Need a little social media pick-me-up? Here’s ten reminders of how you can do better…
1. Use the 1 + 3 rule
For every one Facebook or Twitter post that’s about you, share 3 posts promoting other people or sites or things. This is a great way to build your blog’s culture and community, keeping things broad and not all about you.
2. Post consistently
If you don’t have time to manually post on a daily basis, use Facebook’s scheduling tool (or use Tweetdeck or similar for Twitter). It’s a good idea to post daily on Facebook if you want to be seen in the newsfeed.
3. Post usefully
Facebook especially is favouring super useful stuff (things like current news articles do well). Post piece that will be useful to your community and they’ll be seen and shared more.
4. Use great images
Both Twitter and Facebook are further enhanced by posting images with your text. If you want to be noticed, a compelling image is great start.
5. Chat
Facebook and Twitter are great platforms to host a ‘live chat’ on. On Twitter, link the chatters via a hashtag. On Facebook, create an introductory status update explaining your chat topic or guest – then chat underneath in the comments (be sure to promote this FB chat ahead of time, though!)
6. Write as yourself
Being chatty, relatable and intimate on social media pays great dividends. Talk to you followers as you talk to nice friends and you’ll garner a better response.
7. Ask questions
Followers are smart cookies and they love to be asked for advice. Ask interesting (or funny) questions and chances are you’ll be hit with plenty of useful responses.
8. Be fresh
Don’t rehash content you’ve seen all over the web, rather seek out interesting stuff on sites you respect and share their freshest bits. Be first with the news and be relevant. This increases your usefulness and your posts’ share ability..
9. Mix it up
Try lots of approaches – post videos, images, text updates and more – see what works for you by monitoring the sharing/comments/retweets of your updates. Keep a record of the things that do best and duplicate their success with similar posts as often as seems sensible.
10. Keep learning
Facebook especially is continually updating how their algorithm works – stay informed via sites like TechCrunch or Social Media Examiner to stay on top of changes that can benefit you.
Do you have any rad tips to share, peeps?