10 Ways to Make Social Media Work For You

Are you on LinkedIn, Pinterest? Do you tweet? Do you blog? Do you spend time on Youtube, Facebook or G+ ? Perhaps, you likely are presently engaged in one of these before getting on this page. Yes, social media as a business tool cannot be over-emphasized. Already, individuals and many organizations  alike have absorbed social media into their marketing and PR.

This post highlights 10 key strategies to make social media an effective for your personal brand  or business:

1. Control Google

In my previous post about how to know what Google knows about you, it highlighted the need to understand how Google uses your personal and social sentiment to help determine which ads to show you based on your account information as its evident with their new privacy policy. One can come to the conclusion that your personal brand is equal to your google results, so get active as search engines love to see fresh content coming out of Blogs, Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn. It is imperative to harness all these platforms.

2. Use One Display Picture

Yes, this might seems boring but it very much professional for a personal brand to use the same image (even it if requires changing them occasionally) across each platform that represents your brand online.

3. Tagline Consistency

Your personal tagline is where you say who you are and what you do in about 10-140 characters. Make sure it’s identical everywhere- on your Twitter bio as well as LinkedIn.

4. Know Your Audience

This perhaps could be difficult at the start but identifying a niche market or finding where your target audience like to hang out and target that platform via an effective strategy.

5. Connect with Key Names

Every industry has its “Mafia”. It is important to know them and start following or engaging with them online so as to ensure you’re on their radar.

6. Content Marketing

Procuring quality content can be challenging but necessary to continually engage your audience. But setup a system of procuring quality content from the web  relevant to you audience. Present this to your network regularly- just remember to add your personal twist to avoid plagiarism or duplicate content.

7. Create Content

Creating content is better than procuring content and more challenging. Content can be anything from a blog post, a podcast or a Youtube clip

8. Listen

Use Twitter search, LinkedIn signal and Google Alerts so you can monitor mentions of your name, company and keyword related to your industry.

9. Meet People

Some of the greatest relationships start on social networks and are taken offline. Meeting people for a drink or at events creates even stronger bonds online.

10. Remember to Switch Off

Social media is a time bandit. Set a limit.

Personally, i  do employ majority of these steps and still need to improve on other areas. Which of these steps are you effectively using presently, share with us ?

Written by  Asoto Adeola