Social Media Marketing & Networking

There are a few tips that are applicable to any social network you join. These include:

1. Profile - Make sure you have entered as much profile information as possible, especially links to your website, interests, what you are looking for (friends, networking), and a bit about yourself. Something unique that will make people more interested in learning more about you.

A photo is a must. People are much more willing to interact if there is a face to go with the name.

Also, to maximize the amount of people who will see what you are marketing, it is best to make sure your profile is public, so anyone can see your page without having to be a friend. Seeing what you have to offer makes it more likely others will want to add you if they stumble on your page or if you send a request out.

2. Friends - Building friends/fans/connections/followers should be the next step once you have content on your site. People are not likely to befriend someone (unless they know them) that has a blank, static or lifeless page.

The easiest way to get contacts from the beginning is to use the email contact checkers that most networks have. It will find people you already communicate with that are on their network. This is something to use periodically, say once a week or once a month, depending on the rate that your email contacts grow.

The next way on most networks to gain friends is to use the search option on the site and locate people with similar interests and careers. Whenever you send your friend request, if there is an option for a message, be sure to put the fact that you found them through your searching the thing you have in common.

You can also search for local contacts. This is especially important if what you have to promote is focused on a particular location.

3. Interaction - Once you have contacts, be sure to interact with them using the various features the networks have to offer. There are many people who will drop you if you do not contribute to the community in some form or fashion.

Facebook has become one of my favorite networks, as it has so many tools to work with as far as promoting yourself and your website/products, including sharing links, creating Pages, Blog Networks and Groups, and more. One important thing to remember when setting up your Facebook is deciding between a profile for yourself, and a Page for your website/product. The big difference - profiles are limited to 5,000 friends, and Pages can have an endless amount of fans.


Important things to do with a Facebook profile:

1. What are you doing right now - These status updates will post in your profile, next to your photo in the IM, at the top of your friend's homepage.

2. Applications - Try out the most popular applications. In the directory, it will show you how many of your friends are using a particular application. This can be a fast way to post items to many people simultaneously. Plus it helps keep your name on your friends' minds, because every time you interact with a friend using Bumper Sticker, Plant, SuperWall, or other application, it will send your friend a notification that you are interacting with them.

3. Imported Sites - If you are active on Youtube, Digg, Delicious, StumbleUpon, Pandora, or a few other networks, you can enter your username for those onto Facebook, and everytime you update something on one of those sites, it will post to your profile and as a news update to your friends.

4. Share Link - This is nice, especially for bloggers. You can share a link to your next blog post with all your friends, and anyone who visits your profile. I like this better than the RSS feed through Notes because the link will go direct to your site, instead of posting the entire blog entry onto Facebook. Likewise, if you want to promote a webpage or blog post, you should have a Facebook share icon, so other Facebook users can share your link on their profile to their friends.

5. Website on Frontpage - On your profile, in the section under your photo that shows your networks and birthday, make sure to check the option to show your website. This way your URL is up front and center, as well as on your Info tab.

6. People You May Know - This is a feature that looks through your friends list, and suggests other people on Facebook that you may know based on your friends' friends and your interests. This is a great way to solicit random people, because you can send a message along that says "I am looking to make new friends using the People You May Know tool. Since it suggested you, we must have friends and interests in common." This option shows up on the right side of your homepage, or can be found under the Friend Finder (along with the email/IM contacts search tool and classmates finder).

7. NetworkedBlogs - A NetworkedBlog will pull in the RSS feed, and allow you to link to three specific entries. You can invite your friends to become readers (30 per day). It has a "Related Blogs" where you can seek out new friends of similar interests. Also, you can create a badge and put it on your blog, so visitors on your blog can join your network from there.

Alternatively, you can also use Facebook Pages to promote anything, from an individual, company, product, website, etc.

7. Groups, Pages and Applications - Using the main search option, search for Groups, Pages and Applications related to your website or product. These are good places to find new contacts with common interests, and to post related messages to the Group, Page or Application's wall for all members to see.

My profile on Facebook: facebook.com/people/Kristi_Johnson/573360891

Myspace is the site I have belonged to the longest out of all of the social networking communities. After three years, I have built a network of everyone from real world friends, fellow high school alumni, past and current coworkers, poets, vegetarians, Italian speakers, and other people with similar interests as my own.



Important things to do on Myspace:

1. Custom Layout - Show off your individualism. You can use your product branding, but be sure to let the profile still look personal and not overly corporate or like another advertisement page.

2. Status and Mood - Post a tagline & emoticon that will show up on your profile & friend's homepage.

3. Bulletins - Send announcements, including text, links, images and embeddable flash objects to all of your friends. These can be used to announce blog updates, profile updates, etc.

4. Blog - Create blog entries. These can be teaser excerpts leading to your main site. You can search for blogs on similar subjects, and invite those authors to subscribe to yours, which will give them a notification every time you post. You can also join blog groups, so everyone in the group will see your post when they visit the group page.

5. Groups - Join related topic groups, and post information linking to your page/blog/website for other members to visit. Whenever joining the group, take a look at their forum & announcements first - some groups were created just as spam, and not worth your while like an active group.

6. Friend Subscriptions - Update your photos and profile often. It can be as simple as changing your headline, profile song or Myspace video. If people have subscribed to you in their friend subscriptions, they will see your update and are likely to visit when you do this.

7. Display name - This will show up above your picture, so if you can squeeze in your name & website, it is good advertisement where ever you go and comment/post on the site.

8. Content - Google searches turn up Myspace profiles, so keep SEO and keywords in mind when adding content to your site in the text and images.

My profile at Myspace: myspace.com/gemikitten

Plurk is a fun community. Simple in terms of the fact that there are not any applications or groups to join, but still useful in terms of what can be shared with fans and friends. Like Twitter, you can enter a short blurb of text, but you can also "plurk" pictures and youtube videos.




Important things to do on Plurk:

1. Custom Profile Design - The first thing to do is to make your profile unique by adding a custom background image and changing up the colors to match.

2. Find Friends - On Plurk, you can not only do the searches for people based on common interest and existing contacts in your email, but you can also search for your friends on Twitter that are on Plurk.

3. Share - You can share links to your latest website, blog post or product, and Youtube videos and photographs that will open right in Plurk, but with a direct URL to their source.

4. Karma - Karma shows how active you are in the community. The higher the karma, the more trust you get from other Plurkers. The best ways to raise your karma is to change your profile photo, have new friends accept your invite, plurk at least once every twelve hours (but the more you do, the better your karma), and respond to other plurks.

5. Use the Tabs - Be sure to view "My Plurks" to see which of your plurks have received responses, "Private" to see plurks that only go to fans and friends of the poster, and "Responded" to see if any of the responses you have made to other plurks have followup.

My profile on Plurk: plurk.com/user/kikolani

Twitter is one of the simplest of all the social networks. You can share text and links as a Tweet no more than 140 characters long. Just because it is the simplest, does not mean it is not worthwhile. There are lots of users on this network, and simple ways to find ones with common interests.




Important things to do on Twitter:

1. Custom Profile Design - The first thing to do is to make your profile unique by adding a custom background image.

2. Finding Friends - Besides the basic email contacts, name and location search, you can also use Twitter Search to search for which users are tweeting about a particular subject. You can add friends this way, and also subscribe to the search as an RSS feed so you can keep up with new conversation on a particular topic.

Also, keeping in mind that people could look you up using this same search, it is good to regularly post tweets using the keywords that you are promoting.

3. Replies - Replies are when a user responds directly to a tweet by using @username. It is good practice to reply to other tweets, and to check on replies to yours and respond to those as well either as replies or direct messages.

4. Favorites - You can save any tweets you like to your Favorites by clicking on the star next to each one.

These tweets will then be saved to your favorites. It is a great way to help promote good tweets from your friends, and a way to build a list of resources under your profile.

5. Remove - Are you following more people than the number following you? Some potential new twitter follows see this as a bad sign, and may choose not to follow you because of it. The solution? On your profile homepage, click on the link of the number of people you are following. Then, go through the list and see which people do not have the Direct Message option.

The ones that do not have the Direct Message links are the ones that are not following you back. If it is someone with useful tweets, you interact with on other networks, then keeping them is a good idea. But if you do not interact, then you might as well take them off of your list. The other option is to remove, then re-follow them. This will initiate an email to them that you are following them, and maybe this time around, they will follow you back.

My profile on Twitter: twitter.com/kikolani