Social Media Tips 101: Say Something

I am spending most of my time on social media, which include my blogs, Facebook, Twitter, Google+, Linkedin, and other social networking sites where I promote my brand and also hang out with my friends online. There, I observe a bunch of Internet marketers, who are used to share and promote links to their websites, blogs and other content without telling or writing anything. There are reasons why they don’t write anything. It can be that they are just too lazy to do that or it’s just part of their strategy.

As an online and social media marketer myself, I admit that I had also times where I just share a link on my Facebook Timeline without even introducing what it is. These are the times, when I had virtually no time to write a good description for that particular link or story. But this practice doesn’t give favorable results. The story you share doesn’t usually get the attention it deserves.

If you are promoting something, like for example your latest blog post, you have to say something that will get the attention of your audience. It takes time and effort, but if you will escape that, you might end up wasting your time and effort in sharing your link or story.

Even social networking sites instruct us to write something or say something on what we share to our audience. Check out the image below. It shows that when you are trying to share a link or a story on Facebook, Facebook encourages you to write something.

When it comes to Twitter, we should utilize the 140 characters it gives us to promote and share our links. We can add relevant hashtags on our tweets and retweets to categorize them and help them show more easily on Twitter search. Check out the screenshot of my retweet for my latest blog post below. It still has 70 characters to fill in. It did not utilize the 140 characters yet. Therefore, I can still add relevant hashtags on it and even add some personal phrase like “may latest post” to encourage my followers to take a look on it. There are social media marketers, especially those who use automatic scripts, who just share links and titles on their tweets. This kind of tweets only looks spammy, and may not encourage people to check them out. That is why don’t just share a link or title on your tweet, but also write something personal or special about it.

And when it comes to Google+, the principle is the same – we have to fill in the blank to leverage this social medium. We should learn how to introduce what we are sharing to our friends, connection or audience. In Google+, we can also use hashtags to organize our posts and make them easily discover by people. As you see in the image below, it says “share what’s new”. Hence, don’t just put a link there and share it to your circle of friends, but write and say something to give them an idea what’s new in that post.

Social media is not all about using the power of technology, but it is more importantly about utilizing the human side in us. It is not about automation, but it is about creating lasting relationship with other people. Therefore, don’t just share a link, post or story without even telling something interesting about it. But talk and interact like a human who enthusiastically bring good news to his or her friends online. Let’s us do this not only on Facebook, Twitter or Google+, but also in other places across the social media world. Remember that a story from a real friend is the one that usually gets our attention.

Please stay tuned for more social media tips we will publish to guide us in achieving our success online.