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?
