Doing Your Social Media Effectively

Written by Derek Brigham | 01 August 2010

Many of us in business, politics, event and self promotion have been using social media for a while now. But are we using it effectively? I know I'm not—there's always room for improvement—but at least I know what it is I'm not doing. And for a few key reasons pointed out in this good summary post on the issue by Mike Brown in Brainzooming.

Have a look at the meat of the post below. It was brought to my attention, by a Twitter post from Nancy. See how many problems you can catch on how you are connecting.

Managing Your Presence

• Select several social media platforms supporting your business strategy and objectives; concentrate your presence on these alone. You might have one location for content (i.e., a blog or micro-blog), a second for networking (maybe Twitter or LinkedIn), and a third for community interaction (Facebook or LinkedIn).
• Divide social media time into 3 roughly equal parts – reading and monitoring social media in your topic area, commenting and participating on other peoples’ sites, and creating content for your own site. From this framework, decide how much time weekly you can invest on social media. Really work to stick to your time expectations.
• Before blogging, determine how many times monthly you expect to blog. Pre-write that many posts to see if the frequency is viable and to build a month-long content cushion for when time is limited.
• Choose creating and consistently delivering less content over wild swings in activity. Faithfully writing one blog post weekly and three tweets daily is better than three posts your first week with lots of Twitter activity then going silent for weeks.

Generating Content

• Exploit your best communications talents aggressively in your social media effort. These might include article writing, headline writing, shooting video, illustrations, photos, etc.  Design a content strategy allowing you to use these talents to be as efficient in creating content as possible.
• Write down at least two potential blog topic ideas daily where they’ll be available later as idea starters.
• Cut your writing time and keep it short. You don’t need to (and probably shouldn’t) write thousand word blog posts. Stick to one idea in a couple of hundred words.
• Save tweets and comments you make on other blogs to use as the basis for blog posts.
• Solicit material from your audience, providing a brief description of what type of content, topics, and format you’re seeking.
• At a minimum, set up Google Alerts on relevant topics to create readily available content for sharing online.
• Find an intern from a local university to assist your business in its social media strategy.

Promoting Your Presence

• Use common hashtags and keywords to increase visibility and pass along mentions.
• Place social media buttons on your blog to make it easy for readers to share your content within their own social networks.
• Sync your various social media sites so one item feeds multiple platforms (i.e., send your tweet about a blog post to LinkedIn and Facebook automatically).
• Offer simple, fun give-aways to your audience to incent participation in commenting, retweeting, social bookmarking, etc.
• Take time to write a brief bio and company overview for use on every social media site. Use a service such as KnowEm.com to secure your identity on many platforms, with links back to your main sites.
• Create an informal network of friends (onine and IRL) with relevant networks and agree to tweet about each others’ work.

  Read more...

You'll Find Out November 2nd

Written by Derek Brigham | 19 August 2010

Dim lights