Lately it seems like they have made a social network for just about every interest. It can be cool but it can also be confusing and annoying to have to connect with your friends and associates in a dozen different places. It is hard enough trying to keep track of everyone between Twitter, Facebook, Instagram and Linkedin, which seem to be the networks people are more or less expected to have these days.
After I went through making profiles and taking the time to review all the major social media networks, I spent a little bit of time figuring out which ones actually added value and benefit to my life and business. Part of the reason I use social media is to stay connected with people I care about, and part of the reason is to promote my projects, personal brand, and products. So different social networks appeal to me in different ways. Below is a break down of how I have been using social media to enhance my productivity in my personal life and also as a promotional tool for my businesses.
Facebook – I have 2 pages on Facebook; a personal page that I have narrowed down to under 1,000 actual friends and people I genuinely like to be connected with. I also have a Fan Page that I made a while ago when I was doing speaking and webinars and had a lot of random people adding me. I wanted to build my business audience but I did not want strangers knowing every detail of my personal life. Now what I do is post all my brand related things to my fan page (promoting TV show, websites, business quotes, etc) and I post all my personal business to my personal page. If I think a post is a crossover post, I first post it on my Fan Page and then tag my personal profile in it so it appears in both places.
Since implementing my Instagram strategy, I have began increasing my following with very targeted users and getting business inquiries from it, click this photo to check out the tool for yourself.
Instagram – Instagram has been a good promotion tool for my projects lately because it is easy to target like users based on hashtags. I use a simple tool that likes photos based on hashtags all day long so it keeps my profile engaged without having to follow a lot of people i dont know or use any tools that may violate Instagram’s terms of service. It gets me about 20 new followers a day. My strategy is pretty simple. I switched my profile to Private so that people can’t see my photos without sending me a follower request that I then approve. This is so they have to follow me to see my photos. Then I type in a Hashtag that is relevant to the people I want to follow me. My tool likes their photos so they are notified and attracted to my profile where a certain ratio of them clicks my follow button. Then, my strategy is when I post a new photo to Instagram, I approve all the new followers so they flood in and like and share my content which has been working out well so far. Sometimes I share the content from Instagram to my personal facebook or tumblr pages. I used to share it to facebook and twitter, but now I find that uploaded the content manually to Twitter and to my Facebook fan page, and then tagging it in my personal Facebook gets my the highest distribution of the content and best engagement rates. If you haven’t already, take a look at my profile at http://Instagram.com/Vito_Glazers to take a look at how I have laid out my profile to attract curious users to follow my profile.
As you can see, I have pretty much dedicated my entire Twitter to #MysteryMillionaire for now…
Twitter I no longer use for personal, only for promotional. I have donated my Twitter, which was once by far my favorite social profile, to the TV show I am on. During the Series Premier I used my Twitter to engage with everyone who was discussing the show and it was a very fun experience. Since people didn’t necessarily know me from the show, the people tweeting were very open and candid about what they liked and didn’t like and I was able to get some really good feedback together. I am going to try running paid tweets during the show in the upcoming weeks to see what kind of increase in followers and engagement rates I can achieve.
One Social Network I never thought I would get much use out of was Pinterest. I have started using it for the practical reason of ‘pinning’ all my published articles onto boards so I can access them later on. I also am looking for a way to use LinkedIn to target people to sell my social media consulting services to. There is people hiring social media managers on Linkedin for $30,40,50K a year, they could get a much better value hiring me as a consulting for a few hundred a week and save on employment taxes, learning curve and have less of a commitment so I am confident once I can figure out a strategy on this network I know I can start bringing in some fees off of it.
I will keep this blog updated with new strategies that are working for me as I come across them.
