It's good to talk...

It's a slightly creepy picture but the advert's quote sums my most important point from this post... 

As a follow up to my previous post about spam I thought I'd add to the plethora of posts out there exploring how to best use social media. From the amount of people not 'getting' social media it appears an extra one won't go amiss. Here is a summary of some of the best advice I've been given:

Pick your goal: What would you like to do? Do you want to build your network with your peers or candidates/clients? From a personal view point it's important to be focussed on one or two areas as otherwise your content becomes diluted and irrelevant for your target audience.

Curate: The simplest way to build up a network is to curate interesting content relevant for your target audience. Here one of the RSS replacement apps (such as Feedly) is your friend. Then share it to your selected social networks.

Timing: Post your content throughout the day. There a multiple tools (such as: Buffer, Hootsuite & Do Share) that help with scheduling posts for all your social networks. It doesn't take much time to set-up a schedule to ensure your posts are spread out.

Share & Interact: Retweets and Likes (+1s) are all very good but conversations can be even better. Join in and reply to posts, blogs or tweets. To quote the above advert.. "It's good to talk".

Monitor: It's always a good idea to monitor what you're doing so you can improve the content that you are curating. Hootsuite and Buffer both have monitoring tools for the content that you put out and make it easy to see what has been successful and what hasn't. If you are particularly interested in your Twitter network then I like SocialBro, the free version gives some great insight and provides a "best time to tweet" function based on network activity.

Don't spam: It's pretty self explanatory but too often overlooked.

As a bonus: Create.. It takes a while to build up the confidence to put your work "out there" but why not give it a try (like I am). It's a frightening feeling at first but people are out there to encourage and support you (thanks +Tony Restell and +Aaron Lintz!).