Why would I start? Good question. A lot worry about privacy concerns and sometimes with good cause. My view, don't post anything you want to keep private. Once out there, it's out there.
Social media in all it's various forms is simply a new way of communicating and communicating is what we must do to build a network.
It is the next step. Just as we've seen the progression from cave paintings through hieroglyphics, the written word, printing books, the phone, the fax, and email.
You can adopt it, learn how to use it, or not. The choice is yours.
Of course real one to one interaction is the ultimate in communication but social media allows you to communicate efficiently with whole communities. Who doesn't want that? Social media seems to be able to break through the email clutter and acts as a filter that allows you to reach those with a similar interest.
That's why you should use it.
So just start!
Go to www.facebook.com and twitter.com and set up your profile.
Keep it simple.
Facebook
Put up a happy professional photo of yourself on Facebook set up your security settings and the profile info that you want to share.
If you are doing this to build a network marketing business become a fan of the corporate page, in our case natureline, and friend request other members of the community, such as myself. List whatever replicated website you choose such as yourusername.fixteas.com. Or enviromovement.com or naturelinesolutions.com.
As corporate or members of the natureline community, your friends, post relevant content to your "wall" comment positively and add to the conversation and "like" postings. This adds to your profile within the community and shares it with your own overlapping community.
Generally try to avoid political or religious commentary as it can be divisive and seldom works for your business building purpose. Don't fill the walls of others with incessant game requests such as "mafia wars". You can block all that content by simply deleting the post and blocking future content by the way.
If you want a Facebook page to share family photos, play games, and share your political or religious beliefs by all means set up another profile.
Now, start finding friends. This can be a fun process. Just in the same way that you did with our business plan's memory jogger section. Who did you go to school with? Who do you email? Facebook has a great wizard that can do that for you. Who did you work with? Who'd you play sports with...? More on this later.
Twitter
Set up your account at twitter.com maybe choose your natureline username, if it's available, or something relevant to your goals.
Your aim on twitter is to build a following with whom you can share info 140 characters at a time. People that like your content share it with their communities and so on so the reach of your content can be very wide especially if it piques interest.
As near as I can understand it Twitter is almost like a real time search engine. There is a ton of rubbish out there but if your content speaks to people it gets picked up on.
Search for friends already on twitter, invite friends from Facebook to follow you. Search for me @fixteas and follow me.
Retweet content that I post to your followers. I'll show you how that works later.
To build your database of followers follow those with large numbers of followers and who follow lots of people. Follow back those that follow you. Start by following some of those that follow me and when they follow you see who they are following follow them and see if they follow you back.
You can only follow so many people more than follow you so you need to periodically purge out those who you follow who don't return the favor. I use a website called friendorfollow.com that generates a list of who isn't following me and then unfollow them to open up room to follow more people. More on this later... I just read some of that back and it sounds like crazy gibberish, and it is, but there we go!
Once you are set up on Facebook and twitter update your email signature to send people to your streams on a consistent basis.
The key with these social media sites is to use them. Post consistently; add commentary that adds value and contributes positively to the community. Comment on what others are saying positively and share content across communities and platforms.
Whoa, that was supposed to be a brief overview! But I hope it encourages you to START! Do it now! Set up your profiles and friend and follow me; I'll friend and follow you right back.
Share this blog, comment on it, and next time I'll show some other cool tools that I've been introduced to that can help you as you build your social media platform and network.
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