2.social Mediamr. Mac's Virtual Existence

With 2019 upon us, whether it be eating more vegetables or finally using that overpriced gym membership, you’re probably in full goal-setting mode. New Year’s resolutions are meant to be broken, right?

  • 1984 - The first Mac computer is built which of course leads us over the long run to the iPad. 1991 - The 900 mhz cordless phone was the new invention on the block. 2009 - AmphiCoach world's first amphibious passenger coach vehicle introduced to land and water. 2011 - World's First Spy Glasses - be afraid of people with glasses.
  • Among numerous social media sites, WeChat is widely used in Chinese daily life (Cheng et al., 2017), with a market penetration rate of 81.6% (Lisha et al., 2017).It has grown into a comprehensive platform that encompasses a variety of life and business services (CNNIC, 2017).

Technology is advancing at a breakneck speed. The phone that was once a rich person’s toy has now become a tool of the masses. Wikipedia has over 4 million pages in which anyone may modify, putting.

Perhaps when it comes to personal goals, but for marketing goals, now is the time to tackle your strategy with full-force.

Organization is one of the keys to success in marketing, so if you are not managing your social platforms, or, if you're an agency, managing your clients' social media accounts, with a social media management tool, that needs to change today!

Not only will using a social media management tool make your life substantially easier, it doesn’t need to go through rounds of budgeting approval – because there are many robust free tools out there to help you accomplish all of your social marketing goals in 2019.

Social management platforms will help you manage multiple social profiles in one place, schedule posts in advance, run contests, track analytics across platforms, and the list goes on. These tools really are game changers for your social strategy!

And lucky for you, I’ve rounded up a list of the seven best free social media management tools to incorporate into your 2019 strategy, starting with my personal favorite, Hootsuite!

#1: Hootsuite

Hootsuite has a special place in my heart, likely because it’s the first social media management platform that I used at my very first job as a Marketing Assistant. At the time, I was managing the company’s social strategy before social advertising had really taken off. I can still remember the hours upon hours I would spend putting together a posting content calendar and setting reminders for myself to tweet at certain times. This was until I discovered Hootsuite and my life as a frantic Twitter bird instantly changed.

So what does the Hootsuite free plan include? This option is decently robust with the ability to:

  • Manage 3 social profiles in one place
  • Schedule 30 posts in advance
  • Generate leads with social contests

The free plan also includes basic analytics for tracking followers and various growth and content statistics and two RSS feed integrations. Not too shabby!

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2.social mediamr. mac

#2: Buffer

Next up is Buffer. Similar to Hootsuite, Buffer has been in the social media management space for quite some time, and they are a respectable platform that allows you to manage multiple social profiles with ease.

With many overlapping features to Hootsuite, some of my favorite Buffer features include the ability to easily schedule content while browsing the web with their Chrome extensions. Buffer also suggests the perfect moments to post based on follower activity – pretty neat!

While there are a variety of options for larger organizations and agencies, the free plan just may suit your social media management needs. Buffer’s free plan includes the ability to manage three social profiles, schedule up to ten posts, utilize their browser extensions and mobile apps (iOS and android) feature, create and schedule content using their image creator and GIF/video uploader, and shorten and track links.

#3: TweetDeck

If Twitter is the bread and butter of your social media strategy, then TweetDeck is likely the best social management platform for you! TweetDeck will allow Twitter birds to use custom timelines, create and manage Twitter lists and searches, and add team accounts. It is also free for Twitter users!

While TweetDeck may not be the all-in-one platform you’re searching for, it is the perfect tool for social marketers managing multiple Twitter accounts where these live conversations are critical for business success.

#4: SocialOomph

2.social Mediamr. Mac's Virtual Existence Meaning

Not only do I love the name of SocialOomph, I’m quite impressed by the wide range of features they offer for multiple platforms – ranging from the typical features like scheduling and analytics, to some interesting ones like keeping your DM Twitter Inbox clean to help with increasing followers. They definitely offer a wide variety of unique features for Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, and Pinterest management, as well as the ability to manage and schedule blog posts.

While SocialOomph does indeed have a free plan, the features are limited and mostly lean towards Twitter management. On the free plan you can do things like schedule tweets, track keywords, shorten URL’s, and manage up to five Twitter accounts, but some of the more sophisticated features require a paid plan. If you’re looking to manage multiple social platforms aside from Twitter you will need to pay to play.

#5: Friends+Me

Friends+Me is another prime player in the social media management tools family. While Friends+Me puts the highest emphasis on Google Plus features, many other social platforms are supported. Friends+Me appears to get rave reviews from users, and has a beautifully designed website with plans available based on the size of your business. And yes, there is a free plan!

While the free plan is not super robust, it still allows for two queues (which is a destination to publish posts), the ability to schedule five posts per queue at one time, link shortening, browser extensions, an integration with Zapier, as well as standard support. The free plan can also be used for a variety of social platforms like Google+, Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter, and Tumblr.

Pinterest and Instagram are supported as well, but you will need to upgrade. Plans range from $7.50 to $216 depending on if you decide to utilize monthly or annual billing.

#6: Followerwonk

Followerwonk is definitely not your tradition social media management tool when it comes to scheduling posts, but it is an effective tool when it comes to understanding your audience at a much deeper level. Followerwonk allows you to dig deep into Twitter bios and compare various accounts to find the most relevant influencers. With this tool, you can analyze your current followers – by location, bio, accounts they follow, and more – and contrast relationships with competitors. This will help you improve your social content by matching your activities with gains and losses of followers.

This tool is definitely worth exploring, because having a lot of followers is meaningless if these followers are not relevant and actually engaging with your brand. Luckily, Followerwonk offers a free account, as well! Like many of the others on this list, the free account does come with several limitations, but you will still be able to connect one profile, view authority rankings, see followers and their locations, see when followers are active, and access several other details to further analyze your social audience. If you are interested in more capabilities their plans are still decently affordable ranging from $29 to $79 per month.

2.social Mediamr. Mac's Virtual Existence Software

#7: Zoho Social

Whether you’re a growing business or an agency, Zoho Social will help you manage multiple profiles, research relevant keywords, work with team members, and of course schedule posts from one dashboard.

Zoho Social has many of the same tools and features that the other platforms have, but they also have Facebook lead ads, advanced reporting features, a SocialShare browser plugin, and CRM integrations. Zoho Social caters to agencies as well so marketers have the choice of choosing between the business or agency plans. Pricing for the paid plans ranges from $8.33 to $125+ for larger agencies. Zoho Social’s free plan allows you to manage 1 brand, and includes the URL shortener and SocialShare browser plugin.

I know, I know there are a lot of options here! Luckily, they all have free plans so you can experiment and find the platform that works best for your social strategy. At the end of the day you can’t go wrong moving onto a social media management tool – it will likely save you time, grow your social presence, and possibly even make you some money!

Article ID = 232
Article Title = Virtualising a physical Mac/hard disk/clone/disk image file
Article Author(s) = Graham Needham (BH)
Article Created On = 27th March 2019
Article Last Updated = 27th March 2019
Article URL = https://www.macstrategy.com/article.php?232
Article Brief Description:
Instructions for installing, setting up and virtualising a physical Mac/hard disk/disk image file

Virtualising a physical Mac/hard disk/clone/disk image file

The ability to virtualise an existing Mac/macOS installation is important and very useful as it is an easy way to continue running your old Mac and also a possible way to run 32-bit applications that do not run on macOS 10.15 or later. MacStrategy presents this special guide to virtualising a physical Mac/hard disk/clone/disk image file.
This article deals with transferring an existing Mac running Mac OS X / OS X / macOS to a virtual machine, or take a bootable storage device/clone/disk image and convert it into a virtual machine. If you would prefer to set up/install a virtual machine with a clean Mac OS X/OS X/macOS from scratch please see one of the following articles instead:

2.social Mediamr. Mac's Virtual Existence Server

  • Mac OS X 10.6 Snow Leopard (Server) - costs money but you may already be running/want to run this to be able to use PowerPC/Rosetta based applications
  • OS X 10.7 - OS X 10.8 is better
  • OS X 10.8 - costs money but if you already own it/want to pay for it, it runs very efficiently in a virtual machine and there are few internet/iCloud based services clogging it up
  • OS X 10.9 - was very kludgy and slow when installed on a hard disk
  • OS X 10.10 - was slow when installed on a hard disk, does not support latest Apple internet/iCloud based services
  • OS X 10.11 - free, supports most internet/iCloud based services
  • macOS 10.12 - free, supports most internet/iCloud based services
  • macOS 10.13 - buggy, slow, new Apple File System
  • macOS 10.14 - still being revised, new Apple File System

Virtualisation Software

  • Parallels Desktop [£79.99 inc VAT - 14 day free trial available]
  • VMWare Fusion [£70.00 inc VAT - 30 day free trial available]
  • Oracle VirtualBox [FREE - Open source under GNU General Public License (GPL) version 2]

Instructions

NOTE2.social Mediamr. Mac: This document was written using a Mac mini (2014 model) with macOS 10.14 Mojave running in 64-bit only test mode and using Parallels Desktop 14.1.2, VMWare Fusion 11.0.2 and VirtualBox 6.0.4.

Preparation

NOTE: You will need the following:
  1. Mac computer for hosting your preferred guest OS preferably with a working Recovery Partition
  2. Make sure your actual, physical Mac has a working internet connection e.g. use a web browser to go to https://www.apple.com and see if you can view a web page
  3. Purchase/install/update your preferred virtualisation software (see list above)
  4. On later versions of macOS your preferred virtualisation software will require specifically allowing their System Extension(s) to run via System Preferences > Security & Privacy, plus they may require to be granted access to Accessibility
  5. Purchase/download/obtain your preferred cloning software (we list some in our How To Clone Your Primary/Boot Drive article - we highly recommend Carbon Copy Cloner)
  6. If you going to clone from a physical Mac or a clone on a bootable storage device, if possible, boot that system first to make sure it works/is bootable, and also de-activate any software e.g. Adobe Creative Suite (applications)
  7. Bootable physical Mac/hard disk/clone/disk image file of your old system
  8. NOTE: If you have the original Mac you will need to clone its startup disk either to an external storage device (preferably USB) or to a disk image first using, for example, Carbon Copy Cloner.
  9. Make sure you have plenty of free space on your physical Mac's hosting drive - you will need to create a basic Mac OS X / OS X / macOS virtual machine where you may need to copy the disk image file of your old system to + an additional virtual machine drive that has enough space to host your old system
  10. If you are using an external storage device for your bootable clone or to hold the disk image file it's best to rename it to something that is easy to recognise e.g. 'VM Transfer'
  11. Create a basic/clean Mac OS X / OS X / macOS virtual machine - if your Mac host computer has a working Recovery Partition, in VMWare Fusion you can easily do this by going to File menu > New… > select 'Install macOS from the recovery partition' > click 'Continue' and follow the on-screen instructions. Alternatively, use our step-by-step guides:
Instructions for virtualising a physical Mac/hard disk/clone/disk image file with:

Parallels Desktop Instructions

We have not tested this in Parallels Desktop but you should be able to do something similar to what we did in VMWare Fusion - we will update this article when we have more time to test this. Don't forget to donate to us (use the button in the bottom left corner of this web page).

VMWare Fusion

  1. Make sure the basic/clean Mac virtual machine you created in the preparation section above is shutdown
  2. Go to Virtual Machine menu > Settings > Hard Disk (SATA) > click 'Add Device…' > select 'New Hard Disk' > click 'Add…' > choose size > Apply
  3. NOTE: This additional virtual machine drive must be larger than the space used by the physical Mac/hard disk/clone/disk image file of your old system.
  4. Start up/boot the virtual machine
  5. At the Desktop Mac OS X / OS X / macOS will recognise the additional virtual machine drive and ask you to initalize it > click 'Initialize' (which will open Disk Utility)
  6. Select the unformatted additional virtual machine drive on the left (VMware Virtual SATA) - this is the one without 'Macintosh HD' underneath it
  7. Set 'Name:' to 'Second HD', 'Format:' to 'OS X Extended (Journaled)', and 'Scheme:' to 'GUID Partition Map' > click 'Erase' to initalize/format the additional virtual machine drive (it should now mount/appear on your Desktop if you have the virtual machine's Finder 'Preferences' set to show 'Hard Disks')
  8. Click 'Erase'
  9. If OS X / macOS asks you whether you want to use the additional virtual machine drive for Time Machine Backups click 'Don't Use'
  10. Quit Disk Utility
  11. Connect your physical Mac/clone or hard disk with the disk image file of your old system to your virtual machine OR, if you have enough space, copy the disk image file of your old system on to the virtual machine's Desktop
  12. The physical Mac/clone or hard disk with the disk image file of your old system on it should now mount/appear on your Desktop (if you have the virtual machine's Finder 'Preferences' set to show 'Hard Disks') OR double click to open the disk image file of your old system that is now on your virtual machine's Desktop
  13. Using your cloning software of choice, clone your physical Mac/hard disk/clone/disk image file of your old system to the additional virtual machine drive e.g. with Carbon Copy Cloner:
  14. In the virtual machine go to Apple menu > System Preferences > Startup Disk > set it to 'Second HD'
  15. Quit System Preferences
  16. Shutdown the virtual machine (Apple menu > Shut Down) - not Restart
  17. Go to Virtual Machine menu > Settings > Hard Disk (SATA) > make sure 'File name:' is 'Virtual Disk.vmdk' > click 'Advanced options' at the bottom > click 'Remove Hard Disk'
  18. You will be given the choice to keep or Trash the virtual disk file which is your choice (it might be worth keeping the original virtual disk if you have plenty of space as it is a clean Mac OS X / OS X / macOS virtual machine)
  19. Go to Virtual Machine menu > Settings > General
  20. Change the virtual machine's 'Name' to something that is relevant to your original Mac system e.g. 'Old OS X 10.8 Mac Pro'
  21. Change the virtual machine's 'OS' to match that was on your physical Mac/hard disk/clone/disk image file
  22. Go through and configure your required virtual machine custom settings:
  23. Start up/boot the virtual machine
  24. To avoid confusion with your host Mac, rename the virtual machine's hard disk from 'Second HD' to something that is different to your current hard disk e.g. 'Virtual OS X 10.8 HD'
  25. Go to Virtual Machine menu > Install VMWare Tools
  26. Install VMWare Tools, following the on screen instructions and restart the virtual machine when complete (you may get a message about the installer certificate being out of date and this appears to stop the Tools installing so things like drag and drop are not supported [with this guest OS])
  27. If you are running an unsupported version of Mac OS X / OS X / macOS make sure you check out our Securing Older Operating Systems article
  28. Q. What are the current, supported versions of macOS?
    A. macOS 11 (Big Sur), macOS 10.15 (Catalina) and macOS 10.14 (Mojave) are supported by Apple. The latest security updates are:
    • macOS 11 - included in the macOS 11.1 Update
    • macOS 10.15 - included in the macOS 10.15.7 Combo Update + Security Update 2020-001
    • macOS 10.14 - included in the macOS 10.14.6 Combo Update + Security Update 2020-007
    • SECURITY WARNING: macOS 10.13 and earlier are no longer supported with security updates - see our securing older operating systems article.

VirtualBox

We have not tested this in VirtualBox but you should be able to do something similar to what we did in VMWare Fusion - we will update this article when we have more time to test this. Don't forget to donate to us (use the button in the bottom left corner of this web page).

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2.social Mediamr. Mac's Virtual Existence Key

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