Welcome 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!

If you're new here, you may consider to subscribe and receive all new tips for free. Updates may be delivered on your feedreader or directly on your mailbox!.

Photo by emdot

There are lots of benefits to be popular on social media sites: more visibility, more friends, strong branding, more influence, and so on. However, being a social media power user is not something easy. Many people tried and just give up because they didn’t reach their social media goals.

I personally think that we should consider becoming a social media power user as an art. Mastering an art involves some techniques, but, more than anything, it requires lots of practice and lots of perseverance. This is not a matter of days. Developing a strong and popular social media profile takes time and continuous work.

In that context, I made a list of 5 habits you may want to put into practice to develop and increase your social media popularity.

1. Being very active and showing your presence.

Social media power users are people that get our attention because they are still present when we logged in. Moreover, we usually can see their names almost everywhere on the site. Just as an example, this morning I can see 3 submissions of Maki on the Digg front page (and I can see more of them on every page of the “Popular” pane). If you look at the stats, Maki dugg 34,856 times and submitted 1,996 new contents to Digg. Note that Maki joined Digg on March 2007. You can make the maths yourself; this makes a lot of activity on the site.

So I think that we can define the social media activity as the investment of time and effort on contributing to help the community to achieve its goal. In fact, for almost every social media sites, there are two types of activity; you may be active by submitting/distributing new content and by voting for new content. Focusing on those contributions is essential to develop a popular and strong social media profile. Showing up your name is branding it! People always remember things they see on a constant basis. Thus, being present and very active is the first step to create a powerful brand and become a social media power user.

2. Reading/Browsing a lot.

Social media sites are all about sharing. You may share articles, news, videos, pictures, etc. Whatever it is, the goal is always the same: share quality contents with your friends/followers. In order to do that, you may need to invest lots of time reading news and blog articles, watching cool videos and observing new pictures. The social media power user is curious and wants to find the coolest content before anyone do; he or she is a golden hunter!

One of the best things to do to develop this habit is to construct your own websites/blogs database. Observe and try to find websites that perform well on your favorite social media sites. Take the time to create an efficient system that will allow you to easily add new websites and to browse them on a regular basis. There are a lot of software applications to do that, but you may want to consider Morning Coffee which is a Firefox add-on. I would highly recommend giving it a try. Moreover, you may want to try some update detector application for websites. I would recommend Update Scanner which is also a Firefox add-on.

3. Being generous with others.

You may already have noticed that the most effective action to create and build new relationship is based on generosity. Everyone is receptive to generosity because it touches the very basic need to be accepted and appreciated by others (see Maslow’s hierarchy of need). Thus, offering something valuable without expecting something in return is very powerful. Note that I’m referring here to a pure and sincere act of generosity.

There are countless ways to be generous. As a social media user, you may give some votes or some advices. You may create a post or give a link to his/her blog or website. These are common ways, but you may think about something more personalize like creating a new logo or and new 125×125 ads. Of course, it may depend on your own abilities, but creating something personalize is always greatly appreciated!

4. Making new friends and invest on friendship.

Developing a loyal audience and a strong community is something that requires time. This powerful ingredient – the time – is essential to develop relationships based on trust and respect. However, time must be conjugate with the investment of both parties. Friendship is something that must be maintained on a regular basis. Of course, the goal is not to maintain every social friendship. It wouldn’t be realist to maintain a close relationship with 200, 500 or even 1000 users. However, I think it is essential to communicate regularly with some parties that share your passions and your social media interests. This type of relationship begins naturally by the creation of mutual exchanges.

In order to ease the creation of this type of relations, you may want to add some instant messaging contact wherever you publish contents. It could be on every social media profiles, your blog and/or website, forum signature, etc. Live communications are the catalysts and the preferred channels to exchange about each other. This type of communications increases the proximity of both parties and makes it less virtual. In addition, the live channel allows communicating easily and faster than any other communication platform.

5. Experimenting and learning.

I’m saying it again: real learning is all about experimenting! If you read it, you know. But when you experiment it, you understand! This is, to my own opinion, the basement of the human knowledge. Mastering social media is the result of experimenting social media. A priori, social media is a black box that creates results from user submissions. Every social media is in constant mutation; it changes every day. Learning the whole system is something essential that could be made by everybody – and this is crucial to be successful. However, learning and developing a social media sense to predict/influence the results is an art. As for any kind of art, practice and perseverance are the keys!

If you like this post, please consider subscribing to my full RSS feed. You can also subscribe by Email and have new posts sent directly to your inbox.

This entry was posted on Monday, July 14th, 2008 at 12:44 pm and is filed under Social Media. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.