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3 Powerful Strategies to Make your Social Media Profile Dynamic and Uncluttered
written by Hans
July 23rd, 2008Welcome to Catchtheposts! I hope that the content of this blog will be helpful to you. Don't hesitate to use the contact form to send me your comments, feedback, suggested topics or questions. Thanks for visiting!
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As an active user of social media sites, I’m always looking to create new relationships to share valuable contents, ideas and tips. Those new relationships may be started because I added new people to my list, but it could also be started from people who befriended me.
Today, I would like to share with you 3 strategies to make your social media profile clean and dynamic. Why? Simply because you have only few seconds to make a good impression! Adding new friends is all under your control, but being added is not. The best you can do is to influence people by communicating an original and positive description of yourself and by creating a favorable environment.
1. Keep your Profile Dynamic and Up-to-date.
The first goal of your profile is to properly identify and describe who you are. It is a great opportunity to tell everyone about your interests and your passions. It may also be an excellent place to inform about your social media goals or anything special you may have to communicate.
This being said, most of the time, people signup with a social media site, fill up their profile and then just forget about it! Personally, I really think there are lots of benefits to make the profile more active, more dynamic. The fact is that I change, you change and everybody change! Thus, I believe that the social media profile should be modified and updated to follow the personal evolution of the user.
Maybe your social media goals are changing… or maybe you just discovered a new passion or new interests. I really don’t think that your 2 years old profile still describe you perfectly. Every person is changing every day; just make sure that people looking at your profile is reading about the actual you and not about an old you!
Keeping your profile dynamic and active is a proof about your social activity. Of course, this proof is not the only one, but I really consider it as one of the most important.
2. Periodically Clean up your Friend List.
What are you doing when you are about to receive new people at home? Most likely, you run in your house to cleanup everywhere, isn’t it? And why are you doing that? Simply because you want those people to have a good perception about you!
Everyone wants to be perceived as a great and respectful person. So why not doing the same within your social media home? Presumably, you added some friends in the past and you just continue to add more on a constant basis. Do all your friends active? Do you add people some months or years ago that never reciprocates or never talks to you at all? Does your friends list properly reflect your real friends, i.e. people that support you when you need it?
In fact, most of the time, people add friends but they never remove anyone. Unless you are a very lucky person, you befriended some people that seem to be inactive or, at least, never demonstrate any sign of activity. Social Media is all about sharing and being active. There are many reasons that may explain why you never heard about those people, but the fact is that it cluttered your friend list!
The goal behind the friend concept is precisely to share and to support each other. So the real challenge in adding friends is to choose people that will really share the same friendship values as you.
Just as an example, I’m an active user in the Digg network. I read many user profiles each day and I must admit that I really enjoy it; it is very interesting and educative! Based on some profile I saw, here is a small test for you:
Which of these users would you add on your friend list?
Just let me know your personal perception about this!
3. Promote your Profile like a Blog/Website.
Seeing your social media profile like a micro-website is a funny and powerful way to perceive it. In fact, just like a website, you are free to put whatever you want on it. Fundamentally, this means that you are fully responsible about your profile popularity. Of course, there are many variables that may impact this popularity, but at the baseline you have the total control over its originality and its promotion.
Promoting your media social profile may be a very efficient branding strategy. Just like a website you may promote it by adding it to your signature, by leaving your profile link on every comment you submit on blogs, etc. Of course, these are just few examples; there are millions other ways to promote it.
The essential is to understand that your profile is a web page like any other one, which means that distribution and promotion should be applied mostly the same way.
Although I have a Digg account I’m not really active with it.
I think your point about keeping your profile updated is a very important one.
It’s way too easy to set up accounts at this type of place and then forget to tend them. You have to think of them like a garden. They need a little work, on a regular basis.
Prune old material, plant some new seeds and generally spend some time and love on it. It means the difference between a garden you’re proud to show, or a wreck filled with weeds.
The same applies to your social media profiles. After all, very few people would let others see them wearing dirty, torn clothing, would they? If you’re going to have a profile you should at least keep it up to date.
thanks for the tips, unfortunately I have a lot of cleaning to do then, lol
…so far I have like 20 profiles that i can barely keep track of. but i def update my faves like StumbleUpon, Twitter and a few others.
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I’m not sure if using one profile works best. I have a partner that works with me who has a profile that is very technical (if that is the right word) and I have a profile that is marketing related. Together we have a pair of profiles that work out well.
My twitter profile was previously set to show ever time I ‘fiddled’ with a post. My partner did not. I found his Twitter profile appeared better than mine because people don’t care when I make one change. They are possibly interested in the details that I provide, but not the minor details. I think that was an important change. I also have a twitter for each of my blogs, one blog is more business and one blog ‘feels’ more like me.
My area does not do well in Digg. Each time someone diggs a post I have a maximum of a dozen others that follow suit. It is very important to make sure that each person chooses the social media that is most appropriate for our sites.
I am a fan of stumbleupon because of the traffic it brings to my site, but I know that the stumble traffic does not lead to conversions at the same rate as other traffic. This does not bother me because it helps the Alexa rank, if nothing else. [Is Alexa important? Not really, but some people do use it to give a level of importance to a site.]
My partner was active in a social media group. For beginners a social media group can be a big win. Each person diggs or stumbles the others posts. My partner has an account in 100 social media sites and is active in 40 of them and an occasional user in the other 60. This may seem a lot, but in the social media group he has one person that submits to health sites, so posts in 8 sites for that one person. On the rare occasion that I post on something that can be considered health related, he has that other person submit for me and he follows up.
The same holds true for other areas of social media. Example, I have posts in French, so there are the French social media sites. I have a social media in Greek, Russian, Japanese, German and probably other language specific sites.
Friends. So important the friends we keep. For someone starting out in social media I advise that they find people that have lots of friends, and follow them. Spend a month working for other people before asking them to do anything for you.
Comment. Each time you stumble, digg, tweet, wink or ximmy a site make sure you leave a comment related to the post and say that you did you social media. Example, I just thumbed up this post in stumble. Very often people will follow back after they see that you did something for them. Sometimes there are big name social media types that will post or stumble for you. I have had people that are REALLY well known that have done a social media action for me because I did something for them.
Reviews. Michel and Sylvie Fortin created a new product which I bought. It was really worth the money so I wrote a post about it. Michel did a post on his blog with only 2 or 3 lines that said he found an unsolicited review of his product.
The one thing that we don’t do is promote our profile pages. Maybe not enough time in the day. I know that my partner has done reviews for other people’s profiles, but does not ask people to review or rate ours. Maybe that is something that will go on the to do list.
This comment is long enough to be a blog post by itself. You may see part of this comment on my blog some time in August.
Sorry to post twice in a row, but my partner also is good at making things. An example is with entrecard. We have a web page that is found on a site we are working on, trying to figure out how to use. There are 15 batch files that each open a new window of an Entrecard site. Most sites use SezWho, the Entrecard partner, and all of the sites are from people that own their own domain name and allow comments without logging in. Having created this list the advertisement will be a post on each of the 300+ sites in the list explaining how to quickly drop 300 EC’s in little time. Our sites (and CatchThe Posts) are high on the list and we can see how often the list is being used through our WordPress statistics. People like this because dropping EC’s becomes easier and when those 300 sites tell others to use it (do get more visits themselves) our site is advertised. In a week that site went from 1.1 million in Alexa to 750k. That is a lot of people using a “social media like” page.
Everyone can find a way to promote themselves while helping others. The helping others part is really important. Make life easy for someone and have a hidden benefit for yourself. Everyone wins.