Why should you care about Social Media?

WHY???? .

Communication

is changing. The means of how people or businesses are sharing information is
 shifting . Prior to open source, online users interacted with  HTML
content on one page. Now, open source allows information and communication
to be fluid, user-generated and viral. Just about anything can be “shared” on
other sites or forwarded in a viral manner using tools like Share This, AddThis,
ReTweets or various other sharing functions. Because of the highly viral nature
of the Internet, it’s imperative for personal as well as corporate brands to manage
themselves consistently and “real time” using social media.

Now here are 10 tips of 100 but I want you to retain them so lets do it over many weeks. Installment 1/10

Create Your Brand

Create a brand but more importantly, understand YOUR brand. The
avatar and screen name is your company/personal name. Treat your
avatar like a logo. Use the same image consistently across all social
media sites because you never know where it’ll show up. That little
photo is what your audience will associate with your brand.
Using your personal name as a screen name works well, if it is easy
to remember. Like a logo, your screen name is like a company name.
Choose a screen name that isn’t confusing or hard to remember. For
personal brands, use your own name if possible, and use it consistently.
This is the brand: YOU.

If using your personal name doesn’t work either due to privacy or
it’s already taken, try to keep your screen name short so it’s easy to
remember and so it doesn’t use up precious characters on sites like
Twitter. Your brand name will start to appear repetitively next to your
avatar, but also as vanity URL’s, like Facebook.com/yourbrand or
LinkedIn.com/in/yourbrand.

Brand Repetition = Brand Equity

The more a “logo” is seen across multiple social portals, the more
it becomes imprinted in the subconscious of the brand’s audience.
Social Media will put your visual brand out there thousands of times.
Consistency allows brands to have more online velocity.
For example, Susan Boyle went from being an unknown singer to a
worldwide phenomenon in less than a week due in large part to her
name and visual image repeated over and over on social sites. The
photo of her standing in a beige frock with the bright blue Britain’s
“Got Talent” background served as her brand identity.


 How to Build Influence

If influence in social media were a mathematical equation, it would
look like this:
Influence = Reach*(Brand x Expertise x Trust)
*reach is a multiplier of influence
Many of the tips listed in this book will help your brand build
influence if followed and applied consistently. We live in a time when
an individual can have as much leverage or influence as an entire
corporation through social media channels.
Pick three to five subjects you like to talk about consistently. You don’t
have to be an expert, but be passionate enough about the topics so you
enjoy talking about them every day. Be consistent with your brand
voice. Eventually, people will begin to see you as an influencer and
expert in a certain category or industry. They’ll identify with YOU
and begin conversations with YOU. This is the key to social media
traction.

Broadcasting vs. Engaging

Talk with people online, not at them. The concept of inbound
marketing versus outbound marketing was introduced by Hubspot.
com. Traditional advertising channels like television, print media and
billboards have the ability to get in front of a large audience, but is that
audience paying attention? Chances are they’re tuned out because they
aren’t given a choice on whether they want to hear brand messaging.
Engaging an audience on a personal level through direct conversation
on social portals is more powerful because the audience opts in to your
message. Their opting in to what you have to say is the beginning of
your relationship, and without trust, relationships don’t succeed.
This is one of the most important tips to understand when building a
successful brand using social media. Studies suggest consumers trust
their peer recommendations 78% of the time versus 14% for traditional
advertising

Be Consistent

Using your “logo” and brand name over time will build brand equity.
Change it, and your brand takes a step backwards. It’s disorienting for
an audience who has learned to identify with your brand out of the
sea of other brands online. Consistency is critical because the velocity
with which it’ll move across the Internet and mobile devices is mind
boggling and getting faster as your brand equity increases.
Moreover, social sites will come and go over time but your brand
image will still remain similar over time. Diligence in preserving
brand consistency and equity is important across social networks as
well as over time.
If you remember one tip from this book, this one is it. I can’t emphasize
enough the importance of being consistent with how your brand
looks and sounds. The open source nature of today’s internet make it
possible for your brand to reach places you never expected or know
about unless you’re monitoring it.

Manage Expectations

Social Media creates a direct line of communication between your
brand and your audience. You wouldn’t normally pick up the phone
and call Ashton Kutcher to see what he’s been up to, but you can send
him a message directly on Twitter or Facebook. It appears there is a
direct line of communication but the level of expectation needs to be
realistic. There is an expectation that one person has an immediate
connection with another and thus immediate response. However, a
relationship must first be nurtured before it can be beneficial.
For brands, social media offers a direct line of communication with a
targeted audience. It’s an opportunity to provide one-on-one interaction
and nurture the trust level and maintain the inbound marketing
connection.

Be a Conduit of Useful InformationB

Once a connection has been created between a brand and its audience,
that connection grows through the consistent process of sharing content.
Whether content is originated from you or shared from another source,
brand equity grows by providing information that is relevant and useful to
the audience. You’re keeping them engaged.
In fact, it’s not a bad idea to create original content and share other
people’s content equally. One of the tips to a successful social media
strategy in this ebook talks about supporting others through retweets
and content sharing. By serving as a conduit, your brand gains
credibility as a resource for useful information.
My brand was built around wine, food, branding and bacon. I’ve been
a conduit of daily information about these subjects. People know that
I’m going to talk about any one of these things, which created a level
of expectation. They expect me to talk about wine, and because I do,
my brand has an established level of trust

Don’t be a Spammer

Sharing ways to work from home, make thousands of dollars or showing
people how to lose a bunch of weight is spammy. From television to
email to social media, there are people out there who insist on trying
the same method of promoting get rich quick schemes over and over.
If engaging people online is your goal, these tactics will produce the
complete opposite effect and turn the audience off.
Spam in social media is the opposite of trust. It usually appears after
you’ve opted in to someone else either by following them on Twitter
or becoming a fan of their Facebook page. Instead of beginning a
relationship, they look at is an opportunity to send out a blanket offer
of some sort hoping some percentage of people click their link. That’s
the old way of doing things—it’s outbound marketing.

Avoid Spam Campaigns

Your brand will NOT grow if you try to add someone to your Twitter
Mafia via direct message, or with “I just gave you good luck” messages.
These types of spam are not human interaction. They’re a turnoff that
taints the experience of sites like Facebook, MySpace or Twitter

HouseHoldHacker Network

Social media makes it easy for people to connect and share information.
Just about everyone has their own projects and interests in the hopper.
Look for opportunities to “pollinate” other projects. It doesn’t take
much effort. You might have the one skill, the one connection or the
one piece of information to accelerate someone else’s efforts.
Cross-pollinating via social media is even easier than in physical
relationships and you can do more of it.
We live in a ‘thank you’ economy now where trust and relationship
building comes with some basic manners like “please” and “thank
you”. Every interaction you make is visible to the rest of the world,
which means unselfish support of other people, including competitors,
gives your brand a positive glow that isn’t measurable, but it’s there.
I learned early on that the more I pollinated other people’s efforts,
the faster my brand grew. Self-promotion has a little better than a 1:1
return for your brand, but promoting other projects has about a 2:1
return for your brand.

That is all for now I will do the next 10 in a few days. Hope this helps you.

Justin Matthew comfortable living off the internet.