When you get stuck on a social media site, do you turn to the help center, or do you call a friend, or do you wander around the site until you get frustrated and quit? My experience has shown that, for the most part, option one is the most useful.

This post is the second in a two-part series on the help centers for Facebook, Pinterest, LinkedIn, and Twitter. Last week’s post focused on Facebook and Pinterest. This post covers LinkedIn and Twitter.

 

LinkedIn’s Help Center

To access the Help Center for LinkedIn, click on your photo on the far right of the menu bar at the top of your screen. Look to the bottom of the options in the drop down listing and click on Help Center.

Type the topic you need help with into the search box, click on Search or hit the Enter key. The next screen you see will have several results in its top left section. The more specific you can be in the words you use in your initial search, the higher the likelihood you will be offered relevant resultd.

Once you find the option that most closely matches your situation, click on its heading, and you will be given an answer written by a LinkedIn staff person.

You also have the option to pose your question to a community of users of LinkedIn via the Help Forum. If the list of possible results doesn’t have anything you need, and you have tried searching under several options, click the community link at the top right of the page with the list. If you want to go there directly, here is a direct link: http://community.linkedin.com/questions/ask.html

The questions are open for any LinkedIn user to answer, so you are likely to see more than one answer for any given question.

If you still can’t find an answer, click on Contact Us at the top menu bar of that same results screen and an actual LinkedIn employee will respond by email with some suggestions. I have done this several times and always had an answer that addressed my question.

LinkedIn Help Center: http://help.linkedin.com/app/home/

 

 Twitter’s Help Center

In my opinion, Twitter’s help center is laid out the best of all four of the help centers I have reviewed. To access it, just click on the cog wheel at the top of your screen and select Help.

Twitter anticipates the kinds of things people need help with and organizes these into major headings, each of which then has a number of specific related items under it. These headings include Welcome to Twitter, Me, Notifications, Discover, Mobile and Apps, Troubleshooting, Policy and Violations, Safety and Security, and Advertising.

Just browse through the headlines until you find the one most closely related to your question, or type your question into the search box. Usually you are better off scrolling through the headings and the items within them.

In addition, there is a list of links to the most frequently asked questions about using Twitter. To the right of that, is a place where you can create and send a tweet directly to customer support.

At the very bottom of the screen is the option to Contact Support and select the question most related to your issue.

Twitter’s Help Center: https://support.twitter.com/

 

How About You?

Do you use the help centers for the social media sites you tend to frequent? Which help centers do you like the best? What improvements do you think could be made in these centers?

 

About Joyce

Joyce Feustel helps people, especially those age 50 and up, to become more comfortable using social media, especially Facebook, LinkedIn, Pinterest, and Twitter.

She works with business owners, nonprofit organizations, retired people, consultants, and many others. Find her at www.boomerssocialmediatutor.com.