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Social Media, Learn to Crawl Before you Walk

December 17th, 2008
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Social Media like anything else requires commitment, time and patience. You must first pay your dues, learn and contribute, in order to get achievable results from it, of course all this depends on your objectives for using social media. If you’re new to this and going to be using it for any financial gain, either for yourself or a product your hawking, then read on. If you think creating accounts on every social networking site, and installing Twitter is the winning formula, you are wrong. The tools are only the facilitators of the message, as I have said countless times before. We must first learn to crawl before we can walk, so lets crawl, shall we..

Contribute:

Remember in order to get you must first give. Contribute as often and as much as you can. Contributing can be writing resourceful and useful blog posts, sharing and promoting other’s work. Do not hesitate to help people if they need assistance.

Comment:

Leave thoughtful and constructive comments as much as possible on other blogs. Don’t stop there, post comments on Facebook walls, FriendFeed, and Twitter. This promotes good practices in social media, and it also gives you an opportunity for exposure and link placement. This can lead into new networking opportunities and potential new friendships.

Conversation:

Find and participate in where the conversation is taking place. If you are using social media for marketing, this is very important. Find out where your current & potential customers are, and engage them. Establish a presence and contribute to the conversation, do not overpower and definitely do not spam, otherwise you will be shown the door rather quickly, and be exposed for a marketer, not a member of the community. We are giving and not getting at first, until we have earned the right to do so.

Community:

Just as in life we build a circle of friends based on our interests. Community is what social media is all about. Without the community, its just media, not social. Find the relevant communities and actively participate in them. Don’t expect to be accepted and welcomed right away, again this is earned.

Be proactive as much as possible:

Acting before a situation becomes a source of confrontation or crisis. That’s the definition of proactive. If friends solicit for help via Twitter or email, respond back in a timely fashion. If friends send you a gentle nudge, respond back. If friends need an extra Digg vote, don’t hesitate to help. When it becomes your time and a potential situation arises, you would hope that your network is there to catch you before you fall. Do onto others as you would want others to do onto you.

Share:

Remember one of the first things you learned as a kid? Play nice and share with your neighbors. Social media is all about getting the message out there. we do this in a variety of ways, one of which is sharing. Shine the spotlight onto others, if you expect the spotlight to be shined onto you. Sharing and self promotion is always a two-way street.

Do not promote yourself:

If you have a product to sell or are offering a service, keep those initiatives away from the communities, at least in the very beginning. If you jump into a community and your only goal is to hawk your wares, you will be seen as a marketer and not a contributor. I’m not saying it’s never okay to occasionally promote yourself, but there is a time and place. Again the right is earned, not given.

Build relationships:

Do not friend as many people as possible. All this builds is a list… Do build meaningful relationships with people. People you have taken a genuine interest in. It’s not about how many people you follow, but who you follow instead.

Image by Dyamasaki under Creative Commons License

Mike Fruchter

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