The Social Media Guide for Dummies Like Me Part II

In my first try at this I tried to outline some principles that I think I’m learning about social media and why it’s important to our chamber and our members.  This blog will be considerably shorter and pass on a couple links that I have found powerful and relevant to building your social media strategy.

The first is a You Tube clip that provides a slew of facts about social media that are pretty astonishing when you add them up.  You’ll proabably want to view this several times as it goes very quickly. Click here to take a peek. 

• As a quick recap the imprtant thing about social media is that is an opportunity for you to interact with a broader, virtually unlimited audience.  Our chamber premise is that people do business with people they know and trust.  So the power of social media is best used when (and really this is the only way to use it) you share a little about yourself.  This is the basis of starting a relationship.  I’m sharing that I have an interest in technology and am a lazy tinkerer that wants to know enough to make this easy as possible.  With that here are a couple fundamentals (at least as I currently understand them):
• When you write you need to have knowledge of the topic or you’ll get more visibility than you want.  There’s a fine line between high visibility and indecent exposure. 
• Your topic must be relevant
• You have to keep at it.  Currency and consistency are the keys to making friends and building an audience
• Consider using multiple sites to increase your audience and impact.  With this consider using a blog as your foundation and pick additional media that you can feed off your blog.  Write once anduse it many times is the key to efficiency.  We use WordPress. 

The final element I’ll cover in this entry is market research.  There are  a myriad of outlets in the social media so you need to make sure the one(s) you choose meet both your social and business intent.  Here’s a great site to use to make your selections and a sample of what you can find out

Site                                         Linked In                   Facebook                    Twitter
Monthly US Users              13.8M                          94.6M                            27.6M
Global                                   26.5M                         N/A                                N/A
Male                                  53%                              46%                                 46%
Female                             47%                              54%                                 54%
Top Age User                    35-49 (41%)              18-34 (46%)                18-34(43%)
Second Age Group       50% (37%)                13-17 (20%)                35-49(29%)      
Top Earning                 100K+(34%)            29%                                 30-60K(29%)
Second Earning            60-100K (33%)      29%                                 0-30K(20%)

Hope you find this useful