Everywhere there are articles that tell businesses that they must have a social media presence—Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn, to name three. It seems overwhelming to many small business owners and nonprofit managers already putting in long hours. But research and experience shows that there are rewards. For most people, especially those under 35, this environment is their life. They seem to live on Facebook and tweet about everything! For others it is frightening, foreign territory and simply makes no sense. Look at your market and find out where they are. If you aren't sure, just ask them.

A question I often get asked by clients is, "Do I have to?" The answer, as always is, "It depends."

The first thing you have to know is, where do your customers hang out? The audience for each of these social media sites is different, so you might benefit from having an active presence on one or some of them, but not necessarily all. For a start, here is my take on Facebook.

Most Facebook users are using it to talk about their daily lives, where they are, what they do with their time and what causes they support. They like to recommend a restaurant or service and be kept up to date on specials and product offerings. That means you want to be with them as they make decisions on how they use their money. This platform is excellent for that. According to socialbakers.com, there are over 17 million Canadians on Facebook (just a hair over the total population) and 50% of them are in the 18-35 age group. Fifty-four percent are female. If these numbers reflect your target market, you MUST have a presence for your business or organization on Facebook.

A client of ours, Atomic Cupcakes in Waterdown, Ontario uses Facebook well. The bakery changes cupcake flavours daily so Facebook is a great way to announce it with posts on their Facebook page. When someone likes the page, they receive daily updates on what flavours are on offer - with mouth-watering photos. Who wouldn't like that? Customers can also post pictures of themselves enjoying a cupcake. What a great avenue for endorsements and recommendations!

For charities and nonprofits, Facebook is a great way to keep your donors and supporters engaged. As a board member on a small nonprofit, I hear from donors regularly. Their feedback is consistent: keep me informed and show me how I'm making a difference if you want my donations to continue. Our nonprofit, Home of Grace Care Centre, does keep people updated. We report on board member visits, updates on the orphans and even post videos of the children singing. And it works. People like to receive these updates.

If you think it's too much work to do Facebook for your business, it isn't - especially when you consider the potential rewards. You don't have to write paragraphs. A sentence or two will do. In fact, short and sweet is better. Don't feel you have to be constantly posting. In fact, if you over-post, people tend to ignore you. Do not post more than once a day. So what do you post? Here are a few ideas: Specials, sales, new product or service, contests, boast about achievements, or recognize your employee of the month.

What about nonprofits? Do you have a critical need? Recognize a volunteer. Post a meaningful statistic about the population you serve. Boast about a milestone achieved. One charity I help, Micah House Refugee Reception Services, posts about needs of its clients and updates about the status of the house that are useful for volunteers and donors.

You can see that the possibilities are endless and if it's only a sentence or two, it can be fast. But like all marketing, you need a plan. How often will you post? What will you say? As the saying goes, "Measure twice and cut once." You could even create a schedule of posts so implementation is even faster.

At the same time, we don't often see people on Facebook talking about industrial valves or payroll services. Some B2B companies have made a foray into Facebook, question the value. Can readers of this article share their B2B Facebook experiences?  I'd love to hear your thoughts.

Regardless, I invite you to join the conversation…

A local client who sells their product around the world has a problem: Terminology in their industry is not consistent around the globe. What's a website to do?

There are a few ways to do get your web site to be friendly to alternate terms. More Important ways to insert key words is to add them to the Title meta tag (the text that appears at the very top of your browser's window) and the Description meta tag. You can also add them to the keyword meta tag, but remember that Google does not index that tag, even if other search engines do. But you may need to sacrifice some text already in there, since search engines will only look at the first 160 characters or so.

A really good strategy is to add a page that specifically addresses the alternative terms. An easy way you could do this through a case study of a non-North American client. In that case, you can write it using the local jargon. This gives you the option of having those alternate terms throughout the page, including the meta tags.

Adding the alternate terms into the image alt title is a good approach, too. But be careful your alt title is still relevant to the image. Maintain the spirit of the alt title, which is intended for people who have audible browsing turned on.

I also think there's no harm in editing your web copy to insert some of the "foreign" terms. Some of those terms used more often in Europe/Britain are probably not unknown in North America. It also allows you to acknowledge your global market. Something as simple as "term x, also known as term Y" judiciously inserted will work.

What do you think? Join the conversation and leave a comment.

A client recently asked about getting PDF files small enough to email easily, but without losing image quality - is there a trick to it? This is my reply.

The main factor in the file size of a PDF is photographs. Images accounted for nearly two thirds of the file size for a three-page document I was asked to evaluate. That's  what makes a PDF big. The file had a large photo in the background of the front page and other pages had images too, though not as large. It's always a balancing act between image quality and file size. The smaller the file size, the poorer the image quality. There comes a point where the image quality is so poor, it defeats the purpose of including it. In some cases, you need to change how the document is designed to get the file significantly smaller.

In general, here are a few things to consider when trying to keep PDF file size under control:

1. Number and size of images: This is the biggest factor in file size. Photos or other 'raster' images are stored pixel by pixel. Logically, more and larger images will result in a larger document file size. Big background images look great, but they make for big files. If the image has a solid background colour that matches the document's background colour (e.g. white on white), crop it as tightly as possible to minimize the image's size. Remember that an image size causes an exponential increase in file size, so even a small reduction in the size of the image can make a difference.

2. Image resolution: The fewer pixels that need to be stored, the smaller the file size. There are two benchmark resolutions to remember: web/monitor resolution is 72 pixels per inch (ppi), while print resolution is 300 ppi. Depending on how your PDF will be used (printed vs. viewed onliine), you can play with the resolution. Print quality isn't going to be acceptable below 150-200 ppi. Make sure you also tell the PDF generator to downsize everything above the target resolution. The default is to downsize pictures that are only more than 50% higher resolution than the target. For example, "Downsample to [200] ppi images that are over [350] ppi." should be changed so that both numbers are the same.

3. Image quality: While resolution refers to the number of pixels, this setting determines the amount of information stored about each pixel. The lower the quality, the more 'noise' or image distortion that will appear. The higher the quality, the bigger the file size. Start with the 'medium' setting and experiment by going up or down from there to suit your needs.

4. Colour model: Converting CMYK images (for commercial printing) to RGB (for monitors and desktop printing) reduces file size.

5. Compression technique: Stick with the default setting in Acrobat: Automatic(JPEG). That gives the smallest file.

6. Other objects: Vector-based design elements such as boxes, lines or other sahpes add very weight to the file, so they can be the best way to make a document visually appealing when conscious of the PDF file size.

7. Special effects: You may have no photos in your PDF, but if you have boxes or other objects with transparency, drop shadows or other effects applied to them, they are converted to raster images to maintain the effect. Then you have the image quality vs. file size balancing act to contend with.

8. Raster versus vector: When there is a choice, use a vector version of your logo or other image. Vector images take much less memory. That means no jpg, png, gif or bmp logo files. If your logo contains both vector and raster elements, separate the two elements, rather than putting them together in one large raster image. Here is information on the difference between raster and vector images if you don't already know.

9. Page count: Perhaps it's stating the obvious that a shorter document will be smaller, but it's sometimes forgotten. If you can edit the content down to reduce pages, it will help.

By the way, compression settings are applied pretty much across the board for a document. You cannot apply one set of rules to one object and a different set to another. The only differentiation is for colour, grayscale and bitmap images. There are a few other settings that can have an impact on file size (including bookmarks, subsetting fonts, including thumbnails, etc.) but generally, if you stick with the Acrobat defaults, you already have them set where you need them.

Do you have other techniques for optimizing file size of your PDF? Leave a comment and join the conversation.