Healthy Social Media needs 5 a day too – blogging, facebook, linkedin, twitter and youtube -

I like the snacking approach to social media… little and often… which is perfect for blogging!

Pick a subject you can write about in some depth and split it in to segments. These bite-sized chunks form the basis of your blogs, facebook edges (yes that is really what your posts are called on facebook), tweets and youtube video and can become a whole series. Schedule them in your blogging medium… be it posterous, blogger, wordpress or whatever platform you have picked to share your creativity and knowledge or your other social media dashboards. Then you have taken the first step to actually doing it.

WordPress has a great calendar feature where you can type in the heading and save it them come back to it when you are ready to write. So why not get some ideas down to look at when you have a minute… it may even remind you of something you fancy talking about. This really is a very useful way of scheduling your social media and giving you the impetus to actually do it. If you plan what you are going to write you will find yourself thinking about it whilst doing other things and sentences will form in your mind ready to be reproduced when you are ready. You may also find your mind wandering down a different path and spawn a whole host of related topics for you to write about.

If you create a social media strategy you will find it comes much more easily… have you heard the saying “Fail to Plan then Plan to Fail”? It’s spot on for this world of on-line marketing. Time and again I see students get very enthusiastic and go great guns whilst in the social media training classes and shortly afterwards but then I watch as gradually the tail off barely managing a tweet let alone a blogging post… social media marketing only works when you actually do it! Once they have gone through the homework set in their training they run out of things to say or think they will do it tomorrow. Well unless you pencil it in the diary tomorrow will not come. Like a gym membership… you only get fit by taking part… setting up an account on facebook, twitter, wordpress and youtube will not get any results on-line unless you actually use them… sadly telepathy is not possible just yet!

Don’t get me wrong… we are alike… If I get lazy with my social media stuff I end up having to overdose on it late at night or on an odd free weekend… then feeling sick… bit like craving chocolate and trying to set a world record in eating a whole bar in less than a minute… so planning to have a healthy social media stream is the way to go. You can also use hootsuite to schedule posts too… it can autopost to facebook, facebook fan pages, linkedin, twitter and myriad other places should you set up accounts on ping.fm. So there really is no excuse.. it just takes planning and a bit of thought and guess what… it happens.

Write down what you want to talk about (preferably what you also want to be found for in the search engines) because if you don’t feed them with healthy social media content then how on earth can you expect to be found? Then plan when you will talk about each subject, where you will post it and when you want it to go out… then do it… you should also plan to interact with any feedback or comments… after all it is social networking not social broadcasting. Pick some high traffic areas to ensure the people who are interested in what you do come and find you… then you are not wasting your time in areas where you are not being seen or heard.

So get yourself set for social media and see your productivity and results go sky high…. aim for 5 a day to have a healthy presence on-line. Just one thing from each every day… when you have time to do them… a youtube video of your own or maybe one from someone else that is funny or highlights something you enjoy… or even a howto video to help one of your friends or followers; look at what your friends post on facebook and find something they would like or find useful; blog about what you have found helpful in the week or what about some of the challenges you have faced… you won’t have been alone and don’t need to be… and look at the answers section on LinkedIn to see what others are looking for…

Good luck… once you get in to this new habit it really does become very easy to maintain.

Berkshire social media – social media does not need to be scary… (berkshiresocialmedia.co.uk)
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