I’m so excited to see so many switching over to Parler from Facebook who has been been censoring us and meddling in the election process by blocking and deleting our posts. If you are a business person, you’ll also know that in order for your page posts to be seen by a good amount of your own followers, they want you to pay. Parler has no such algorithms…and anyone’s post has the potential to reach many more people.
Parler is still relatively new, but I’m very impressed with John Matze’s vision for this social media platform. He believes in freedom of speech and goes all out to protect it.
So having said that, here are a few tips that I’ve learned along the way.
- Use a real name, people like interacting with other real people. It will draw your own friends in as well. Get your membership verified. You will get the red badge next to your name, and it adds credibility.
- Use a nice profile picture and cover photo, it doesn’t need to be anything fancy, but choose something that depicts who you are. Add bio information, it allows you to add a link even, so it’s great if you are a business person or a blogger.
- Go out and search for your “tribe”. At the bottom of the screen you will see the icon for a magnifying glass…you can search by member name or hashtag.
- Hashtags…use them…a lot! I hear that the maximum to use effectively is five. But these are used similarly to how Twitter and Instagram uses them. They are great for organizing posts, and for finding those with similar interests, or folks within a particular community. You can post your own, or find one that suits your needs (when you enter the hashtag and start typing, the most used come up) and start posting to it. Follow those that have used those hashtags if they are meaningful and start following them.
- Moving over to a new social media site, is similar to moving to a new town. You need to put yourself out there. Follow people, comment, up vote, and echo their posts.
- Up-votes (the up arrow at the bottom of a post) are similar to facebook’s ‘likes’ . An ‘echo’ (the megaphone) is a share. If you simply ‘echo’ without commenting, you aren’t really adding to the conversation. But if you ‘echo with comment’, you’ll be able to see how many views your own echo got, and how many are on the original post (plus all the echos).
- The possible reach for each echo is crazy compared to facebook’s reach. It’s possible to get thousands of eyes on something you post. So provide value. Don’t be there to just take and get clicks.
- Don’t be afraid to follow others…no need to lock yourself up. There are trolls on Parler as well, but they are easy enough to block.
- Curate your own news feed. Follow only those that you want to hear from, no need to follow everyone blindly. I like to read through people’s profile pages before following, and those with a profile picture and a red badge take priority. But it’s up to you and your comfort level. It’s ok to be choosy…just don’t be afraid, this really is a pretty awesome group of people.
- When you follow someone it gives you the option to ‘subscribe’ to them as well. Use this wisely… they will show up on your notification (the bell at the bottom of the page) when they post. You can use this as a good way to stay in touch with friends, or folks in a particular group that you don’t want to miss their posts.
That’s all I can think of right now, please let me know if you have any other questions that I can help with. I don’t work for Parler or have any skin in this game…I simply love it and would like to see our community grow. I’m Esmeralda @EssyD, come follow me, I look forward to getting to know you all.