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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.

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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!

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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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