These 10 social networking tips and tricks will help you build a
stronger network and take your online presence to the next level. All
are designed to make you think strategically and take advantage of
timesaving tools to boost your effectiveness.
Here are 10 ways to boost your social standing online.
Listen to Your Audience
The three most important factors in social networking are audience,
audience, audience. Identify what kind of people you're trying to reach
and pay attention to what they're saying. Build RSS feeds and monitor
conversations using listening tools like TweetDeck, Social Mention and
Seesmic. Learn the basics of
social metrics, or what to measure and why.
Participate and Collaborate
Set goals for engaging your contacts and monitor how much activity your
efforts generate. How many retweets do you get on Twitter? How many
reposts does your blog generate? Use third-party tools like Retweetist
and the Retweet iPhone App to measure your social media influence and impact on networks. Klout is one such tool that lets you track your impact on multiple social media networks.
Join Specialized Networks
Whatever your passion, there is a specialized social network for you. Try Digg if you're a social news
hound, Kickstarter for fundraising, Last.fm for music, deviantart.com
for artists, fanvibe for sports, or ozmosis for doctors. To find your
niche network, run a Google search on
"yourtopic and social media."
Use Social Media Dashboards
Save time by using social media management tools
like HootSuite to manage your accounts and activity across different
social media services, including Twitter, WordPress, Facebook,
Foursquare and others. HootSuite lets you post and read messages, track
mentions of you, and lets you prepare posts and updates for automatic
posting later at pre-scheduled times. Most of the best Twitter clients, for example, also let you manage other social networks.
Ask Lots of Questions
Asking questions is a great way to engage your contacts, attract fresh
links and learn new things. When people reply to your questions with
comments or posts, it boosts the visibility of your content on that
particular network. But take care to read and respond to answers.
Link, Link, Link
Links equal love in social media. So liberally add links to your posts,
status updates, tweets and other content. Cross-link to your tweets
from your blog and vice versa. On Facebook, you can tag your pals to
hyperlink their names. All it takes is adding the "@" symbol at the
beginning of your friend's name when you write your status updates. You
can also upload files and link to them. Try the
TwileShare app, for example.
Time Your Tweets
Noon Eastern Standard Time is a great tweeting time to reach bigger
audiences. American West Coasters are showing up for work then, while
East Coasters are starting lunch breaks.
Use Mobile Helpers
If you have a smart phone, install special helper applications to send
and receive information faster on your favorite social networks.
Instagram, for example, helps iPhone users spice up their cell-phone
photos and share them quickly across different networks -- Twitter,
Flickr, Facebook and others. There are plenty of Twitter helpers for
cell phones and tablet computers. Trickle, for example, displays tweets on the iPad one at a time.
Create a Visual Identity
Tweak your Twitter profile, Facebook profile and other social network
home pages to create a unique visual identity. Create a custom Twitter
background to add more bio information and give your Twitter presence
personality. Many custom backgrounds are available for free downloading
at sites such as MyTweetSpace.com.
Back Up Your Virtual Self
Once you've taken time to build a strong social network, don't let your
social identity go up in digital smoke. Make use of available tools for
backing up your profiles, photos, and status updates. Facebook's backup
tool is under "download your information" in Account Settings. For
Twitter, try a third-party tool like TweetStream or TweetScan. WordPress
lets you export your posts to a downloadable XML file, which you can
save and import later into a new blog in the event that one of your best
social blogs accidentally get zapped into oblivion.
