I’m not much of a bandwagoneer, and I’m reluctant to give up even more of my life to the internet, so I’ve been aggressively avoiding social media sites for years. I know, it’s crazy considering my career choice, but I just figured I’d dive into it when work required it. Well, work required it.  Early this year, I spent my free time chasing after the bandwagon. Here are some quick tips that I picked up along the way.

Everyone’s already talking about social media… constantly. So I won’t go into a lot of depth.

When getting involved in social media, it’s important to establish goals first. Our goal was to communicate with clients/prospects and to drive traffic to our content.

It’s also important to know what social media platforms your audience uses and devote your time accordingly. You can spend a ton of time making the perfect ning page and then find out you’ve set up shop in a ghost town.

I decided to devote most of my time with twitter, facebook and linkedin. After spending some time on all three I realized our sparse resources were best spent on LinkedIn. I set up a twitterfeed and facebook rss feed reader to get our content out there and updated on a regular, automated basis. I still thank people individually for friending and following us, but LinkedIn is where I devote a little time each day.

The absolute most important thing to remember when starting a social media campaign is that people have their bullshit meters on high alert. If you walk into every chat, every tweet, and every friend request shilling your product, you will be a lonely social mediarite quickly. I’ve not been in it, but I bet it’s tough digging out of that hole.

If you want to gain friends and followers and group members, share your knowledge. Give away free content. Start conversations that matter to people. Be generous, link to others’ content, give free advice. Once you’ve made some friends and people feel comfortable, then you can mention your product. But again, try to avoid the hard sell.

I have to admit that once I became involved in the social media world, I was surprised at how quickly and easily it worked. It certainly won’t replace any of my standard marketing tools, but it’s a good addition.

Some links that helped me:

6 ways to simplify social media updates

5 Tips For Getting More from Facebook

5 Tips for Getting More from LinkedIn

50 Ideas on Using Twitter for Business

4 simple rules for generating traffic from forums

3 Social Media Aggregators That Bring It All Together

Tagged with: editorial • Marketing • online • social networking

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