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Social Media sites are actually part of our life. No matter if you are a blogger, an online marketer or a professional journalist, social media is an essential source of information as well as a critical element to build an efficient network development strategy.

The fact is that signing up on a social media sites is quite easy. However, from this point, there are a lot to do – and lots of fun to have! Here are, in my own opinion, the 5 must-dos before submitting content. I think it may help you to have a good experience of social media sites. In addition, I think it may also help you to build up a wide network and a strong brand.

1. Complete Your Profile.

I frequently receive notifications because somebody befriended me on a social media site. Naturally, my first reaction is to look at the user profile, but several times I’m facing a blank and empty page! What am I doing? Nothing! When I’m adding somebody, I better like to see a complete profile in front of me. Of course, nobody could tell me if this profile is real or not, but why would I have to doubt?

Now, let take a look at some essential part of any profile:

Add an avatar.

This may be a picture of you or any other image; the essential is to include an image that best represent who you are. In fact, this will be your trademark. Thus, I highly recommend using the same avatar on every social media site. This way, people may recognize you and add you on these sites too. Note that leaving your picture space blank is rejecting an efficient branding opportunity and putting you on the same bucket than any other “blank picture” users. Take this opportunity to differentiate yourself!

Write a short text.

The goal here is not to write an article. This is another opportunity to write the essential about who you are. You think you are unique? Write it down! What are your passions? What are your goals in this social media site? What should I know to give me an idea of who you are? Don’t hesitate to point your profile reader to your own realizations! It could be your personal blog, your website, etc. Of course, be careful to not include sensitive information. The best text is precise and concise! Just tell me who you are!

Include ways to contact you.

In some social media sites, you will have the opportunity to add your contact information in specific fields. Include few ways to contact you. It could be your AIM ID, Google Talk ID, email, etc. Just publish the ways you are best comfortable with. This type of information offers great possibilities to increase your network. In fact, adding someone on you friend list is quite easy and need generally no communication at all. However, building your network with a one on one conversation will help you to make your network stronger and based on real communications!

Include links to other profiles.

Again, some social media will let you enter links to other social media profiles. Don’t miss that opportunity! This will give the chance to any people who add you on this social media site to add you in other sites. Please, make sure you didn’t put the same exact (copy/paste) profile text for every social site you subscribed on. If so, change them to fit the social media it serves. Make it original and unique!

2. Make Sure You Understand The Whole System.

One of the most popular reason why people fail using social media sites is because they don’t properly understand the whole system. How could you be successful with something you just don’t really understand? In fact, no body would! So take care to read a lot about the system. Here are some key points:

- How do the voting system works?
- How do I add friends/followers?
- What are the privileges of people I befriended?
- What are the communication channels available within the system?
- How does befriending somebody affect these communication channels?
- What are the exact criteria to make my content popular?

And so on…

Don’t hesitate to ask people that are familiar with that site to give you some information. This may help you avoiding big headaches!

3. Watch and Learn.

Another reason why people may fail using social media sites is because they don’t observe enough! Life is short so take it easy… give you the time to properly observe the whole behavior of the system. You better sharpen you axe for 10 minutes and cut the tree within an hours than starting immediately and take 3 hours to cut it! Here are some elements you may want to observe first:

Observe which type of stories works and which don’t.

I hope this is not a surprise for anyone: each social media site have some topic preference. For example, Digg works great for news, Linux, Apple topics and some others. However, it would be very hard to make your blogging story hit the font page. Understanding that each social media sites have its own function is critical. If you submit the right content on the right sites, you may get terrific results! But the only way to get there is to watch and learn.

Observe the headlines that work better.

Headlines are decisive for social media sites. There are so much content submitted; the only way to get through all that stuff is to scan the headlines. So if you make your headline attractive and catchy, you will most likely get a massive number of readers. Note that there are some headline patterns. Depending of the social media site, you’ll notice that some perform pretty well.

4. Add Friends Smartly.

I don’t want to treat this topic very deeply here, because I think that befriending is part of a good network development strategy. I would like to develop this topic as an individual post or maybe a series. The only thing I want to say here is that befriending shall be done smartly in opposition to mechanically. There are a smart ways and some kind of spammy ways. I don’t want to be moralist here, but my opinion is that befriending is a critical process that may have significant impact on your distribution strategy. Thus, I think it worth to do it with cares. As a first step, I would recommend to browse through the content and to befriend people that submit and vote for content that you really enjoy. Please don’t add 500 people at the same time! This would look like spam; and it is! You better add few on a regular basis than adding a big bunch once in a while.

5. Experiment.

There is no better way to learn! You will inevitably generate unexpected outcomes when you’ll be experimenting something new. However, the essential is to understand what happened and to learn from it! Try submitting different type of content and different headlines. Make your own experiences and build your social media plan based on your results. Experimenting is the foundation of human knowledge. Try something new, something original and be audacious! Knocking at the door of audacity can make the wind turn on your side!

In Summary…

Developing social communications and built a mass critical network to distribute content efficiently takes a lot of time and effort. However, when done properly, it could bring you benefits you even never think of. Don’t sign up on a social media site to distribute your own content; sign up because you want to build a strong and an efficient network. Relational and social media marketing will inevitably give you back what you gave to others!

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This entry was posted on Friday, July 11th, 2008 at 8:31 am 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.