For the past 5 years, I have posted all I can on Facebook and really started picking up twitter in the past year and a half thanks to @janniaragon and @BrittFhaugh.
I have been to a few social media/programming events in Vancouver and the way that groups are using twitter has opened up some new possibilities for me. For example, creating a hashtag for a specific event and asking people to tweet about the event using that hashtag.
In may cases, the result is that the hashtag starts trending while the event is happening and people consider that to be good press. Doing this is essentially free and it's because if people want to meet up or connect online after the event, they know where to find some of the event attendees by looking at the trend.
For facebook, the most solid advice I received so far was at @NetSquared Event a couple months ago. According to @dbarefoot the key is to set the expectations of your followers/audience so that they know in advance if they follow you, you will be posting one a day/week/hour – what ever the case may be.
That way, if people are concerned that you post to much or too little, you can emphasize that that is what your social media is designed for.
Also, the idea that you would only use your social media feeds for self promotion is a bad idea. People will often follow someone regularly not just because of what you can offer based on your own insights and services, but because of who you follow and other ideas you share. This is what it means to build a community, instead of simply following people to put only your own ideas out there.
Also on Facebook, posts with images do well in terms of 'likes'. This makes sense in a our increasingly visual society and the trick is to have images that make you think and/or convey a message clearly, with a couple sentences to help provide content.
I have recently been exploring tumblr, soundcloud, youtube and vimeo and I know there is a lot more to learn.
How do you use social media? What works?
I uses the social me0dia becuz of Mork Zipperburg made the facebok the best.
ReplyDeleteAt present, I use Facebook to promote my activism and organize with student groups, twitter for news and staying up to date with friends, and Google+ for more professional networking/close relationships!
ReplyDeleteI avoid liking things on Facebook, because I don't want my news feed cluttered any more than necessary, but I'm definitely a fan of twitter. Its interface is straightforward, and it keeps me up to date with things that are happening in a number of different areas of interest.
ReplyDeleteI use my social media accounts mostly to connect with my friends all over the world. It's amazing how my grade school classmates and I still communicate until now because of Facebook and Twitter. I've noticed that it's also a great tool to create events and invite people to them. Like when one time that, again, my grade school friends set up a reunion for us, instead of sending a message to everyone, they opened up an event just to know who can and can't come. There's also the thing with groups. For me, I think that social media all comes down to connecting to old and new people as well as branching out to different networks.
ReplyDeleteI love Facebook (Facebook Page not the actual account), Twitter, and maybe linkedin, Personally I think anything other than that is making it too much for the audience to follow, as other updated content can be notified by Facebook and Twitter (blog, youtube).
ReplyDeleteI think the thing with this questions is that, the answer depends both of the person asking the question and the audience you're looking for. For something like facebook it's a combination of friends and acquaintances, which means things are easy to share and, track if you're spreading information. With twitter, which I think is like facebook, it's a quick and easy way to access info and see what people are up to. There are so many different niches in twitter, I guess (as you probably know) you need to make sure you're followers know what type of things you'll be tweeting. Tumblr is great, I find there's a lot of youth and it's really easy to find a niche. The design and layout is flexible and also there can be a lot of dialogue and you can control how much of that you want on your tumblr.Another plus with tumblr is that the people you are connecting with are people likely not to be in your area, which is a plus in my books.
ReplyDeleteI think at the end of the day, when it's too much is when you find it hard to manage your accounts. I see people successfully update their facebook, twitter and google+ constantly.
If you have a target audience, maybe you want to look into the demographics of each social media.