3 Most Important Social Media Strategies

To be successful in social media is it important

• To increase your network in social space - have more and more followers in Twitter?
• To have presence in all the forms – blogs, forums, Twitter, Facebook…?
• To keep talking about your own business?

If you feel so, then you are wrong. Social media is about others talking about your business. It is about sharing knowledge. It is not a place to do sales. Your network should talk about it and spread the word.

The most important steps for a social media campaign to be successful are

1. Identifying the evangelists who will talk about your business and get them into your social network.
2. Make the evangelists to talk about you and your business.
3. Allow the evangelists to spread the word among their network

Who can be these evangelists? They can be your customers, prospects, analysts and/or your partners. Try to convert them into evangelists. Discuss a topic among them so that it can ignite a healthy discussion. Share knowledge so that these evangelists can get more dope to discuss. Let them review your product or service. Let them discuss about your customer support. If at all there are few negative conversations or feedback in the social media space, inspire these evangelists to have more positive conversations apart from you immediately responding to the same.

Also read below articles to know more about social media and networking:

The Four Important Steps to Start Social Networking for Business
6 Tips To Be Successful In Social Media Marketing
5 Important Approaches for Social Networking for Companies

Seven Social Media Trends for 2010

We have seen what difference Social Media has done to the online world in 2009. The users have increased enormously on Facebook, Twitter… More and more people are using it. Organizations have also moved over to this channel to provide customer service or just to create brand awareness here as well. So, what 2010 has for us in Social Media –

1. Social Media will be more filtered: People do not like unnecessary updates to be seen in Facebook or Twitter. They want to read updates which they are interested in. People would now like to connect with only like-minded people. They just do want to increase their social network – they will now choose in which niche network they want to be a part of. This will give rise to increase in “exclusive” social networks concentrating on niche areas where like-minded people can ignite more in discussions.
2. More Organizations will join this wagon: More corporate and organizations will try to use this medium to provide customer service. This is the most economical way to solve the customers’ issues and it is also quick. Even the customers will feel it is comfortable to reach through this channel. Wells Fargo, Best Buy’s are already using Twitter help out their customers to answer their queries.
3. Organizations will look out for numbers: Organizations will try to leverage this medium and at the same time they would like to know as to whom all are talking about their brand and products on other social channels. They would be keen to analyze the plus and minus feedbacks. They may also want to know about the presence of their competitors here and how they are leveraging this platform. More tools and filters will come into play to help the organizations in getting these stats and analysis.
4. Social Media on Mobile: Organizations will have polices on using networking sites by employees and may even block most of the sites within the office network. Employees will be forced to use mobile phones to help them with the social media. This will increase the usage of mobiles with good apps to help them in satisfying them with the social media addiction.
5. Social Business: More games and apps will be focused on generating revenues. The apps will try to create competition with friends. FourSquare, Rummble will try to concentrate more into this business.
6. Usage of Emails will come down: Social media helps in distributing and sharing of content with large audience much easily than emails. People will try to use less and less of emails and more of social sites. Read more about this - Email Vs Social Networking Sites
7. Leveraging Offline meets with Online Connections: People will tend to meet offline with the like-minded people whom they met online. Networking groups will lead to such meet-ups. More and more websites and people will come-up to have such meet-ups.

Let me know if you anticipate more or do you defer with my thoughts. I would like to hear from you.

Related read: Top 10 Probable Trends in 2010 for Online World

Aggregator Tools to Update Your Status on Multiple Social Networking Sites

My first question and probably for most of the readers – Is it right to use a tool or aggregator to update your status on most of the social networking sites without really logging in and updating it individually?

Yes, it really saves time of logging into each of the site say Facebook, Twitter, MySpace, Xing or LinkedIn. But, one should also note that these networking sites attract different sets of audience and with varied interest. Moreover, social networking is more of conversations between like-minded people and should only be used for sharing of knowledge and discussions. It should not be leveraged as sales pitch and use automated tools to update the status. One needs to be very personal in participation on such networking sites.

Lastly, is it necessary to be on all the networking sites? It is better to use two or three good ones where you feel is the best community for you and build network, share knowledge and keep the engagement as lively as possible. You will be benefited by this in the long run. One has to realize the real value of social networking sites.

Short-cuts may not work always. But, still if you are interested then here are few good tools which can be looked at.

Ping.fm: Allows you to post on Facebook, Wordpress, LinkedIn and Twitter
HelloTxt: Update status on Twitter, Facebook, Bebo, MySpace and more. It takes status updates from web, mobile, sms, email.. to more than 45 social networking sites.
GlueNow: Enables you to post content across the social networking sites using web or mobile phone.
Posterous: Is a blogging platform that allows you to post to multiple social networking sites except for Ning, Viadeo and Xing.
Flock: A Firefox plug-in and enables you to aggregate most of the networking sites.
Postling: Can be used for blog posts and simultaneously update the status in social networking sites. They have a 30-day free trial.
Digsby: Manage various IM, Email and social networking sites. You can update Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn status from Digsby directly.
Yoono: Is free software that allows you to connect and share with all your social networks and IM services in one place.

But, still the bottom line is use social networking sites carefully, thoughtfully and strategically. Definitely, no one likes to read the same status message on your profile when they visit Facebook, Twitter or LinkedIn. All are different and so should your status messages.


Also, please take time to answer the poll question on LinkedIn.

Related post:

• More Than 100 Free Twitter Tools for You
• 5 Important Approaches for Social Networking for Companies
• Update your Facebook Status from Twitter

Men, Women Use Facebook Differently

Researchers at the Queensland University of Technology have found that while woman prefer applications which they can express themselves through, men chose ones they can compete against others with. So, your gender determines which Facebook application you would rather prefer.

According to the lead researcher Russell-Bennett, applications were also considered cool when they allowed self-categorization such as discovering which movie star you are applications which change daily, applications which allows high level of interactivity like scrabble or bowling and lastly applications which are special and novel. Facebook users use the applications and share them only to enhance their standings in their network of friends.

This study is important from a commercial point of view. This will help the organizations developing these applications as they can now identify which features encourage people to recommend the game to others. The more they recommend to others, the more people use it and this will attract a substitute to the traditional and/or viral advertising.