I’m constantly asked about best practices on Twitter and Facebook, and here are some of the questions I have heard: What are the rules? How to get more followers? How to get more likes? Why isn’t anybody engaging with me? How come people don’t see my posts?
There are great articles on the web about social media best practices, and Mashable.com for example has great tips.
Since I have my own unwritten rules, I’ve decided to write them down. I know, from now on I can’t call them unwritten anymore.
Please note that every time I say friends, it could be a business contact, a Twitter follower, or a Facebook “friend”.
- Have a Higher Purpose: Don’t write content or share information for likes. Write it and share it because it means something to you and it will mean something to your friends.
- Be Authentic: Show up as yourself. Social media is a great opportunity to expand and become more of who you are. Hiding won’t give you the same growing opportunity, or a higher number of followers, as showing up does.
- Let It Go: After you post something, let it go. Don’t keep refreshing the page, seeing how many likes it gets, or who liked it. Post it. Leave it. Open another tab, do something else.
- Say Yes or No, but Say Something. When a friend invites you to an event, respond. You could join it, say maybe, or if you truly cannot make it, decline it but leave a note. This will help your friend out, as it will show their event on your wall (as long as the event was set to public).
- Engage! Don’t expect anyone to like your page, comment on your posts, communicate with you, if you are not doing the same for them. Make sure to spend time either reciprocating the favor, or simply be supportive of your friends posts, tweets, etc.
- Respond: When someone posts a comment on your post, or shares an article you wrote, make sure to like their comment, tag them, respond, thank them, and/or share your opinion about it. A good trick is to like at one time, and respond a while later, so that the post goes back up and more people see it.
- Timing is everything. If your posts didn’t get any likes or RTs, yes, there is a possibility that nobody cared for it, but most likely nobody saw it. Here are a few things you could do: Post it again, send private messages to friends asking if they saw it, or like your own post at a later time.
- Ask for help: Yes, you can ask people to share your event or article on their walls. If they say yes and do it, please like it, thank them, and show them some appreciation.
- Return the favor: Ah, and if they ever ask you to return the favor, please do so. Do they even have to ask?
- Show gratitude: If someone posts a testimonial about you on their wall and they tag you, say thank you on the post, like the post, share the post. You would think this one was obvious, right? Not so much.
- Show gratitude 2: When your Tweets are re-tweeted, please say thank you, favorite the tweet, respond.
- Reciprocate: When someone re-tweets something you wrote, also return the favor. Read their tweets, read their blogs, and whenever there is something that you and your followers would like to read, share it, tweet it, and return the favor.
- Include Images: Whenever possible, add/post an image that speaks to your audience.
- It’s not personal! Finally, don’t take it personally. The number of likes or RTs you get does not represent how many people like you, accept you, or even love you. The number of responses has more to do with how you made people feel than with how people feel about you.
Here is a quote from Seth Godin on this topic: "Instead of measuring, for example, how many people click on a link, we can measure how something you wrote or created delighted or challenged people... You can see the changes in emotion, or dignity improved or light shed."
If you are not doing so already, follow me on Twitter. Depending on your Twitter etiquette ;), I’ll follow you back. You just learned mine: @womenandbiz.
What would you add to this list?
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