Engage & Connect

So now you have all thje major Social Networks in your portfolio…Twitter, Facebook & LinkedIN, now what?

The biggest common mistake out there is when people sign up for Social Media and are not active on there or better yet develop a stasis lock and waits for something to happen.  This isn’t dating and in which dating rules apply you have to make sure the time is right before you make the first move.

There is no waiting for the perfect time to make the first move, anytime is a good time to make the first move.

Why Make The First Move?

The worst thing you can do is just have your Social Media profiles just sitting idle, collecting dust.  It will be a waste of time and conform to the myth that Social Media is a waste of time.

• Be Proactive

Don’t be afraid of rejection or feeling scared to engage people.  Quite often or not you will find most of the time that people on Social Media networks are generally receptive and engaging when you first contact them

Contacting people first opens up a Social Engagement and shows the recipient that you are providing value on your Social Media profile and validating that your not some spammer or non-active user.  What people hate the most are Spammers and users who just sign up for Social Media profiles but don’t provide value or any updates.  It’s like buying a Nintendo Wii because everyone is buying one but just showcasing it to the world without actually opening the box and playing with the system.

How To Maske The First Move?

Facebook / LinkedIN

• Join groups that fit your interests and niche – If you like surfing, then search for Surfing groups.  Find groups that can benefit you by networking and sharing the same interests.  An added bonus when joining groups, you will make new friends and it’s ok to friend request people in the same group as long as you indicate that in your message.

• Comment on your friends status updates often – Don’t wait for them to comment on yours, you make the 1st move.

• Friend new people – Proactively try to find new people to friend whether it be the ones Facebook suggest, Groups or manually searching.  More exposure the better and you can’t go wrong with a large network especially now since Facebook allows you to customize & label your feed stories so it won’t be too much noise in your streams.

• Facebook chat – Try often to just Instant Message someone on Facebook just by saying hi, this will open up conversations.

• Suggest a friend

• Wish Happy Birthdays

• Become humble and ask questions – Ask questions often, often we see self indulged narcisstic marketeers that get no respect because they are all about them them them and not enough of letting other people take charge in conversations.

• Join Q&A discussion threads – This tactic gets quite often overlooked but it’s so easy to do, especially in LinkedIN.  Find Question & Answer boards and actively answer questions or ask questions on here.  The point is to engage the community so they can either respect your authoritative responses or help you out and both ultimately providing you with meaningful relationship building.

Twitter

• Follow new people – Find Twitter directories like Twellow or Wefollow and again follow your niche and community, by reaching out to follow them first you can start building your follow empire and community.  Waiting for people to follow you will be the long and hard route so why not take the proactive approach.

• Ask open ended questions – Again often on Twitter people who don’t ask questions arent really engaging correctly and will have a hard time building quality relationships.  Try asking open ended questions and see how the responses are and more than likely great conversations will come about.

• Engage Twitter comments with full replys Just because you reply does not mean your actively engaging in quality manners.  Don’t be lazy and show some decency by replying back with full engaging replys so hopefully you can build quality relationships down the road.

• Retweet The art of retweeting is just to acknowledge the influence and authority of your friends on Twitter.  They will highly appreciate your Retweet

• Follow Fridays It may be a fad but theres a reason behind this madness, its to promote your friends and also become the influencer to your current followers,  The more quality people you recommend the more influence you gain.

• Recommend Friends Start promoting your friends and recommending ones that you admire, chances are the recipients will greatly appreciate that since you are adding value to them.

So like AT&T’s old slogan used to be “Reach out and touch someone”

Post from: Social Media Vision

This isn’t a date – Make the 1st move in Social Media

Don’t Be Corrupted By Social Media Slang

What is Social Media Slang?  Slang are informal words and language not associated with the standard/common language we use in society.

Social Media Slang is picked up mainly from communicating in Social Media.  When communicating within Social Networks like Facebook and Twitter, you are often presented a short amount of space to relay information to convey to the other user involved.

Shortcuts, Abbreviations and L337 Speak are often concocted from the quick and short communication avenues.

Early Social Media Slang

Before Twitter and Facebook wall posts and status updates there was AOL and chat rooms with instant messaging.

AOL is known for the grand daddy of Internet slang creation and was the start of the early trendsetter of rapid short communication shortcuts. L33t Speak and Acronyms were heavily used back in the AOL days.  

L337 Speak had AOL users writing words like:

/\/\ 0 n3 Y = Money

MiCrOsoFt = Microsoft

4 replaces A, 3 replaces E, 7 replaces T 1 replaces L, and $ replaces S, 13 replaces B are just a few more examples.  L337 speak is still widely used in Video Games still.

Acronyms or the “Text Talk” is very popular still too.  Some examples are below

U = You  2 = Too  TTYL = Talk to you later  LOL = Laughing out loud 4 = For R = Are O= OH

Corruption of the English Language

With chat rooms and instant messaging slowing losing traffic and more and more users are Texting and using Social Networks now to communicate, Internet Slang now has transformed to Social Media Slang.

These are English Teacher’s worst nightmares.  These shortcut slang talk can corrupt your Business and Education.

Just because its easy to do to just “slang talk” or “text talk”, try to still practice good communication and not fall victim of Social Media Slang.  You don’t want to write a proposal for a client that has this below:

“Hello wut do u want 2 do today? plz let me know, k, ttyl”

This of course is very unprofessional and can be detrimental to your etiquette.  Although this seems like commons sense more and more professionals are caught with “Social Media Slang”

Just like with your personal profiles, keep your online etiquette very professional aswell and don’t fall to the corruption of shortcuts and slang.

Post from: Social Media Vision

Don’t Be Corrupted By Social Media Slang