Twitter chats have become incredibly popular, especially in the past year as more people try to find meaningful ways to engage with others during the COVID-19 outbreak. Great examples of successful chats include Brianne Fleming’s #PopChat, Christine Gritmon’s #ChatAboutBrand, Madalyn Sklar’s #TwitterSmarter, and many, many others.

If you’re not familiar with this particular social media phenomenon, a Twitter chat is basically a pre-scheduled conversation hosted by a single account centered around a specific topic. …

Most social media managers absolutely hate the fact that Facebook requires you to have a personal profile in order to manage a Facebook Page. It’s a sneaky way for the platform to effectively keep its user numbers high. It also creates a massive headache for page managers because there’s virtually no way for us to split our personal and professional notifications without creating a second profile, which goes against the Community Standards for Facebook.

At least that’s what I thought until this morning.

I like to double-check my settings for Facebook at least once a month. This ensures that all…

I’ve recently seen some questionable takes about the purpose of alt text, mostly from content creators on TikTok. There’s a strange debate about its actual purpose and if creators should be prioritizing accessibility or SEO when they write their image descriptions.

Honestly, I hate that this is even up for discussion.

Given the choice, you should always place more importance on how accessible your content is for users with disabilities rather than how searchable it is. …

Captions for your Instagram story videos have finally arrived! Sort of.

Industry leader Matt Navarra gave a sneak preview of the new captions sticker for Instagram stories via his Twitter account, and I, of course, had to go try the feature out immediately.

At first glance, the tool works pretty well. The captions take very little time to generate, you can easily edit the captions by tapping them, and there are four different formatting options to choose from. …

I’ve tweeted about it, I’ve recorded a video about it, and now I’m going to write long-form about a practice that has become commonplace on social media, especially Twitter, and frustrates me to no end.

I’m talking about flattened copy on images.

Flattened copy is text that has been turned into an object and is no longer recognized by basic technology as readable characters. If you run your cursor over it or tap it on your mobile phone, you will be unable to select the text. Most screen readers typically cannot read flattened text.

You probably see this quite frequently…

President Joe Biden has made it no secret that he wants to better support the disabled community during his time in the Oval Office.

He said as much in his November victory speech as well as making it obvious at his Inauguration. There were several accessible options for viewing and listening to the ceremony on January 20th, the Pledge of Allegiance was signed by Captain Andrea Hall, and the now-famous Amanda Gorman recited a moving poem and has an auditory processing disorder.

Biden’s digital team also made sure that accessibility was a priority for the revamp of the White House…

I get it; social media is still pretty new. In relation to other areas of marketing like print, television, and radio, it’s practically a baby, and the people who make a career out of it have varied backgrounds and levels of education.

Like with any career path, social media is one that deserves respect. Most digital marketers, content creators, and other social media professionals are sadly very familiar with the flippant attitudes that many people adopt when they learn about the line of work we’re in.

However, we also know that these minor condescending comments and actions aren’t normally meant…

Whether content creators like it or not (and most are leaning towards not), Fleets for Twitter are finally here. This is the bird app’s own version of stories, a feature that Snapchat, Instagram, Facebook, and, most recently, LinkedIn all have in some capacity.

Similar to its counterparts on the other platforms, Fleets will disappear after 24 hours and video Fleets can only be 30 seconds long. An impressive part of Twitter’s stories function is the fact that you can add alt text to your still Fleets, something that the other social media platforms have yet to figure out.

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