book.chapter Establishing your social media base

To effectively leverage social media for your advantage when the need arises, it's imperative to lay down a robust groundwork. This involves ensuring that your profiles are freshly minted, bios are current, author pages are comprehensive, and so on. It's also crucial to become adept at posting engaging content and managing interactions through comments with the aid of social media tools. There are four fundamental components that you must refine to ascend to the status of a social media influencer. Addressing each component in detail: Every social media platform offers you the chance to create a "profile" page, a space where you can introduce yourself and articulate your interests and expertise. It's essential to craft a profile that not only captures the attention of viewers but also presents you in the most favorable light possible. Here are some recommendations for enhancing your profile page: - Choose a neutral and professional screen name that aligns with your personal or professional brand and maintain consistency across various social media platforms. - Optimize your profile to make an impact within the brief five-second window that viewers typically spend on it. Incorporate striking graphics, photographs, and succinct biographical snippets that project an image of approachability, trustworthiness, and a compelling conversational partner. - Select an avatar that focuses on your face and ensures that you are well-lit in the photograph. Stick with one image and maintain uniformity across different platforms. - Develop a succinct mantra that encapsulates your essence or mission statement. - Utilize the secondary, larger photo space provided by platforms like Facebook, Google+, and LinkedIn to narrate your story through visual means. - Acquire a vanity URL to showcase your creativity and have posts associated with your name or your company's name. - Ensure that your profile is complete, demonstrating your attention to detail by filling out all relevant sections. - Maintain a professional demeanor by opting for "pages" on Facebook instead of a personal timeline. - Regularly review your page from an outsider's perspective using an "incognito window" to see your profile as others do. Guy Kawasaki and Peg Fitzpatrick assert that the ultimate goal of a profile is to persuade others to engage with your social media endeavors. Essentially, it acts as a global resume for the world to scrutinize and evaluate. The most significant and persistent challenge in social media is the generation of sufficient high-quality content to share consistently. You have two primary strategies at your disposal: - Create original content by writing articles, capturing photographs, making videos, and producing your own material. - Curate content by discovering excellent work done by others, summarizing it, and sharing it with your audience. To post content that resonates: - Develop a content strategy that outlines your objectives for using social media. - Employ an editorial calendar to plan and organize your posts systematically. - Share only high-quality content that is likely to be reshared by others. - Actively promote content posted by your connections. - Monitor content aggregation services for material you can repurpose. - Stay abreast of trending topics and participate in the conversation. - Solicit suggestions from your network. - Maintain a dynamic list of intriguing topics, stories, services, etc. - Embrace user-generated content related to your products or services and share it with your audience. Guy Kawasaki and Peg Fitzpatrick emphasize that social media is fundamentally straightforward: if you share valuable content, it will be reshared, leading to increased interaction and a growing follower base. To craft posts that add value for your followers, consider the following tips: - Provide informative, entertaining, or practical assistance to the reader. - Post content that spans a broad range of interests. - Be bold in your stance on issues and share materials that support your viewpoint. - Keep your posts concise. - Express gratitude by acknowledging your sources and providing links for followers who wish to delve deeper. - Incorporate visual elements to significantly increase viewership. - Organize lengthy posts with bullet points or numbered lists. - Employ compelling teaser introductions. - Utilize hashtags extensively to link your posts to trending topics and conversations. - Aim for a posting frequency that keeps you active without overwhelming your audience. - Use scheduling services to automate the timing of your posts. - Post at the top of the hour, when people are most likely to check their social media accounts. - Be generous without expecting anything in return. - Consider paid promotion for your posts if the potential revenue justifies the expense. - Translate breaking news into multiple languages to reach a wider audience. - Analyze the performance of your posts using tools like Facebook analytics or LikeAnalyzer. - Challenge conventional wisdom through experimentation. - Focus on creating and sharing exceptional content rather than attempting to manipulate search engine rankings. - Review your posts using an incognito window to see them from the perspective of other users. Ernest Hemingway once said, "There is nothing to writing. All you do is sit down at a typewriter and bleed." This sentiment captures the essence of creating content that resonates with an audience. When engaging with social media, you will encounter both positive and negative feedback. Handling positive comments is straightforward, but you will also need to address negative comments. Here's how to manage negative interactions: - Always be mindful of your entire audience when responding to comments, maintaining a courteous and professional demeanor. - Assume that people have good intentions until proven otherwise. - Be willing to agree to disagree. - When faced with strong negative opinions, ask the critical question, "Do you have firsthand experience with this issue?" - Limit exchanges to three rounds. - If necessary, ignore, delete, block, and report trolls or spammers. Guy Kawasaki and Peg Fitzpatrick remind us that responding to comments is a hands-on marketing effort that requires dedication and hard work. Don Miguel Ruiz advises not to take anything personally, as the actions and words of others are projections of their own reality and dreams.