Hangout on Air organised by Stone Temple Consulting and special guest Rebekah Radice.
The best parts:
Some basic principles for growing your social following are the same across networks. Understanding what these are, and then understanding the differences between each one can make things go much faster for you.
+Ben Fisher It is always a gamble to get heavily invested in a new network. You are spending you personal/professional equity and potentially losing out on opportunities. I think it all comes down to your strategy.
+Mark Traphagen I would say early adoption is important. If you are responsible for advising others on social media. You have to at least be aware of what is up and coming.
+Scott Scowcroft There’s no better way to expand one’s service area than to go online. Especially for a solopreneurs, quality trumps quantity in terms of followers every time.
+Tim Longwell Social Media is not just about making money but making connections. To repeat a often stated phrase: “People buy from people (businesses) they like.” The benefit of SM is that one can become that ‘someone people like.’
+Kristin Drysdale The hardest thing for me is to limit my responses with new people who have legitimate questions. I want to help everyone that I can. But there’s just not time enough in the day (or night). How do you choose the people that you decide to give your teaching time to?
+Gina Fiedel Seems helpful to always be on the lookout, remaining open to extending your awareness of what’s going on around us. I can tend to be shy jumping in where I’m not known, but we can also tiptoe in gently and get to know new people. I’ve been reminding myself to do a little of that almost everyday and it’s been very fruitful.
+Bitingedge Elevating others is always a win-win
+Carmen Rojas *Helpful is the new viral!* (Love this statement. As I said earlier it reminds me so much of +David Amerland and +Ana Hoffman)
+Georg Buech It´s basic to find the network where your audience is.
+Amelia Hoskins Everyone has paintings on their walls – anyone is a customer
+Kristin Drysdale Communities are the heart of Google Plus.
And some of the best answers:
+Omi Sido Is it all about the money when participating in a social network?
+Eric Enge It doesn’t actually have to be only about the money. You can have other reasons for engaging in social media. But even then you probably gonna have some purpose.
The purpose might be to network or to meet somebody in particular to meet some certain type of people. Maybe you are a music lover and you wanna share your passion for music. Even in those situations it’s not just about building a large following. You really want to be able to focus on what you do to meet your goals.
It isn’t necessarily just about the money, but there still should be a purpose to it. Even if it’s just serendipity and you just want to learn and discover new things. I think that’s a great way to think about things too. There could be people who want to do that with social media. You still want to use your time efficiently in my opinion and it isn’t necessarily just about a large following, because you want to have conversations with people that you value.
+Omi Sido How to keep branding consistent across all platforms while growing our presence there? Do we have to be consistent?
+Mark Traphagen Think about being a brand. And especially on social media where so many of us are doing it as ourselves. Recently we started, Stone Temple Consulting started, a new community on Google plus the “Thought Leadership & Personal Branding” community, because Eric and I certainly know the power, we know that Rebecca knows it, of the personal brand.
If you can get out there you are representing your business as a real person. Become an expert, become known. You are sharing with people all those things that reflect back on your business. People at the end of the day want to do business with people. So having said that you need to think about it as building a brand. And what is a real brand do? You have a consistent look and feel. Use the same basic profile background on different social media networks. Same colour scheme, same logo, whatever you do for yourself on that. Try to go by the same name everywhere.
Do just basics things that a brand does, because you want to be reinforcing everywhere to the people that see you that you are the same person. You want to get every opportunity to get into their mind. But there is a little more to it than that. You will be on those basic things of the look and feel of your personal brand and they have to be consistent with your message. The things that you are talking about, the things that you emphasise, how you talk about them so whenever people encounter you they get to know like “he is the guy…she is the girl” you want to talk to and go to about this or that.
So there is a lot more we can say about that, but I think particularly if you are looking to build authoritative presence online for whatever- for business, for your cause whatever it may be, those kind of consistencies do become important. You do ultimately have to think like a brand thinks.
+Eric Enge Consistency is critical. Brands really talk about what is their message, what they stand for and what is their mission. These all sound like artificial, maybe not very important things if you don’t understand what they actually do for larger companies. They really help you get a sense of focus. Your audience may be a little different on different social platforms, so you might tailor it a little bit and that may lead you to be talking some different topics on one social platform versus another, but it really shouldn’t be fundamentally different. Should still be coming from the same same core area of expertise and I think that’s very important.
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