographic? Finding a solid template! I’m really grateful for the amazing tools out there that make infographics as easy as can be. Check above for a quick video of how I tried my hand at creating my own infographic!

A couple highlights:

• 0:09 – Found a great template!
• 0:40 – Drag-and-drop design parts

(We’d love to know how videos like these feel for you! Keen for us to make more?)

And here is my finished infographic. Total time to create: 15 minutes!

The 7 Best Infographic Makers for Building an Infographic From Scratch (Design Skills or Not)

1. Canva

• Price: Free
• Paid options: Canva allows you to purchase some elements like icons and photos. Canva for Work, their new business plan, starts at $9.95/month
• Ease of Use: Easy
• Time: 30 minutes

Canva is a powerful online image tool (and infographic maker) that allows you to create a variety of designs even if you do not have any design knowledge.

Canva provides many different templates for you to pick from including Twitter posts, Facebook posts, Tumblr banners and many more—including infographics.

Since we are looking to make an infographic, let’s take a look at the features Canva offers for you. You can pick from a variety of of templates (the templates themselves are free, and some include elements like icons and pictures that you can purchase or replace with your own elements).

Here are some sample templates that Canva offers (all completely customizable):

(click any of the above to enlarge)

Once you select your template (you can also select a blank canvas to start with), Canva offers a variety of options, including a vast library of elements (some free and some you can purchase). You can also upload your own and add to your image.

Et voila! You have your very own infographic!

—

2. Venngage

• Price: Free
• Paid options: Upgrade for $15/month
• Ease of Use: Easy
• Time: 30 minutes

Similar to Canva, Venngage offers you a few different options to pick from in terms of what it is you want to create. You will find templates for things like reports, posters, promotions and of course, infographics.

Within the infographic section, you will also find additional options to pick from that tend to deal with particular topics and categories of infographics, like:

• Statistical
• Informational
• Process
• Comparison
• Timeline
• Geographic
• Charts
• Tutorial

Below you will find a variety of templates to pick from (some free and some premium that require a Premium Plan):

(click any of the above to enlarge)

Once you find a template you like, it’s time to customize! Venngage allows you to insert what they call “Widgets,” which can include things like maps and charts based on the specific info and data you have for your infographic.

—

3. Piktochart

• Price: Free
• Paid options: Plans starting at $15/month
• Ease of Use: Easy
• Time: 30 minutes

Piktochart is another good option to create different types of infographics. You can pick from a few different formats, including a traditional infographic size (tall and skinny), presentation size (for slide decks), poster, and report.

You can then either create your own infographic from scratch or select one of their templates (some are free and others require you to either have a Lite or Pro plan). Here’s a sample of some of the Piktochart templates:

Once you have selected your template, you can simply drag and drop to add any graphic elements and text to your canvas. You can also upload your own images.

—

4. easel.ly

Price: Free or Pro Account starting at $3/month
Ease of Use: Easy
Time: 30 minutes

easel.ly makes it really easy for you to create infographics. When you arrive on their main page, all you need to do is either pick one of the many templates they offer or “Start Fresh.” They also offer a way for you to search their template library by category. Here’s a sample of some of the easel.ly templates:

     

Once you have found a template you like (or even when you start from scratch), you will be directed to a new window where you will be able to customize your infographic however you want. easel.ly provides a variety of tools such as backgrounds, shapes, text, charts, and more.

—

5. Visme

Price: Free or Upgrade starting at $7/month
Ease of Use: Easy
Time: 30 minutes

Visme is a  new service that is still in beta according to their website. It allows you to create presentations, animations, mock-ups, banners and of course infographics.

Once you login with your account, you will be greeted with a visual of all your projects (the space will be empty if you haven’t created any projects yet). You can click on “Create New Visme” to get started.

Then it’s time to pick the type of project you would like to create. We of course would be the “Infographic” tab. You will notice that some of the templates are free to use and others require a premium account. Here’s a sample of some of theVisme templates (some are free and some require a premium account):

 

You will then be able to customize your infographic however you like with a variety of tools. Visme even allows you to animate objects, although I personally haven’t really played around with that feature.

—

Other Infographic Maker Tools

6. infogr.am

Price: Free or Upgrade available starting at $15/month
Ease of Use: Intermediate
Time: 45 minutes

infogr.am offers simpler infographic templates for you to use. Here are some of the templates they offer:

Once you have picked the template, you can edit the elements on the page. infogr.am is a good option when dealing with statistics. I personally found it a bit harder to use than some of the other options mentioned on this list.

—

7. Visualize.me

Price: Free

Visualize.me is a different type of infographic, they help you create an “infographic resume.” Once you login, you can start creating your resume. You can even connect to LinkedIn to populate some of the information automatically.

On the left you will be able to input your information as well as pick the theme for your infographic resume.

Here is an example of a template and some very basic information I filled out:

—

Quick tip on sharing infographics to social media

One of the amazing benefits of infographics is that they’re a wonderful visual asset for sharing on social media. The only catch: They’re not quite the ideal sized image for sharing.

Twitter and Facebook tend to favor horizontal or square images, and infographics are extremely vertical! (Great for Pinterest, btw.)

One thing we’ve done to work around this:

Take screenshots of different parts of the graphic. 

For instance, with my infographic I built above, I could share this smaller-sized image as a teaser for the infographic.

Over to You!

 I find it incredible how easy it is to create beautiful images and infographics nowadays. I hope these tools will be helping in you creating your own.

What are some of the tools you use to create infographics? Any I missed? I would love to learn about your workflow.

New post! 7 Tools for Building an Infographic in an Afternoon (Design Skills or Not) https://t.co/vkBmuKHKll pic.twitter.com/AedQwqijBK

— Buffer (@buffer) November 4, 2015

Image sources: Unsplash

The post 7 Tools for Building an Infographic in an Afternoon (Design Skills or Not) appeared first on Social.

York Diamond Series

I was working on a York Diamond series, I cant recall the serial or model number. I checked with my senior tech whether there were any recalls and he advised me that there weren't.
The problem is a whistle sound coming from the combustion chamber. The combustion air is drawn from the top opening of the combustion chamber.
I checked the gas pressure, the amps/wc' suckage from the ventor motor, did a combustion analysis of the flue gas and still couldnt figure out why the chamber was whistling. When I loosened the outlet screw for the gas pressure, gas leaked out more than usual from the missing screw. Most other units I might smell a little gas, but I smelt a little more than I figured was normal. I got 3.8 wc'' after taking the negative draw into account of about .085. I proceeded to lower the pressure, but as I inserted the key to turn it down, the gas pressure shot up to 5.1. It was like my key was being inserted too far into the hole and restricting the gas pressure. even when I eased the key in, it would shoot up.
I left the furnace and set up an appointment with a senior tech to come diagnose the issue since Im just a new maintenance tech. However my boss told me that it wasnt my job to fix these issues and that I shouldnt be taking a lot time on maintenance. I dont understand if Im not exposed to new things, how am I to ever learn the trade.

Anyone have any exposure to the problem I addressed?

DC transformer question

Lets say you have a step-up transformer. If you connect it to the circuit backwards/in reverse, will it become a step-down transformer? (Using the secondary coil as the input instead of the output). Since a transformer is just 2 coils and some soft iron, its not like it has any official polarity, correct?

Homelessness protesters hold sit-in at mayor’s office

OCAP calls Seaton House redevelopment a ‘brutal attack.’

The Superhuman Guide to Twitter Advanced Search: 23 Hidden Ways to Use Advanced Search for Marketing and Sales

Every second, on average, around 6,000 tweets are sent on Twitter, which translates to over 500 million tweets per day!

Did you know you could search every single one of them? (Plus the multi-million profiles attached to them!)

Twitter has an amazing, yet somewhat little-known Advanced Search tool to help you find exactly what we’re looking for.

Looking to find your next customers? Advanced Search can help.

Want to measure the happiness of your current customers? Yep, Advanced Search is what you need.

Advanced Search is a goldmine for marketers and small business owners. In this post I’m super excited to share some top tips and tricks to help your business win with Twitter Advanced Search.

Let’s get into it.

 

First things first … how to get there!

There are a few different ways you can search on Twitter:

The Twitter website’s toolbar search field.

The web search page.

The mobile app search (on Twitter’s iOS or Android apps).

All of these options are great if you’re looking to quickly dive into a certain topic or hashtag.

If you want to get the most value out of Twitter search though, Advanced Search is an amazing and powerful resource. Advanced Search is available when using Twitter’s web app — you can access it directly by heading to twitter.com/search-advanced.

Also, you can get there from a standard search results page by clicking on the More Options menu and choosing Advanced Search from the bottom of the list.

And once you’re there, you’ll find over a dozen different ways to search, segment, and filter Twitter’s huge data of tweets and profiles.

1. Contains all of these words
2. Contains this exact phrase
3. Contains any of these words
4. Contains none of these words
5. Contains these hashtags
6. Written in this language
7. From these accounts
8. To these accounts
9. Mentioning these accounts
10. Near this place
11. From this date
12. Positive tone
13. Negative tone
14. Question ?
15. Include retweets

(Much more on each of these different filters at the end of the article.)

In addition to the Advanced Search page itself, there’re a couple other great resources for helping to further refine your results. On Twitter’s search results page, you’ll have menu options for filtering results by media type, profiles, and more. And you can also do quite a number of advanced search tricks from any Twitter search box, using a combination of Twitter search operators.

Now let’s see some neat ways to put this all together!

23 Sneaky Cool Ways You Use Twitter Advanced for Marketing and Sales

Index

• Marketing hacks
• Monitoring your brand reputation
• Analyzing the competition
• Fine-tuning your search
• A super simple sales trick

Advanced search hacks to help your marketing

1. Create a saved search

Twitter allows you to save up to 25 searches per account. To save a search, click More options at the top of your results page and then click Save this search.

Saved searches can be great to keep an eye on people sharing your content, keywords relevant to your brand and your own mentions.

2. Find your interactions with another Twitter account

It can be hard to recall all of your interactions with another person on Twitter. As a way to refresh your mind, you can use the ‘From these accounts’ and ‘To these accounts’ filters.

Here are all of my interactions with the Buffer Twitter account:

3. Find the most popular Tweets about a topic

I stumbled upon this one a little while back and it has since become one of my favorite Twitter search hacks.

As an alternative to the “Top Tweets” that Twitter displays for each search term, this search trick will allow you to define your own metrics for what makes a popular post. As Amit Agarwal explains on his blog:

Go to the Twitter search box, type any search term and append the operator min_retweets:[number] or min_faves:[number] to filter your search results. For instance, here’s a sample search that will only shows tweets pointing to the labnol.org domain that have been favorited or retweeted at least 5 times.

For example, to find Tweets about Buffer with over 30 Retweets, I could search “buffer.com min_retweets:30.”

4. Find your most popular tweets

Using the same technique as above you can also find the most popular tweets from your own Twitter account. To do this simply head to the Twitter search page (or use the toolbar search field) and search for: “from:[your account] min_retweets:30”.

For example: “from:buffer min_retweets:30” will bring back results for tweets sent from the @buffer account with move than 30 retweets.

If you have a Buffer account, you can also see your most popular posts using Buffer Analytics.

5. Find ideas for blog posts

Twitter is a great source of inspiration for blog posts. When researching a post, Advanced Search is a great way to see what people are talking about relating to subject.

Here’s a search I used to research this very post on Twitter Advanced Search!

6. Find great blog posts

If you’re looking to find some great blog posts or content on a certain subject, Twitter Advanced Search can be a great way to unearth some real gems.

In the search fields you can add your chosen topic to the ‘All of these words’ field and then add ‘http’ to ‘This Exact phrase’.

Here’s an example of a search I use to keep an eye on any content marketing blog posts:

7. Find content shared by selected accounts

For example, if you would like to see how all of your favorite tweeters are reacting to some news, search for a keyword and their names.

Here’s how TheNextWeb reacted to Twitter moments:

8. Embed a search in your website or blog post

Embedding a search within your website or blog post can be a great way to bring content to life.

You can find more information about embedding Twitter search timelines here.

Tweets about dogs from:buzzfeed

9. Filter Tweets by location

If you’re looking to find people who are talking about your brand in a certain location, head down to the Places section of Advanced Search and look up the areas you’d like to focus on.

This feature can be extra useful if you pair the search with a couple of keywords. For example: ‘@Buffer buffer.com near:”London, England” within:15mi’

Advanced searches to monitor your brand reputation

10. Monitor mentions of your company

Using Twitter’s Advanced Search to monitor your brand can be extremely effective. As well as monitoring mentions of your brand name, Advanced Search allows you to keep an eye on mentions of your Twitter handle and even any Tweets that include your URL.

Here’s a search we use for all things Buffer:

11. Filter out competitor Tweets

If you want to filter out any results mentioning competitors of yours, you can do so by adding their username and URL in the “None of these words” Advanced Search field.

12. Find news about your company

After running your Advanced Search and landing on the results page, select ‘News’ from the More options dropdown to show all results that contain a link to a news site.

Below is a search I ran on Buffer to see who was talking about us when Pablo launched:

13. Find happy and un-happy customers

Twitter search is a great way to quickly see a snapshot of how happy (or un-happy) your customers are.

These types of searches will help you stumble upon some great feedback and ideas too. For example, a Tweet where a customer expresses frustration could spark discussion around how you could improve your product or service.

To include sentiment filters in your search, tick the relevant box over on the Advanced Search page or simply add a happy or un-happy emoticon to the end of your search term, e.g. “buffer :(” or “buffer :)”.

Advanced searches to analyze the competition

14. Monitor sentiment about competitors

Similarly to how you can monitor sentiment about your own brand, Twitter Advanced Search gives you the power to keep tabs on how customers are talking about your competitors too.

In order to check out what people are saying about competitors, add their company name and URL to the ‘All of these words’ bar.

15. Search your competitor’s tweets

This is a great tip I picked up from Tim Baran. Using Advanced Search you can filter through tweets from any account and for selected keywords. To do this, simply use the ‘All of these words’ and ‘From these accounts’ fields.

Here’s an example that will show all of the times our Buffer Twitter account has mentioned ‘transparency’.

As a shortcut, you could search: from:buffer “transparency” in the toolbar search.

Fine-Tuning your search

16. See Results for Only the People You Follow

The Twitter world moves fast and sometimes it can be easy to miss great content from the people you follow.

Thankfully, Twitter search allows you to filter Tweets from only people you follow. This, coupled with is a great way to make sure you don’t miss anything from your favorite tweeters on the subjects you care about.

Here’s an example search I used to see who from the people I follow had been talking about content marketing:

17. Find video related to a topic

Video is such an awesome way to bring content to life and if you’re in search of a video on a specific topic, Twitter search provides a great alternative to YouTube Search. To filter videos search using either Advanced search or toolbar search the and then select Videos from the results page filters.

18. Find photos related to a subject

Much the same as video above, to filter photos search using either Advanced search or toolbar search the and then select Photos from the results page filters.

19. View questions only

If you tick the ‘Question ?’ box on the Advanced Search page you will only be shown results that are questions. This is a real neat trick if you do a lot of your customer support over Twitter.

20. Find interesting people to follow

If you’re looking to find new people to connect with in your niche, you can run a search on a keyword or phrase and then filter ‘Accounts’ that match those keywords.

Here’s a search I ran for ‘content marketing’:

21. Find accounts by keyword AND location

Combining keywords with a location is incredibly powerful if you’re looking to locate accounts or businesses within a certain area.

22. Don’t search terms, search things you think people will say

Twitter search is a little different from Google Search. When you’re thinking of which keywords and phrases to query, think about how people talk to each other. Tweets tend to be a lot more conversational that Google search terms.

A simple tactic to find new sales leads

23. Look for buying signals

Listening is extremely important in social media and by keeping an eye on what people are saying, you can find some exciting opportunities.

Searching for terms like ‘anyone recommend’ or ‘any advice on’ are really great ways to identify people with on the lookout for some help and advice.

Also keep an eye out for any buying signals shown on Twitter (for example, dissatisfaction with a competitor or showing a need your product can fulfil) and engage to get the sales cycle in motion. Try not to be too “salesy” and more conversational at this stage. Or, if you can spot someone who is looking to make a purchase imminently, jump in and get on their radar.

Navigating Advanced Search

At a first glance, the Advanced Search page may appear a little overwhelming. There are quite a few fields to consider and its a little daunting figuring out where to start.

Below we’ve put together a quick guide to help you get started.

Getting started with Advanced Search

Words

• All of these words: Enter two or more words in this field and you’ll see tweets that contain those terms (in no particular order). You can search for one or more phrase by using quotations to separate each, for example “social media” and “social marketing”.
• This exact phrase: It’s best to search for just one phrase in here. This field is particularly useful if you want to search for names or quotes.
• Any of these words: This field is great to search for multiple words. For example, if I was searching for all things Buffer related I could use ‘Buffer’, ‘@Buffer’ and ‘#Buffer’.
• None of these words: Whatever you put in here will be remove tweets from your search results that contain the words or phrases you included.
• These hashtags: This one helps you to hone in on hashtags, I tend to use it to check-in on #bufferchat conversation.
• Written in: Using this option will allow you to find tweets in any of Twitter’s 50 supported languages.

People

• From these accounts: This one will show you tweets only from the account’s you add in this field.
• To these accounts: Enter the username of one or more accounts and you’ll be able to see tweets sent to them.
• Mentioning these accounts: Pretty similar to the last two, enter an account name (or more) in this field and you can see any tweets mentioning your chosen usernames.

Places

• Near this place: You can see tweets sent while a person was in a particular area.

Dates

• From this date to this date: This is an incredibly easy way to search for tweets between two dates.

Over to you

How do you use Twitter search? Any tips and tricks that have really helped your sales or marketing?

I’d absolutely love to hear your thoughts in the comments.

Image sources: IconFinder, Unsplash

The post The Superhuman Guide to Twitter Advanced Search: 23 Hidden Ways to Use Advanced Search for Marketing and Sales appeared first on Social.

The Beginner’s Guide to URL Shorteners: How to Shorten and Track Links for Social Media

I sometimes feel like URL shorteners are some of the most understated tools in internet marketing, and there have been more than a few times that I wished I’d had someone share some advice on URL shorteners earlier in my marketing career.

For instance:

What do you do with really long links?

What if you want to track the results?

What if the link—long and unwieldy—upstages the content?

So, if you’re new to the world of URL shorteners—much like I’ve been—here’s a list of things you may find helpful to know!

About URL shortening …

If you’re new to the social media marketing space, you’ve probably caught on to one of our dirty little secrets.

Links can be a little unwieldy sometimes.

They can get long.

They can get a little complex (especially when you’re tracking them).

Sometimes they can be a bit distracting.

And if you’re trying to share helpful information with a growing audience, then you don’t want the links to all that golden content to upstage your efforts!

Thank goodness for URL shorteners.

(Here’s an example, with pomeranians, of a long link that’s been shortened to buff.ly/1irhfHu.)

Jiff, the #Pomeranian, Just Won #Halloween https://t.co/6ErIpGUSwN

— David Pride (@DavidaPride) October 30, 2015

These super-simple tools can save you a good deal of headache when it comes to keeping track of your links. Plus, they make our tweets, statuses, and other updates look super clean.

Where & how can you shorten URLs?

Fortunately, we have tons of great tools at our disposal for shortening URLs, including the native networks and dashboards we use every day.

In terms of tools, there are some neat sites that handle URL shortening, including full analytics and archives of everything you shorten. For these services (and for URL shortening in general), your URL is replaced by a new domain (e.g., kevanlee.com changes to bit.ly) and the permalink is replaced by a string of numbers and/or letters (e.g., kevanlee.com/best-writing-articles changes to bit.ly/df8jpI1).

Here are handful of the more popular link shortening services:

• bit.ly
• j.mp
• goo.gl
• ow.ly
• tinyurl.com

Here’s what it looks like when you use goo.gl, Google’s URL shortener:

At goo.gl, bit.ly, and others, not only do you get a nice, clean, shortened URL, you also get stats on clicks for all the URLs you shorten.

In addition to these shortening tools, many social networks and social media management dashboards also provide a way to shorten long URLs automatically.

For instance, any link shared to Buffer will be shortened automatically once it’s added into your update.

You can choose to use Buffer’s own “buff.ly” shortener, or the shorteners at bit.ly, j.mp, or custom solutions.

Twitter automatically shortens links as well. There are a few different ways this might happen: Twitter uses it’s own t.co shortening service often on link shared on mobile devices, Twitter will sometimes include the full URL (minus the http:// part) if it doesn’t bump up against character count, or Twitter will truncate the link after showing the domain and part of the permalink. In the example below, the shortened link is 32 characters long.

Why should you shorten your links anyway?

Of course, if you’re new to the URL-shortening game, it might be good to take a quick spin through the reasons (and ways) we use URL shorteners in the first place. One of the biggest and best reasons:

URL shorteners save character count

You don’t always have unlimited space for a message. Twitter is the most famous example: you get 140 characters per tweet. The problem for Internet marketers? An everyday URL can take up half of that length. (Or more!)

For example, if you wanted to share this fantastic article on how to get your first 1,000 followers on any social network, you’d have to work with a rather long URL:

https://blog.bufferapp.com/first-1000-followers-twitter-facebook-social-media

Whoa. That’s 77 characters long—more than half a tweet’s worth! It barely leaves any room for descriptive commentary . . . let alone a witty throwaway joke.

And if you wanted to add UTM tracking codes to the link?

https://blog.bufferapp.com/first-1000-followers-twitter-facebook-social-media?utm_source=social&utm_medium=twitter&utm_campaign=blogpost-promotion

Eep!

146 characters! (Longer than the max length of a tweet!)

Now, the good news is that Twitter automatically shortens links, as do many social media management tools—including Buffer.

Let’s say I were to shorten the link above. I could come away with something like this:

http://buff.ly/1VI7t0I

Hey, that’s only 22 characters. That leaves me plenty of room to share one of my favorite insights from the article!

6 ideas for how to use URL shorteners in your marketing

1. Make links more memorable with a custom, short domain

If you ever happen to visit the Twitter feed for Moz, you might notice something unique about their links.

They’re using a custom short URL: mz.cm.

Cool!

So links like this:

https://moz.com/blog/announcing-mozcon-local-2016

Become links like this:

http://mz.cm/1gpgLAJ

This can be a really great opportunity to extend some branding into the shortened links you share on social media. And at the very least, it could make for a fun experiment to see if it helps up the engagement on your updates (I’ve heard some folks fare better with custom short URLs, some do better with full URLs, and some do better with buff.ly or bit.ly URLs.)

Kevan put together this quick video on how to set up a custom short domain. You can buy custom short domains from sites like Name.com and set them up to automatically shorten your links with bit.ly and Buffer.

And the result:

Whoa, check out this URL! It worked! http://t.co/OrRB8uu6lS

— Pretend Kevan (@pretendkevan) August 15, 2015

2. Track all the clicks, see how things change over time

Shortening links is valuable in and of itself—but how do you know people are clicking them?

Good news! Some URL shorteners let you track those links, too. =) There are a few ways these links tend to be tracked:

Some URL shorteners track the links themselves.

Bitly is a fantastic example of this. Bitly shows you how many times one of your links has been clicked, where the link has been shared, and how other Bitly-shortened links (Bitlinks) are driving traffic to the same content.

Here’s an example of what that looks like: 

Some URL shorteners automatically attach Google Analytics tracking data.

Granted, you can manually add UTM tracking codes to any link, and then shorten them down with a basic link shortener. But some tools will let you preset those tracking codes and then automatically append them to whatever links you shorten.

This is where the Buffer link shortener really shines, in my opinion. If you’re using the Buffer for Business plan, then you can easily (and automatically) add UTM tracking codes to any link you share with Buffer. I’ll show you exactly how to do this later on in this post! =)

3. Customize a shortened bit.ly link

One thing I love about Bit.ly’s link shortening service is the ability to name short URLs. This means we can turn a link like this:

http://bit.ly/1LYGfyq

Into something that reflects the content of the link itself:

bit.ly/tips-4-tw (a link to an article on twitter tips)

Customizing a shortened link can be a fantastic way to give people a little bit of context for where they’ll go when they click that tiny link.

4. Add a shortened URL to your video

If you’re running an ad campaign that directs people to a certain website, you’ll want people to remember where they’re supposed to go.

That can be tricky when you’re dealing with a long, long URL. But a link shortener can make online destinations a great deal easier to remember.

For example, I’m writing this article as Facebook launches its killer new Lead Ads feature. It’s a sweet new way to do targeted advertising.

But all the sweet info about it is on a page with a pretty long URL:

https://www.facebook.com/business/a/lead-ads

A long URL like that might not be a problem—except that Facebook is educating people about this new feature through a video. And I don’t know about you, but I’d have a rough time remembering this URL after watching a video. BlogThis!

New Here

Hello everybody, New here. I've been lurking for a month or two posted a couple times figure i should introduce myself.

I'm new to this whole field currently going to school finish in a month plan on starting to work in this field the beginning of next year. My neighbor teaches HVAC at a college not far from me and always has employers coming to him looking for young guys getting into the field so he's going to help me out there.

I am so glad i chose to go this route and view this as a career i will do for the rest of my life. I'm 26 years old now and live about 10 miles from Detroit, Michigan. Anybody in the area knows there's HVAC companies EVERYWHERE around here. The place my neighbor wants me to go is a plumbing and HVAC place so should be interesting.

I'm currently buying tools as i can as almost all of my tools got stolen and i never replaced them as my father has all the tools i ever needed at the time.

I really enjoy this forum and everything about this trade.

Well i don't know what else to post but look forward to getting to know all of you and working in this field!