Social
media can level the playing field between industry leaders and
upstarts, between multinational corporation executives and small-business
owners, making peers of all participants. Yet appearances can be deceiving. To
borrow from George Orwell's Animal Farm, all
social-media users are equal, but some are more equal than others.
So
what makes the difference between a following of 500 and a following of
500,000? While A-list celebrities can have an advantage over most everyone
else, other social media darlings have grown their base of fans more organically,
and you can learn from their strategies.
What
follows are five keys culled from darlings of the current social media
landscape for increasing your influence in a way that can make a difference to
your business strategies.
1. Produce quality content.
If you want
to make your mark on social media, first and foremost you should provide
quality content. "Content is twofold," says Mari Smith, a
social-media marketing expert and author of The New Relationship Marketing: How to
Build a Large, Loyal, Profitable Network Using the Social Web (Wiley,
2011). "It's generating your own, [being] a thought leader. The other
element is what I call OPC -- other people's content -- and not being afraid to
share that."
One man who
successfully balances both elements is entrepreneur, investor and author Guy
Kawasaki. "He's a self-professed 'firehose of content,' " says Smith.
"He has a way of creating a nice blend of other people's content as well
as his own thoughts and opinions." Not only that, but according to his Twitter bio,
Kawasaki repeats every tweet four times in order to reach all time zones.
Quantity
is not the same as quality, of course, but what is remarkable about Kawasaki,
says Smith, is "his masterful ability to curate such volume. I could skim
through his tweets and probably find a few things every day that I could pass
on to my followers."
2. Be open and engaging.
On
social media, it's important to be available to your audience, and few people
exemplify that principle better, says Smith, than entrepreneur Gary Vaynerchuk.
"On Twitter, he does a lot of responding" to followers, she says.
"He treats everybody as an equal, and he responds at an amazing
velocity."
What's
the upside of all this time-consuming engagement for Vaynerchuk? A loyal and
devoted following for his business books and priceless visibility for his
consulting business, VaynerMedia. "People love it," Smith says.
"If they get a response from Gary, even if it's a smiley face, they're
like, "Oh my God, Gary tweeted back at me!'"
3. Focus on a specific niche.
On social media, you can either be a generalist --
producing and curating a hodge-podge of content across many different
disciplines -- or you can choose to specialize in one or a few areas.
Specialists tend to bend more ears than generalists, says Smith. "Social
media is extremely noisy. You've got to be able to stand out," she says,
and the best way to do this is to own a particular subject.
Jessica
Northey, founder of Tucson, Ariz.-based social-media marketing boutique Finger
Candy Media, "owns" country music, says Smith. Northey hosts a live
weekly Twitter
chat and Google+ "twangout" for country-music fans. This
year, Forbes ranked
Northey at No. 3 on its list of the Top 50 Social Media Power Influencers. She
has more than half a million followers on Twitter and more than 700,000 on
Google+. "In my travels, if I came across anyone in the country-music
arena, Jessica would be my choice" of someone to connect them with, Smith
says.
4. Use social media to build your business, and vice versa.
For an
entrepreneur, time spent on social media might seem like a distraction from the
more important tasks central to running a business. Because it's so
time-intensive, you should back up your thought leadership on social media with
a real profit-making enterprise. Chris Brogan, founder and chief executive of Human
Business Works, a business-training company in Portland, Maine, is one example,
says Smith. "He walks his talk. He speaks all over the world, and he
consults with a lot of companies on social media."
In
other words, Brogan demonstrates his expertise in blog posts, uses social
platforms to broadcast those posts and then uses the resulting visibility to
market himself for speaking gigs, coaching sessions and more. These, in turn,
increase his social media following. And it doesn't hurt that he was able to
carve out a place for himself by being an early adopter of social platforms,
Smith says.
5. Embrace each social network's unique culture.
Each social
network has a "unique culture," says Smith, and the best users
embrace it rather than sharing identical content across platforms. Take Cory
Booker, the mayor of Newark, N.J. He relies mainly on Twitter, where he has
more than 1.2 million followers, and Facebook, and uses each platform in a way
that takes advantage of its native capabilities.
"On
Twitter, I see him retweeting people, I see him thanking people and engaging
with them," Smith says. She also notes that Booker makes use of hashtags,
a popular way of marking your tweets for a specific purpose or larger
conversation.
On
Facebook, by contrast, Booker posts less frequently. "You don't want to
bombard people on Facebook," says Smith. He finds more elaborate ways to
involve his community in his activities. For instance, he uploads albums of
photos from various events where he has spoken.
Some
power users maintain a presence on multiple networks, Smith says, but for most
people two are enough. "Really you want to have Facebook and one other
[platform] that you're active on," she says.
