Plunging into social media for the first time can be a bit daunting for individuals or businesses. There is a learning curve when it comes to becoming more social online, and it can take a while to learn what works and what doesn’t. Here are a few of the best Do’s and Don’ts that can save you time and help grow your social media authority more quickly.
1. Start small
You’ll want to start small and try a couple services out at a time. Oftentimes newbies sign up for every social network under the sun and try to grow each of them. Guess how long they last? Building profiles for multiple social sites is hard work, so it’s best to start by only tackling a couple at first.
Once you find the right ones for you or your brand, then start to narrow your focus on those. Eventually you may want to scale your social media strategy to include more services, but you have to crawl before you can walk.
Start small, and then grow to other social networks as your confidence grows. Success breeds success.
2. Get a widget
Put a widget up on your site for your social networks. The best place to find followers is your own blog or site. Also, it’s much easier to get your readers and friends to vote or retweet your content than strangers. Adding a widget next to your content can help.
Facebook has a widget generator you can use, and the Tweetmeme badge is easy to add to your site as well.
3. Frequently test your buttons and widgets
Start testing which social media profiles have the most impact, then drop the rest. For example, if your site does really well with Facebook shares but hardly ever gets voted on Digg, then drop the Digg vote button.
Oftentimes you’ll see sites littered with tons of widgets and buttons. Having a gazillion widgets at the end of each article only creates noise and annoys the reader. Figure out which buttons are getting clicked, and drop the buttons that don’t convert. Ideally you’ll only have two or three widgets on each page.
You can tell which buttons are effective by using Google Analytics and goals to see who’s clicking what. You can also use A/B to see which types of buttons are getting more clicks.
4. Don’t annoy your followers
Sounds like common sense, right? Unfortunately, lots of companies that are just starting out with social media think the best way to “promote” their brand is to publish coupons, offers, news, and anything else related to their business.
Rule of thumb: if it’s something you personally wouldn’t like to receive, avoid it.
Your social media goal is to be helpful first. People follow and respect brands that are helpful, not self-promoting shills. Give first, then ask.
Try posting useful links to industry articles, answer questions, and engage. The followers, engagement, and ultimately sales will come if you’re helpful first.
5. Don’t fret about follower counts
Don’t believe all the spammy ebooks out there that sell you the notion that you can attract thousands of followers in a matter of days. Sure, you could do that and it’s not hard. But the types of followers who are going to be following you are mostly bots. Or they’re just following you in hopes that you’ll follow them back. Ultimately, they aren’t followers who would engage with you.
You want social media followers that are going to listen and interact with you, and 10 of those followers is worth more than a thousand bots.
It takes a while to organically build up a great social profile. Focus on building great content and being helpful, and the followers will come.
6. See what the pros are doing
Everyone has a different strategy when it comes to social media, and sometimes it’s best to take a look at people who are real social media experts. Lee Odden is a good example of someone using Twitter and Facebook to help people, which in turn grows his social media influence.
There are plenty of fantastic examples of people who truly understand how to interact and build powerful social media profiles the right way. Check out sites like WeFollow to find influential Twitter users within your niche.
7. Don’t overlook niche social media sites
When people think of social media, they typically think of Twitter or Facebook. But there are literally hundreds (maybe thousands?) of social media networks and sites that you can use to help promote your brand. Jut because a network isn’t huge doesn’t mean it’s not going to impact your social media strategy. Oftentimes targeted niche social sites can bring more targeted traffic to your site than larger sites.
If you’re smart, you can use smaller social networks to help promote your site on other bigger social networks. For example, I’ve written posts on web development that have made it to the front page of Dzone, a social media site for web development. Once the article made it to the front page of Dzone, the attention brought a lot of saves on Delicious, and subsequently made it to the Delicious front page. The delicious front page brought even more traffic, and those Delicious users voted the story up to the Digg front page. So, by simply submitting my site on a smaller niche news site with a great headline, I managed to make it to the coveted homepages of both Digg and Delicious.
Niche social news sites can be very powerful, and oftentimes much easier to become influential in than the larger sites. Here’s a list of social news sites organized by category.
8. Find people within your niche to follow on Twitter
The ideal follower on Twitter is one that has similar interests within your niche. You can find like-minded people to follow on Twitter through these directories and odds are many will follow you back.
Once you’ve started following these people, start interacting with them. Participate in discussions, and retweet things they say that would be helpful to your community.
Not only will this method help build your follower counts, it also gives you more influence within your niche. You’ll find great friends that will help you promote your content and site too. Always remember to give first and ask later.
9. Stay Humble
Social media beginners often try to quickly establish themselves as “experts” within their field, but they have nothing to back it up. (For example, search for “social media experts” on Twitter. You’ll find many with only a handful of followers. Shouldn’t an “expert” have more?)
As with anything in life, nobody likes a know-it-all. Be humble. Ask questions. Teach, but don’t preach. Let others do the hyping for you. And they will if you’re helpful and humble.
