As you become more comfortable with social media, you may want to become an influencer. Much like becoming a subject matter expert, becoming an influencer on social media can impact your business.
Where should you participate?
There are so many platforms, how do you determine where to become actively involved. You need to go back to the beginning. Where are the influencers in your business? Have you engaged them and shared your own information with them? One way to become engaged on Twitter is to participate in a “chat” on your topic of choice.
A chat enables you to share your opinions and experiences with others that have similar interests. Participating in a Twitter Chat also helps you prepare to lead your own chat. As you become more comfortable with a chat, you will become more involved. You also want to become familiar with tools that can help you participate, and possibly lead, a chat.
TweetGrid
A Twitter search dashboard that enables you to search up to 9 different topics in real-time. As new tweets are created, they are automatically updated in the grid without you having to refresh the page.
Where can you gain credibility?
Your credibility will usually grow as your visibility grows, as long as you are authentic in your social media activity. Identifying where your influencers participate, as well as where your community is will help to determine your platform(s). As Twitter, Facebook and LinkedIn continue to hold steady as the top 3 most popular social media platforms, Pinterest and Google+ are quickly gaining traction.
Google+ reached 50 million users in 3 months compared to Twitter, Facebook and LinkedIn. And as discussion about Google+ grows, it appears that it is an important place for businesses to participate. On Google+ you can search for conversations, on Facebook your search will result in pages or people. As with its search engine, Google+ places content search first rather than friends and/or pages. The platform also suggests people who are interested in that topic to include in your circles.
How do you share information?
Beyond social media platforms, you should share content. As discussed earlier, you can create content and/or curate content. Either way, you attain a level of subject matter expert because you create it, or know where to find it. Use your participation on social media to gain insight into what your community is interested in. Take notes and create a calendar of ideas. Leave space for spontaneity. Listen to what people say, but also listen for what they are asking. Sometimes the questions go unspoken, but present the biggest opportunity.
How do you know if anyone’s interested?
Offer your community an opportunity to participate in the conversation. On your website you should offer share buttons to share the content on other platforms, and the ability to comment on what they have read. And as they comment, you should respond to keep the engagement moving forward. You can also use StatCounter to monitor actual human activity on your website in real-time.
Statcounter
simple summary statistics for all your pageloads, unique, returning and first-time visitors, and highly detailed analysis of a smaller number of your latest pageloads.