What's Your Strategy?

In this series, I have just touched on a few of the most popular social media platforms. With all these vehicles and possibilities, how do you decide what’s for you? You could easily spend all day on Facebook alone. But is that where you should be?

Think about what your goal is. Is your company striving to have a presence in social media because you’re afraid you will miss out on something? You think it’s the thing to do? Oh, then you do know that’s not a good reason to spend the time and effort to get a profile up. First of all, when you create your profile, you should have your strategy already in mind. Answer these things:

What’s the purpose of the presence?

If it is to find out what your customers are saying, then you will have a different personality on your profile than if it were to simply be up there to answer the competition. You cannot (or should not) do social media as a response to someone else’s actions.

If it’s a personal site, what do you want it to convey?

Are you a budding freelancer in any area? Then your site, whether it’s Facebook or LinkedIn, should maintain a certain professional quality. Be careful who you link to and what they say about you. Ask for recommendations on LinkedIn and join Groups. On Facebook, you can post videos, audio, or photos that will showcase your work. But personality is key here. You may want to occasionally throw in something fun. Keep it updated fairly often and tell people what you’re doing.

If you are building a Facebook profile to keep an eye on your kids, and your primary personality on there is mom or dad, then that is a totally different thing all together. But always remember, it is entirely possible that business associates will find and look at your Facebook profile (depending on your settings).

How committed are you to the presence?

Once you set up the page, you need to be committed to keeping it updated. Whether it’s a blog, Facebook or LinkedIn profile, or a Ning page, old news is not going to help your cause. Just like a website, once it’s up, it’s there for all to see (well, in most cases). But I am continually surprised to find websites with nothing posted in the Newsroom/Media Center in the past year. What a waste of an effort, and what a black mark on your company’s PR efforts. So don’t build a page, profile, or any other presence until you have a strategy for continuing it. If this means building a calendar of posts, then do it.

How much time can you spend on it?

You should be able to update your page a couple times a week. This should not take more than an hour at a time. And that includes looking around. But you have to look around a bit in order to get the full benefit of this medium. You should read and comment on other’s posts in your LinkedIn groups. Find more Groups to join. Look for people to connect to on Facebook and LinkedIn. When you get back from a trade show, go through those business cards and decide who is a valuable contact, and find them on LinkedIn. If it’s a non-work relationship, try Facebook.

Which platform to use?

Last but not least, you must answer this question. Well, actually, you should answer this first. You need to know a) what your goal is for the platform b) who you want to attract and c) what types of things you might want to post. Answering these questions will help you to decide which platform to use. Get online and find some profiles to look at. If you can’t get in to any Facebook profiles of people you know, ask your son/daughter/niece/nephew to let you look at theirs. If you are a professional of any type, just bite the bullet and build your own LinkedIn personal profile. You will use it, it will help you – in ways that you may not even imagine.

The overall key component to any social media platform that features a profile-style site is to keep it fresh. This doesn’t apply so much to SquiDoo, because once you create the page, you are simply looking for others to view it and rank it. You may want to update the content occasionally, but only if there is some pressing reason to do so. But for other sites, a new update will often show up in your contacts’ email box. For instance, on LinkedIn, you can get an index email every week of your contacts’ activity, including their updates and who they have recently connected to.

Coping Strategies for Social Media

You can, as I said in the first blog in this series, get sucked way into the vortex of social media and have a hard time finding your way out. Some sites are worse than others. I find that each time I log into my LinkedIn or Facebook profiles, an hour can go by before I even look up.

How to cope with this time drain while still using these powerful communication tools? Two words: egg timer. Yes, seems simple, doesn’t it? I was told last summer that I should time myself at my desk due to a repetitive stress injury. Do you think I ever got the egg timer and actually brought it into my office? No, alas, I did not. And I still have the pain in my shoulder to prove it. But when your valuable time is being sucked by Facebook, perhaps you will be more proactive about getting something in place to keep yourself in check.

Of course, there are other ways to be jealous with your time. Set a timer on your watch, your cell phone or perhaps there’s some cool app on the iPhone or even online that will do this (must look that up!). But once you have the time thing under control, you will be able to get in, see what’s happening, listen a bit, post a message or two, and get out in a shorter amount of time. Familiar with the concept of structure creating production? That is what I am advocating here.

But Why Social Meda?

Okay, statistics may seem like a lame scapegoat, but they are powerful. I will once again quote Chris Brogan (why? Because I recently sat through a webinar he gave on Business Blogging and he was very persuasive!), who says that Social media effectiveness is going up.

Read Tribes by Seth Godin. You have to be willing to put in some sweat equity and know that it will take a while to see results. Chris Brogan (again, at chrisbrogan.com) says that social media stickiness is way higher than other forms of marketing, and that Listening is the New Marketing. You have to pay attention to what’s happening and where it makes sense for you to be. You will find that some places are just not producing conversations, or at least not ones that you want to be involved in, while others are very exciting places to be. Take the path of least resistance, and put your time into the ones that are lively.

Comments

[Eileen Flanagan]

I have a question. I have it set up so my blogger posts pop up on my Facebook page. I get some comments about the blog on Facebook, so I know some people are reading it there. Am I right in assuming that these people are not showing up in the statistics captured by SiteMeter on the blog itself? And if so, is there any way to gauge how many people are reading my blog on Facebook?

Thanks,
Eileen Flanagan
http://www.eileenflanagan.com