Tips For Your Personal Social Media Strategy
Most successful people are smart. They’re good at one thing or another and they know that thing better than most of the people that know them. But, even so, the things that every successful person I’ve met have in common with one another have little to do with being smart and everything to do with being good at elementary things.
The address book, for example, is an often overlooked list that only the best of us ever manage to master. Keeping in touch with the right people at the right time is almost impossible for anyone to perfect. But, for the ones that do, it’s an endless network of opportunities, experiences, and relationships that make virtually anything possible.
I opened the doors of Blend to help companies dive into social media, but it’s important to note that social media doesn’t exist because companies wanted it to be there. It exists because people wanted it to be there and, even in the days of Facebook ads and Twitter’s never ending search for a business model, social media is still about people. Forget, for a moment, that companies even know what Facebook is (most of them still don’t) and imagine that the only asset Facebook has to offer consists of the profiles of other individuals like yourself.
Some of these people are already your “friends” – that is, you may or may not really know them very well, but they’re listed on your Facebook page nonetheless. Using Facebook’s list feature, spend an hour sorting through your friends to find out which ones really matter to you. It’s as simple as asking yourself whether you’d like to stay connected to this person in a year or not and then filtering them into groups that correspond to how important they might be to you.
Next, make every effort to actually give the people you thought were most important real and tangible priority. Send them a message from time to time catching up on what you’re doing and, more importantly, what’s new with them. Make sure that they appear in your news feed so that you can glance at them when you visit the site.
As elementary as it is, you’ve just created your first living address book. Paired with your real address book, you’ve just managed to stay up to date on what the people that are most important to you are doing as often as they are actually doing it.
The next seemingly elementary but very important part of your own personal social media strategy is how you want to portray yourself to the world. I don’t want to scare you, but it’s good to approach this knowing that your decisions might be permanent. Even with Facebook’s ever-better privacy controls, it’s still possible for someone you don’t want to see something to see it anyways. In the age of social media, it’s best to approach anything online with the attitude that anyone else might someday see whatever you do.
Take a Post-It note and jot down three things that you hope to accomplish by being on Facebook (or any other website). These may be as simple as staying in touch with friends from high-school or as complicated as saying you want to meet someone who might be an in for a company you’d like to work for. These three things will help you evaluate why you’re really using Facebook and will start to suggest how you can nudge that experience along to help you get more out of the time (a lot of time, for most of you) that you spend there.
Whatever your three things may be, make every effort to integrate them into everything you do on sites like Facebook or Twitter. If you want to brand yourself as the best pizza maker in the world, ask yourself if your last twenty status updates make you look like the best pizza maker in the world. If you want to stay in touch with your college professors, look to see if you’re interacting with one another on each others’ walls. If you’re not, then start.
There are an infinite number examples of what you might want to do and how you might accomplish it, but they’re far less important than getting to that point to begin with.
I know that it sounds like a coloring book or alphabet song, but I promise that if you actually do it, you’ll be amazed at what you can do with Facebook.
Here are my three things:
1. Learn from the people that can teach me something I’d like to learn and teach others the things they’d like to learn too
2. Design things that make people smile
3. Keep in touch with people I care about and meet new people who might help me accomplish number #1 or number #2 from above
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