Social Media – easy peasy!

Courtesy of zazzle.com

I think getting social media to work for you is really straightforward, but loads of people are telling you it’s really difficult. But if you want it to work, there are a number of key things that you MUST do.

Broadly speaking they are:

1. Use common sense – with  over 300 social media platforms, tools and sites out in the marketplace, clearly you’re going to have to be selective about which ones you choose. For most businesses/individuals – LinkedIn, Twitter and Facebook are a must, but there are others which you should consider, which ones these are will depend on your industry, your time available, resources etc.
2. Don’t waste your time or other people’s – put yourself in your friend/follower/ connection’s shoes, and consider if you would want to stay connected if you received the tweet which you are about to send (if that makes sense). These people have trusted you by letting you on to their desktop – DON’T betray their trust. Make sure that your tweets/status updates etc add value to anyone that sees them.
3. Be you – don’t pretend to be someone or something you’re not, because if you do there’s a fair chance you will get found out. If you are discredited, it will take a long, long time before you get over that as posts, comments and blogs are there forever.
4. Give it a chance – social media is rather like going to the gym. Signing up and going once ISN’T going to make you ripped! You need to persevere, you need to have a plan, and you need to give stuff away as often as you can.
5. Niche, niche and niche again – if you take LinkedIn for example, it has over 50,000,000 users. Say 40% of them are regulars. That’s 20 million potential customers. Unless you are Coke, Unilever or similar you don’t want all of these guys. You don’t even want 10%. You are probably looking for 0.0001% or less (below 20 customers) – but the right ones. So the more you can niche your offering, the more the prospects will self-select if they want to work with you.

So, there you have it. Simple really.  If you do these 5 things, I reckon you’ll see a return within 2 months. If you don’t, you’re either doing something wrong or your product is so bad you don’t deserve to be in business!