Which Social Profiles Really Count?
Don’t waste time setting up a profile on every new social media site that pops up; instead, focus on the social sites that are built to last: Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn. Once you have mastered to art of monetizing your products and/or services through these sites, you can implement your strategy on the other ones.
To begin, you need a social headquarters– a blog. The goal is to build relationships through Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn and then drive the traffic to your blog (your base camp).
Using Facebook, you can create a page for your company. Your customers and even your prospects that use Facebook can become fans.
People can follow you on Twitter. I simply Tweet about each blog post I make, and the occasional comical situation I encounter.
LinkedIn is similar to Facebook in that it’s a social networking site. Within LinkedIn, a great place to build relationships is “Answers”. You can offer answers to those who have questions in your area of expertise. If you answer gets voted the best one, you get a point in that category.
Here is the issue: maintaining all these accounts can be time consuming and unprofitable. The reason for this is nearly always a lack of focus on your part. In order for a plant to grow it needs to be watered and to get the proper amount of nutrients; social media is much the same. You can’t focus on it for a week, forget about it for a month, and then focus on it for a week and expect to reap fruits from your labor.
Success in the social media arena, much like anything in life, takes constant, continuous, education and communication (CCEC).
It’s easy to get overwhelmed trying to keep up with social media trends, so my advice to you is don’t. Focus on Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn. Turn these sites into profit centers and you will have a formula you can apply to the other ones in a systematized manner.
Learn more about LinkedIn Answers>>
Learn more about Facebook Pages>>
Thank you for reading this post. I hope you found some insight that will help you simplify your online presence. True success, to me, is not about doing more, it’s about doing less and doing it better.
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Comment by Teresa Sanderson on June 30, 2009:
Great article. I am all for social networking but want to keep it concise and manageable. As with all marketing, we must all be sure that we can deliver upon the product. If not, don't get in!
Comment by JNFerree on July 9, 2009:
Curious why you left out Stumble, Digg and Deli.scious and a few other social sites? After all, whether one uses the Tell a Friend widget (as you do) or the Share This widget (as I do on my blog) I have noticed a steady stream of target traffic comes from these other social sites (and) with the widget sitting right there at the end of each post, its not that much of a hassle to click/click send your post for the added traffic is generates. Just my $.02 – Neil
Comment by Flywheel aka Ortonom on July 9, 2009:
That's called Social Bookmarking, JNFerree. This article is about Social Profiles. I will make sure to be clearer next time.
If you would like to learn more about Social Bookmarking, you can read this post:
http://www.jivesystems.com/blog/2009/04/the-funda...
Comment by @tbsSEObrett on July 16, 2009:
Great article, Fly! My exact sentiments. With my Twitter up around 4000 followers I'm trying to get both Facebook & LinkedIn cleaned up and be more active with them. Missing the blog, which Paul and I've talked about recently. The goal today is driving traffic to hear my ThinkBIG story of search engine supremacy!
http://bit.ly/ZMG4P Brett Davis