The Rules of Social Media Engagement

Are you maximizing your social engagement? Consider these the eleven rules of social media engagement.

Whether you are a power tweeter or an occasional updater there are certain methodologies you should employ in order to achieve the highest possible value from your effort. Consider the list below as a short guide to set you on the path of achieving social media enlightenment. I call them rules and as with all rules feel free to break them as your see fit. It’s not like the Social Media Police are going to write you a summons. Just know that you’ll be hurting your own image.

The first step in is to collate all of your accounts under a single umbrella. Consolidating multiple accounts into one environment will be overwhelming at first but in the end you will gain greater control and understanding of your engagement needs. The streams in my Tweetdeck tend to look like the Matrix. In fact in a sheer moment of überGeekiness I even adjusted the theme to be monochrome green. The result is I have a screen containing the information I need in front of me so that I can process where to place my attention.

Raising your engagement potential is the name of the game

The main benefit of this consolidation is that I am better able to stay abreast of the changes in my various networks. Without this level of awareness I would never be successful in many aspects of engagement. For engagement is many faceted gem. It is not focused on one medium but across many. You can not be just a tweeter because you have conversations that occur on other media sites like LinkedIn, Facebook and Google+ to name but a few. All of this leads naturally into the next step.

FOLLOW Your Retweeters

Coordination is nearly impossible to without some sort of simplified management and consolidation is the essential building block to coordination. By monitoring all of your important streams you are better able to plan your effort and spread it across the networks of concern. Coordination is the process of spreading your engagement across the bounds of multiple social media infrastructures. Conversations should be organic and bend themselves around the network upon which they travel.

However in order for these processes to work each of these networks need to be firmly cemented in a specific foundation. They have to have a solid grounding in order to be effective. If you are a self publishing wizard then you need to follow other publishing icons, as it is expected that the majority of your content will be centered around publishing. It is not to say that you are not allowed to follow other people it is just that you need to ensure that you have a solid foundation from which to branch forth. Only than can you build additions to your Social Networking House.

The next key area is to divide and of course conquer. By this I mean you need to break your network down into more manageable streams. This is where tools that allow listing and grouping become essential. Think of these lists and groups as bricks in your foundation. Imagine for a second how difficult it is to follow a busy stream of hundreds of people let alone thousands. That would be like building a castle on top of a swamp.

In my personal account on twitter I currently follow a very active stream of approximately 4500. However the only way it is manageable is that I broke that down into discreet lists. These lists allow me to frame the updates into topical streams of information. In fact there are lists I use and follow that contain users whom I do not even follow. For instance my SciFi list mostly contains celebrities that I do not follow directly but by watching that list I am aware of what is happening in that circle. This saves me from following celebrities that will not likely follow me back. Unfortunately most celebrities do not understand nor even care about the necessities of the followback. I know this is minor but there is nothing worse than receiving a something personal via DM and not being able to respect that privacy and DM a response.

1. Consolidation
2. Coordination
3. Build your foundation
4. Divide and conquer
5. Ignore the numbers
6. Stick to what you know
7. Share your passion
8. Follow your retweeters
9. Respect the HASHTAG
10. Know your avatars
11. Follow up

One important subject is follower counting. This is a huge issue and my personal consideration is that unless you hit the followback wall do not worry about the number of followers you have. It is more important to concern yourself with follower quality and interaction over count. If you look at Klout, Tapp11, TwitterCounter and so many others you will loose focus on your message. These sites encourage you to focus on ridiculously meaningless vanity metrics because that is what their business model is based on. You can summarily ignore them.

One caveat regarding Klout is that you can currently give out +K’s to 9 people per day. I would suggest that this is actually a good practice and should not be overlooked. Just remember to include the obligatory mention tweet as well as the thank you tweets to for anyone who give you a +k in return. Each of these distinct actions help raise your engagement potential. Think of it as another method of opening the conversation door.

Never forget that your message is the reason you are doing all of this but it is not the only reason. What I mean here is although you use social media to share your message it is also important to listen to others in your circle. You must focus your circle to a specific core of activities or else your message will get lost. You can not be everything to everyone. So stick to what you know best and build up from there. Be a source of reliable information on the subject you know best.

Focusing on what you know makes it easier to achieve the next goal which is to share your passion. People become intoxicated by something that someone else is passionate about. Without passion your message lacks the drive to carry it through the cruft to your audience. Your passion will help your content bubble up to the top. It will get you noticed.

All of this will lead to people sharing your information with others. These people will help you develop your social capital and credibility. As a general rule of thumb FOLLOW your retweeters. Besides being a general good practice, it is a simple rule that you need to heed. If your followers think enough of you to share your content with their followers then you have to at least be curious who else they are sharing. Could it be someone who contradicts your beliefs?

Unless you hit the followback wall do not worry about the number of followers you have

More importantly your retweeters most likely share ideas and content congruent to your beliefs. By following your retweeters you increase the likelihood that you will discover new content and new ideas that these individuals share. If they share the same point of view as you do then you have extended your core and strengthened your foundation. Ultimately it opens the door to further engagement which is critical to your success with social media. Remember the key aspect of social networking is to build relationships and you do that through conversation. It is easier to easiest to share information with people who have similar beliefs, background and methodologies. The differences between you increase the potential for conversation.

At this point I need to discuss the mighty HASHTAG for a moment. Be ever cognizant of existing hashtags in the updates of others. There are two tags you MUST always be aware of #in & #fb. These two tags will send a tweet to your LinkedIn and Facebook stream respectively. If you are not careful you could unintentionally retweet something into your other streams.

While no one owns a particular hashtag it is important to understand who else may be using it. Take for example the two hashtags that are associated with my personal account the first is #JustSayin and the other is #LastTweets. Each have their specific purpose and I use them so often that no matter who else uses these tags my messages will show up alongside them in the search results. My point being that if you think you are going to corner a particular tag and hijack its stream be forewarned that because you do not own the tag you have no real idea how others will use it. You should do your research before just sending an update with a seemingly clever hashtag.

You know he may be crazy w/ that ark and all but we could be nicer I’ll go apologize to @Noah tomorrow… #LastTweets

One last thought about hashtags and this is kind of huge. Google ignores them. In fact their search algorithm strips the # (octothorpe) symbol from your query strings. In addition Facebook has made no indication that they intend to respect them either. So at this point Twitter, LinkedIn, Diaspora and EmpireAvenue seem to be the only major social media platforms that honor the hashtag. It is very sad that Google has rejected such a vital information tagging tool.

Since I have already written two comprehensive articles about avatars I will just recommend that you see the “What’s related” below and read those articles. They cover the best practices you need to know about selecting a good avatar.

Sadly Google ignores HASHTAGS

This leads me to number 11 which is odd I know (no pun intended) since most normal people can only focus on 10 things at a time. But this one is kind of a big deal and applies to all of your social media activities. You need to followup with people. It is like any other factor in business. Think of it like this: You will never hit a home run if you do not swing through the ball. If you make a promise you need to follow through on it and if you have a conversation with someone on LinkedIn about something then you must always followup with them. No one likes to have their question unanswered and if you are a venerable source of information but often leave your clients wanting they will look elsewhere for the answer.

If someone tells me they are not feeling well, they started a new jobs, got a promotion or whatever it is I always send them a note. It is important to engage with people on a personal level and the easiest way of learning to engage with people is to listen to them. They will tell you what they need. Failing to listen is why most tech support people are complete failures at social media. They spend too much time ignoring their users and focus solely on the mechanical turning into Nick Burns every time. It takes just one small deed to make a big impression. You just need to decide if you want the impression to positive or negative. The choice is yours.

Ultimately your goal is to maximize your impact with a minimum of effort. Unfortunately measuring that impact is difficult at best. As I have already mentioned there are many wizards and people out there that will try to sell on some magick formula or bottle of snake oil that gives you a nice simple number to crunch. This is because as humans we are attached to these simple answers. The truth is that it is only your engagement that will drive your social media effort. As much as your managers do not want to listen to this undeniable truth followers do not equate to results. All that I can say is that by following the eleven tips outlined here you will improve your engagement thereby improving your true ROI, or as my friend Ted Rubin likes to say RonR (return on relationship).

If you still insist in throwing money at the problem I am always available and have some cute little bottles of scented oil for you. #JustSayin

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