4 Social media tips that Rock by @franswaa

Following is a guest post from a dear friend, @franswaa who writes for NetWit’s Think Tank:

__________________

To be honest I’m not totally sure if I’ve rocked social media or if social media has rocked me. Funny thing is I got into social media by complete chance. I dabbled a bit personally with Facebook, but nothing major. Then, one day I was asked to speak at a conference about “Social Networking for Fundraising & Events” … from there the story begins. I work in the nonprofit space so it’s not a complete reach, but if I was going get up in front of people as “the expert” and speak about social media I had to dig in, learn how it applied to nonprofits in the fundraising/events space and make sure I could teach others. So what did I do you ask? How did I figure out how to use social media? Or maybe you want to know how you can get started?

Here are 5 starter tips from my journey.

1) Jump in

I got busy digging through the internet for information about social media. I was already using Facebook so I quickly got accounts on  Twitter,  FriendFeed, StumbleUpon and  Delicious. These were the sites I was going to focus on using. My initial reason for choosing these sites was because they covered the spectrum of social media – micro-blogging, life-streaming, social bookmarking and social sharing.

I also got busy reading blogs like never before. In order to make this more efficient when I found a blog that was useful to me I subscribed vie RSS. I should also mention that this is when I started using RSS in a meaningful way. I used Google Reader and spent time daily mining for information that would help me better understand and use social media. Using RSS is a great way to save time. If you don’t already make use of this technology please start now. Check out Feedly once you get Google reader going. It’s a GREAT addition.

Here are a few resources to keep you learning:

Google Reader for beginners by Google

RSS In Plain English by Common Craft

How To Get Started In Social Media by Shana Albert

40 Key Elements to Getting Started In Social Media by Louis Gray

If I Started Today by Chris Brogan

2) Look for people who know what they are doing

Next I looked for people who seemed to know how to use social media and what was going on in that world – I found Chris Brogan (go figure!) and others. I’ve found that when you’re trying to learn something new it’s best to learn from folks who are already “Rockin’ it”. Twitter was the best place to find people that fit the profile I was looking for so I spent some good time watching and learning how to interact from folks there. Twitter was (and still is) also a great place to find resources because people are always sharing quality content there.

Here’s a quick list of social media A-list’ers to get you started – 200 of them!

3) Look harder to find people that are focused on your business or niche

Then I focused more on the niche I was interested in by finding people in the nonprofit world who were already using social media effectively and were talking about things I wanted to know more about – Specifically nonprofits, fundraising and events. You’d be surprised how many people are out there already. I found Beth Kanter, this strange guy named John Haydon (wink), Marc Pitman, Maddie Grant and her buddy Lindy Dreyer, NPtech, Danny Brown, Stacy Monk, Wendy Harman, Chad Norman and Star Focus to name a few. These folks helped me take it to the next level.

How do I find people you ask? Here are few quick ways:

Blogosphere: Google blog search, Technorati
Twitter: Twitter search,  WeFollow, Twellow, MrTweet

4) Watch and listen

As I mentioned earlier I found that it was (and still is) critical to learn social media listening skills. Point number two and three above would not be possible without listening. Listening is a bit of watching what others are doing and listening to what people are talking about. Watch what others are doing in order to see what is effective and what isn’t. Listen for people talking about you, your business, your customers and anything else relevant to why you are using social media. Use this information to make good decisions, come up with a strategy and engage in conversations where you’re relevant. Or use it to provide services like Dell or Support like Zappos or Comcast. Get the point? If you listen you can figure out how to be effective. If you don’t you’ll be treated as a spammer!

A few resources to keep you going:

How to Listen for Opportunities on Twitter by Chris Brogan

Don’t Dump, Learn to Listen by Me

We are media: Listening by Beth Kanter

5 Tools I user for Listening by Chris Brogan

One thing we should all remember while we’re learning to listen online is to be an “active listener” – Comment on blogs where you are being talked about. Talk with people on Twitter. Share useful resources on Delicious or StumbleUpon.

Rock It!

The above 4 tips are lessons learned as I’ve gone on learning about and using social media. As you start your journey you’ll need to figure out what works for your. You purpose, business, area of interest or overall need will be different than mine.

One thing you can’t forget to do is set a goal or multiple goals so you know what success looks like. If you don’t do this, you’ll have no idea if you are achieving the results you want.

My initial goals:

1. Spend time listening, watching, learning, researching and using various social media tools in order to figure out which ones would help us the most before we launched a new blog.
2. Learn what topics were relevant to my industry/niche so we could ensure our blog was coving the right things
3. Gain a solid Twitter following so I could use that network to build our blog
4. Get others within my organization to start using Twitter
5. Ensure our blog was set up using tools that would give us useful analytics/stats in order to help us continue to learn and grow

Based on having some goals and objectives, the launch of our new blog (NetWits Think Tank) has been much more successful. Here are a few metrics that are simple to show and will hopefully give you some things to think about.

1. Within the first 2 and a half months of launching our blog we’ve had 8,500 visits, 5,500 unique visits and 18,500 pageviews
2. We’ve got 7 blog contributors actively using Twitter (and many others within the company)
3. We’ve had posts get over 35 RT’s on Twitter (RT = ReTweet … which is kind of like having friends spread good reviews by word of mouth)
4. We’ve had posts get over 700 unique page views
5. We’ve got posts that carry great conversation with upwards of 20 comments on them

What’s my biggest tip for a beginner?

Be social! Remember its “Social” media!

What’s my second biggest tip for a novice? Learn. The social web as we know it now gives each of us an incredible opportunity to easily learn more than ever before. There are a lot of great people out there using social media effectively. Watch them. Learn from them.

What will help you be successful quickly? It depends on what you are trying to accomplish. Once you figure it out come share it with us because everyone wants to know.

I know a lot of you out there have tips related to these. Please share your thoughts in the comments. Make this post more useful to the readers here.