For years I struggled to embrace social media. I just didn’t get it. I couldn’t figure out what to blog about, what to tweet, and who cared about being my friend on Facebook. For the past few years, my idea of social media was leveraging LinkedIn to find business connections and clicking ‘accept’ whenever I received a Facebook invite.
Several months ago my mentality started to change. I started updating my status in Three Pillar‘s Confluence instance so that employees could track what I was up to on our intranet.
This practice brought some much-needed visibility into different corporate initiatives. I quickly found the transparency to be a healthy thing for the company.
I also started monitoring what other employees were doing and found this to be a great tool for keeping my finger on the pulse of what made our employees tick.
Unfortunately, status updates on our intranet started to dwindle. It was difficult for people to maintain them while simultaneously updating their Twitter/Facebook accounts (a great plugin for Confluence would be integration between confluence status updates and Twitter). I decided to take a second stab at Twitter. If micro-blogging had been helpful internally, why not globally?
I now see social media as a way to stay in touch with customers, employees, and friends. It promotes communication and helps me keep a pulse on industry trends. Yesterday’s executives read the Wall Street Journal to ensure they were up-to-date on business. Today’s CEOs embrace social media to stay up-to-date and help shape it (see Michael Hyatt and Bill Marriot).
Here are some initial thoughts that I have about building your social presence:
Integrate Platforms
Simplify your life by integrating the platforms you want to use. Automatically pushing your tweets to your Facebook and LinkedIn profiles helps keep everyone in the loop.
Be Relevant and Interesting
You can leverage your social presence as a marketing tool, but you cannot build a social presence if marketing is your only purpose. The content you post must be relevant and interesting to build loyalty.
Monitor Others
Monitoring other’s content is just as critical as creating your own. Social media is a two-way medium.