This year, hubby and I will be wearing our team colours and coaching newcomers at Social Media Camp starting Monday. We have been assigned seven newcomers whom I’m sure will have varied needs and differing levels of comfort and skill. So how will we manage all of this?
Well, we will do our best to answer their questions (or find them answers) and we will stick to some basic advice about social media.
- Be Complementary. Know your audience/market and go where they are. If your market is on Twitter and you are on Facebook, you are just going to be shouting into the wind.
- Be Choosy. Pick a manageable number of SM services rather than spreading you our your team thin over many services.
- Be Competent. Learn to use your chosen service(s) well.
- Be Creative. Don’t send the same message over multiple services. It’s OK to link to the same blog post across multiple services but you need to tweak the language depending on the service and audience. This also limits the number of people who tune out if fans follow in multiple places.
- Be Conversational. Don’t just broadcast, engage. You’ll hear that word a lot but it means you need to interact with your audience in a way that is positive and meaningful to them.
- Be Careful. Be mindful, positive, and keep it balanced. It’s not always easy to measure ROI, but it is often easy to calculate how much time you are spending versus how many engaged fans you have.
Other than that, I believe you can use any social media service to spread the word about you and your brand as long as you follow the basics!