W2.1 Four Components to Managing a Social Media Presence

Four Components to Managing a Social Media Presence

There are four main components of successfully managing a social media presence. We are going to work on all these components this week using our Twitter accounts.

1. Extending reach 
2. Consistent participation 
3. Direct engagement 
4. Achievement of goals 

Let's look at each of these goals in more detail.

1. Extending Reach

Extending your reach is increasing the number of people who follow you and whom you follow. "Reach" is how many people you will touch when you share something. The greater your reach, the more valuable your opinion and sharing power is.

Work actively to cultivate your social network. Every week, look for new (or more valuable) people to follow and engage with. For example, if you want to be followed by game designers, you'll have to share articles, videos, and games of interest to this crowd.

2. Consistent Participation

Consistent participation for social media means sharing daily, often several times a day. You don't have to write clever posts or do interesting research to share. A common social media role is that of a curator - one who collects and shares resources about particular subjects.

Plan to share something interesting on Twitter at least once a day. As we learn more advanced tools, you'll learn how to auto-schedule tweets to appear at prime times in your Tweetstream, and this will make the task of sharing a bit easier.

3. Direct Engagement

Direct engagement is replying to questions and comments from followers, and engaging with the people you follow with questions and active conversation. Here are some easy ways to engage.

• Retweet a good resource or insight shared by someone else.
• Reply to someone with a question or insight.
• Ask a question of your followers (first wait till you have some)

4. Achievement of Goals

Achievement of Goals is setting social media goals and working actively to meet them. Your goal might be something like:

• Develop a learning network on the topic of digital library resources.
• Drive more traffic to my business.
• Build my personal brand to increase my marketability for a career in data mining.

To meet your goal, you'll need to make some short-term objectives. Objectives are only achievable if they are measurable, so set date limits and make sure that you'll know if you've been successful. We will eventually pick up some social media analytics tools that will help us to measure objectives. For now, stick with objectives you know how to measure. Here are a few examples:

• Get 100 new followers who work in game design by the month of March.
• Get 10 new followers from Brazil.
• Convert 5 social media engagements to new customers in the month of March.
• Book two speaking engagements through social media in the month of March.
• Get a post retweeted by 10 people. [this is actually pretty hard, BTW]

Set a social media goal for yourself and write a couple of objectives that will set you on the path to achieving this goal.