How to get started with Social Media – An easy guide to become a social star

Most of the people around me are passionate about social media, but not many of them are successful in building and maintaining an engaged audience. The most common reason is ‘lack of time’ or ‘don’t know how to start’.

Being an active social profile in the last 18 months has shown me that you have to be consistent and really define your content for an audience. The time issue can be addresses by technology.

In this post you will discover a series of tips I’ve collected on how to effectively build your social media audience, curate relevant content and publish it in an automated manner.

These tips are for LinkedIn and Twitter as I belive they are the ‘must have’ professional Social Media networks, but content should be amplified through any other social profiles you might have.

1. Create or update your Social Media Profiles.
   Your profile is your business card, so the first step is to create a highly appealing profile. In the slideshare below you will find some ideas on how to do it but keep in mind that the more professional it looks the better image you will have on your audience. Keep it simple and straight to the point!
2. Start publishing relevant content related to what you really know about (in an automated manner)
   I love Marketing & Design, so that is what I normally I read about, making it really easy for me to share some of the best content I found on the net with my networks. In the slideshare below, I explain how to setup a news aggregator, that will help you have all your news sites and blogs in one place. I use Feedly because is a multi-platform aggregator so I can keep all the blogs I follow across devices. Once you start finding great content to share, you can start automating your posts across your networks. I normally use Buffer or Hootsuite. I personally prefer Buffer for scheduling for two main reasons, firstly it has a great suggestions tab that will offer similar content based on your posts and secondly, because its integration across devices is brilliant. Buffer makes really easy to schedule content on your mobile or tablet in a couple of clicks.
3. Connect with influencers and their audiences.
   The easiest way to find your audience is to follow influencers within your area of interest and also start following their followers. You can use tools like Followerwonk, Influencer program or Klout. I personally follow back any one that follows me. My little secret is to follow those who follow back (you can tell by the balance between followers and people they follow). Once you have connected with relevant profiles, keep them engage by publishing content regularly and engaging in their conversations (mentions, favorite, comments…). These tips don’t apply to LinkedIn, where you only need to follow relevant contacts within your professional network.
4. Manage your audience (in an automated manner)
   There are apps that can help you manage your audience. For twitter for example, you can use JustUnfollow, Unfollowers or any similar app. These apps will help you to automatically follow back anyone that follows you, send automatic responses to those who just followed you, and unfollow anyone that is not following you back. You can automate some of these tasks to make it easy.
5. Post, listen & experiment
   One of the most critical tasks in keeping your social profile active is to post and listen relevant conversations. To Post, I’ve already mentioned before how to automate the process, but keep in mind that you need to be consistent, so try to automate at least 2-3 posts a day. Remember that most of social profiles walls get saturated really quickly, so you need to post several times a day to increase the exposure of your content. To listen, leverage the listening feature of Hootsuite, and setup some hashtags you want to follow closely so you can engage in those conversations, by mentioning, favoriting and sharing your top findings. Also, listen to your own profile, and engage with those who mention you in posts.My last advise is to experiment, don’t stop testing different times of the day to post, days, content formats, topics,  keywords, hashtags, and any other variable that can influence the success of your content. It’s a matter of you finding when and how your audience engage the most with your content.