Day 34: Social Media Rule #1

Today is day 34 in my quest to become one of the 1000 most followed Twitter accounts. As of today number 1000 is Duane Patterson's account with 269,880 followers. I now have 603 followers. So that means I only have 269,277 followers to go. Not an impossible task, but certainly very challenging.

As I promised today a I'd like to discuss my first rule of social media.

Rule #1:   It doesn't matter what you have to say if no one is listening.

In other words, your content, no matter how good it is, and now matter how often you post it, will do nothing for you if no one cares enough to read it, watch it or listen to it.

Yesterday I spoke to a potential client about helping them with their social media strategy and he asked me a very valid question about why they should use my services instead of hiring a part time college student to blog for them. He is part owner in another company that has hired a part time college student to do many of the same things I am proposing to do for him. Only cheaper.

My response to him was this: That other company has now been doing blogs, SEO, paid clicks, webinars, Tweets, LinkedIn, and Facebook for years now, in fact they just other day they just did their 1000^th tweet. The webinars are usually pretty successful, and usually have around 100 people register for each one. And yet they aren’t getting very much business from all of these efforts. Why? The answer is no one is listening. At least not very many people; those that are listening aren’t the right people.

How can I say that you ask? Especially after saying they have about 100 people sign up for each webinar. The answer is: It’s the same people that sign up for each webinar. Also, those same people, 237 to be exact, are following them on Twitter. Don’t get me wrong, those 237 people are very loyal followers. They love the message. They attend the webinars, and read the blogs. But how many businesses can survive only 237 leads? Especially when it has taken them years to accumulate that many followers. For what they’re getting, their “cheap college student” doesn’t seem so cheap.

To make matters worse, they aren’t just using the student to create content as he told me. They are actually using very expensive people to contribute content to the blog. In my opinion the content is top notch, but does that really matter if no one is listening?

So now that I feel I have made the case for needing listeners, let’s talk about HOW to get people to listen. There are probably many other ways, but here are a few that I’ve used. I know they work.

1. Link your social media plat forms together. Once you post on one, post on them all.
2. Join LinkedIn Groups. There are thousands of LinkedIn Groups with different focuses. Find one that is filled with people that will want to hear your message.
3. Become "popular" on Facebook. Be friends with your friends' friends. In fact be friends with you enemy's friends. Facebook makes it easy to make new connects.
4.  Make strategic connections on LinkedIn. Connect with influential people with many contacts. Connecting with those types of people brings you a steps closer to connecting with many others that may want to hear your message.
5.  Follow people that will follow you. Many Twitter accounts will follow you just because you follow them. If you follow someone that doesn’t follow you within a few days, unfollow them and move on to the next person.
6. Tweet about interesting topics that people are likely to re-tweet.  This works especially well when you tweet about someone else’s content. Being re-tweeted will help you add followers.
7. Follow back those that follow you. If you don’t, they may not be listening for long.
8.  If someone connects with you are one platform, get them to connect with you on another. That will expose them to your message multiple times.
9. List your blog on blog index sites.
10. Promote your social media accounts on your company website.
11. Add you social media account info. to your emails
12. Promote your social media accounts in person.

Of course there are many other ways to promote your content and to get people to listen to what you have to say. These are the ones I am currently using. If you have other ideas please post them in the comments box below. I will feature the best ones in my upcoming blogs.

Thanks for your interest. Until next time, good luck in your own social networking.