This tip on my Ask Anything series today is a FAVORITE quick tip of mine to save TIME–and, it is a tip that is great for NON-business owners also!  It for anyone who loves social media!  It all starts with my macbook, which I LOVE!  It is so easy for me to work on, and I just love a full keyboard- due to growing up in the instant messaging years, I am a really efficient typer.  So sometimes typing on my phone can get really cumbersome.  That being said, my iphone is often where business- and personal- social media happen, based on ease (and, as a working mother, phones are easier for the “OMG the kids are actually playing TOGETHER happily–let’s get that Instagram post up”… can I get an amen?!).  But sometimes using social media, especially hash-tagging on Instagram, can get REALLY annoying on phone keyboards.

So I have made use of something that has drastically changed my social media use on my phone…keyboard shortcuts!  They are so easy to make, and they cut down my typing time big time! You can make keyboard shortcuts for ANYTHING! So if you are a mom (or puppy mom!) and you use a specific hashtag for your kid to group those photos, like “#BestBoyBrian” or whatever it may be, you could make a keyboard SHORTCUT for that so that you only have to type a couple of characters (for example, “BBB”), and it would appear! Or maybe you are a photographer and are constantly typing in the same string of hashtags for your business or area (which you definitely want to be doing!)…little keyboard shortcuts can make it SO easy!

The other use I have found that has changed my world is for blog comments! I love to comment on fellow photographer’s blog posts, and this often happens from my phone. But often, you have to fill in your email address and website if you have one as a part of the comment registration process…and on a phone, that requires you to switch between multiple screens! Not anymore! Now, I just type “web” and my full website appears! I type “Jemail” and my email address appears! It is amazing!

So how do you do it? It’s SUPER simple! These are iphone instructions since I am a Mac girl, but I’m POSITIVE you could do it on any type of cell phone (from the last few years! :))!

Step 1). Go to settings. Press “General”. Scroll down to “keyboard”. Press “shortcuts”.

Step 2). Decide what all you want to use! I have a shortcut for my regular business hashtags, for my wedding hashtag, for my publishing hashtags, etc.

Step 3). Plus the + in the upper right corner. Under “phrase” you write what you want to auto fill (so for example, for wedding hashtags I want #jillgumphotography #jgpweddings #jgpcouples #springfieldweddingphotographer #midwestweddings – so I put that all under “phrase”

Step 4). Under “shortcut”, type what you want to type instead! So instead of ALL of those things up above…I type “Whash” for wedding hashtag. That’s ALL!  That is 5 letters instead of 80!  It is AMAZING!

Step 5). Press “save” in the upper right corner, and you are done! The next time you start to type your shortcut- Whash for example, ALL of those other phrases appear!

Some people may have better luck than I do with autofill, but the hashtags I regularly use only sometimes would show up, and never for the blog shortcut use- so this saves me TONS of time!

One tip: Make sure the actual shortcuts you WILL type in (“whash” in my example) aren’t phrases you usually type! For example, when I started with the blog comments shortcut, I just used “email” to autofill jill@jillgumphotography.com…but I found that I typed the word “email” a LOT in other conversation, so it was autofilling in my actual address where I didn’t want it to! I went back through and changed it to “Jemail”- which I would never regularly type- problem solved!

I hope this is helpful- I have found it to be SUCH a time saver!!! Enjoy using your new shortcuts!!

To learn about Instagram feeds on your website, click here!

Email questions about business or photography to jill@jillgumphotography.com!