Unwritten Rule # 2 - How to write updates
Social media is all about communicating and how you write your updates will really depend why you are using the site in the first place.
For personal use
If you are using Facebook, Twitter, Bebo, MySpace etc to keep in touch with family and friends, then pretty much anything goes.
However, do keep in mind that more and more employers are using social media sites to check out prospective employees, so do be careful and try to avoid bad language or compromising photos!
For business
If you are using social media as a business tool, keep at least 80% of your posts about business issues.
Don't overtly sell (there will be more on this in part #3).
It is OK to mention some personal stuff so people get to know you, and your likes/dislikes,. However it is not a good idea to mention lurid details of parties, drunkenness and the like if you want to be known as a serious professional!
Likewise, keep your language clean (i.e don't swear).
Post updates regularly and often so your following get to know and expect to see items from you. It just isn't effective to update 100 things one day and then not touch sites for 6 months...
Leave suitable periods of time between updates and understand that followers on different sites will expect a different frequency of updates. Users on LinkedIn for example tend to expect up to 1 update a day. Twitter followers expect several a day although I always recommend to leave at least an hour between tweets, unless you are engaging in a conversation with someone.
Try not to abbreviate. You will lose followers if you use them too often and people outside your company/industry don't know what they mean.
Add links to things you mention and ALWAYS check links (to make sure they work and to check they are not spam) before forwarding posts.
When re-posting a quote or retweeting on Twitter, give credit to the person who tweeted the information first.
Next time: Unwritten Rule # 3 - Don't sell
No comments:
Post a Comment