If you go into a bar and try to sell SEO services how do you think people will react? If you go in a park and stop people that jog to present your product how do you think they’ll react? If you see a group of people sharing stories about their latest vacation and you interrupt them to promote your service/product how do you think they’ll react?

These kinds of actions based on interruption are the worst things you could do on any social network. You may think that since so many people use social networks for business it’s natural to expect a direct sell interruption. Wrong! Indeed many people use social networks for business but the word social makes all the difference.

The idea is to interact, build relations, let people know what you do by using your bio. When they go out to scout for new clients people are interacting first and present a business card later. When a person enters a company office or visits a business blog, there is the place where they expect to see direct sale.

You don’t have to tell people what you do. They can read your bio, visit your blog, see what you tweet or post on Facebook or what kind of videos you create. The only thing you have to do is think about how to establish a connection. How to gain their trust? How to build authority around you? How to brand yourself?

Then, why grown up people don’t realize this when going online. And I think that there is a place where this kind of things are most obvious: Twitter. It must be because of the way Twitter is build: because of the way you interact with your friends/followers. The possibility to interact almost in real-time with people around the globe makes us loose the sight of our goals sometimes. Now, I don’t want to get me wrong here: I’m not saying that you have to be a robot and tweet only technical stuff or your-niche-market-related-stuff. But I’m suggesting the fact that to much of side-talking or not-relevant-to-your-profile-tweeting can affect your presence on Twitter.

You are what you tweet. Why? Because it’s the first thing I’ll see when “we’ll meet”. Ask yourself the question: why I’m using Twitter and what do I hope to obtain by using it? If you have an answer then start thinking to what you tweet. If you have a goal and you think you can achieve it by using Twitter then what you tweet has a great importance.

What I’m saying here is for those that are using Twitter as a way to leverage their business or their brands or them as authority persons in some niche market or they just have a defined-goal, because for this people Twitter is a tool that is used to increase awareness and web exposure. Having a plan helps, but it’s not enough. You also have to implement it (stick with it), track results and then make adjustments.

This  is my advice for you: think about what you’re tweeting, especially if you plan to achieve some goals by using Twitter.

Let me know what you think about this? How much do you think you can afford to tweet small things and not lose the interest of your followers?

5 DO’s on Social Media

1. Be Human : I wrote an article on Social Media Success Depends on How Human You Are and the main idea is to look at your social media activity from a human stand of point. You have to realize that your friends or followers on these social websites are REAL Humans and you have to treat them just like you’d do in real life.
2. Add something to the community : This is something you should do most of your time on social websites. Adding value and posting useful links or just comments that offer some information will help establish yourself as someone who knows things about your niche and who is constantly searching for new ones.
3. Offer your help for free : Here is a simple concept that works on social media : the more you offer for free the more you’ll receive back. Offering free information will increase your reputation and people will start to trust you. Free means no money but if your help requires a little bit of work from you at that point you can ask for a testimonial and sometimes a simple client review could help you get more clients.
4. Post at least 3 times per week on your blog : This is essential. At the beginning this is enough to start building a community but as time goes by and your traffic increases and so do comments you’ll have to post daily. There are bloggers that have lots of traffic and post whenever they feel like but not all of us are that fortunate. In the end it’s up to you to realize what works best for your niche but consider a minimum of 3 times per week.
5. Always expand your social network : Your friends or your followers represent your power, your influence. But don’t think it’s enough to be friends : you need to interact as often as you can with as many as you can. Keeping your follower active can get you great benefits.

5 DON’Ts on Social Media

1. Don’t Spam : For example if you are on Twitter don’t post something like “thanks for the follow to @…. and @… …” every 5 minutes. Use direct message for that. Don’t start following thousands of people just to send them a message with your website. It will not get you any benefits and soon you’ll be out of the game.
2. Don’t pitch people : Understand that social media is like hanging after hours with your friends. If one of them decides to contact you for your services it’s fine but not the other way around. For example if you and 5 of your friends are drinking beer would you say something like this to them(at some point) : “I’m offering SEO services at affordable prices” ? No. Because it will sound stupid and inappropriate. But if you talk about it in a natural way and not trying to manipulate the discussion to that direction then all your friends will know what you do and if they need your services and trust you they’ll contact you for sure.
3. Don’t rush into social media : this is a recent article I wrote and the basic idea is to try and take things one at a time. The reason is because sometimes it can be overwhelming to blog every 2 days and comment on 30 blogs daily and interact with your social friends every day. It takes time to get used to this. You can check the article and also view the video version of it : Don’t rush head first into social media.
4. Don’t broadcast : This refers to someone that seems to not pay attention to what is happening around him. Usually he keeps posting his links and he’s not interacting with the community. Imagine that in a bar there is someone in a corner that is speaking alone. He doesn’t care what the others have to say – he just has some things to say and after that he gets up and leaves. I don’t have to tell you how that person would be seen as.
5. Don’t use automated messages or auto follow or accept everyones invitation : This kind of thing is usually used by spamers or broadcasters or pitchers. They are the ones that auto follow everybody and send automated questions or requests to visit their site. Don’t do that. Remember the human factor and answer carefully to each of your new followers or friends. Personalize the message by using their name or a remark to their blog or website and you’ll get much more benefits.

What can you add to this

I know that these are not the only things you should or shouldn’t do on social media in order to be successful so I’m inviting you to post your advices or suggestions in comments bellow. I would love to hear from you and see what you think.

First it can be overwhelming

Your main tool is the blog and after that comes all the websites that offer some kind of socialization and give you the possibility to market for free what you have to offer. Now, if you want to benefit from social media tools you need to calm down and first take a deep breath. It’s not as easy as you might think. Social media activity like blogging and constructing a network means that you need to be dedicated to this. You need to write regularly (minimum 3 times per week) and be present every day among your friends on the Internet. If you’ll try and start big time with a blog and few social accounts you may be facing extinction by the end of the first month. That is because writing every day, even if it is for your blog or some comment on a blog or some posts on Twitter, it can get you down if you’re not used to this. That is why you should take your time and build slowly.

Start slow and add accounts on different social sites as you gain experience

This advice comes from my own experience. At first I’ve created all these social media accounts and tried to develop strong networks on all these social sites, all at once, but it didn’t worked out. Soon I realized that if I’m not gonna try and focus at one thing at a time and learn how to use it I’m not gonna make it. This is how my adventure into social media started. So I’ve started to work on my blog, trying to develop good articles that people would like. And even thou I did write articles that were full on informations nobody was interested. At some point I realized that I was offering informations that everybody knew in a dull format. That was the moment when I started an account on Twitter and start reading what others were publishing. Articles by Michael Martine and Chris Brogan were among my first ones. I’ve start building a network on Twitter and make everything possible to offer something in return to the community. Looking for great articles to post, answering peoples questions, helping others. After that I’ve started another 2 accounts, one on Facebook and another on LinkedIn. The one on Facebook is still in an early state but the LinkedIn account has started to develop and now I’m receiving traffic both from Twitter and LinkedIn. Of course that after that followed Stumbleupon which is the process of developing. I’m far from saying that I have great benefits from my actions on social media websites but I’ve started to receive traffic from it and that what’s important. Just think of it : if each account will give me 100 visitors per day and I have 5 accounts just by that I’ll have 500 visitors a day.

The only way you’ll be able to benefit from that and receive traffic is by building slowly one network after another until it’s self sustained and you can go one and build another one. At some point the network will sustain itself and every post will get more and more visitors to your blog. You just need to work patiently on each social website.

So what say you

This is what I think is the best way to achieve success on any social website. And even if you are used to building networks it’s gonna be very hard to do many at once.

My advice is to build it slowly, one at a time until it reaches a certain maturity. Then you can go and build the next one but this will not mean that you can overlook the other networks. I would like to hear your opinion, how do you started and what tips you have for all the other readers.

Video for this post :

What are the things that might get in your way

1. After you post something on Twitter a few users stop following you : you ask yourself if you did something wrong or if you offend them or if you said a stupid thing. For example I decided to offer free SEO tips for beginners on Twitter (tagged #webseotips) and each time I offer one I lose one or two followers. When this happened for the first time I was very frustrated but then I realized that this is what I am and if there are some users that feel that SEO tips for beginners is to low for them to read then I respect that. The thing is you have to stick with your plan and if you made the right decisions in the beginning then you’ll win in the long term.

2. You receive a hash critique on a forum thread : something like : “You don’t know what are you talking about”. Don’t let this type of answer discourage you and remember : only a fool attacks in this manner. Someone that know much more then you will always help you realize the mistake you made and help you get on the right track without hurting your pride. Many times these hard answers are just to hurt you. Stay focused but analyze the statement and the one that said it. It might be true and then you must correct the error. Either way don’t let it affect you : nobody succeeded without failing. Trust in you and good things will start to happen.

3. Suddenly the traffic on your blog goes down : if your blog is just starting to develop you have be conscious that for a period of time your web traffic will vary. The more popular you become the more people will visit your blog. You’ll know when you’re on the right track when your web traffic will stop oscillating and start to constantly increase in volume. I know that having low traffic can be discouraging but one thing you could do is again to stick with your plan and just don’t look to your stats for a month. A great article on this you can find on problogger.net : Ten Tips for Stats Addicts

4. Your blog articles don’t receive comments : you are working hard to come up with ideas and interesting things. You write an article and every new one seems to be your best. You post it on your blog and …. No Comments. Don’t let it get you. Comments will come in time : Patience and Determination. Develop yourself as a brand. Offer something to others from your social networks, gain their trust and you’ll see how you’ll start receiving comments. It’s true that you’ll see articles with much less information then yours but placed on a trusted blog that will get a few dozen comments. This is life : money leads to more money. Even the simplest article on a trusted blog will get more comments then a brilliant one on a start up blog written by an unknown blogger. Keep going forward. Don’t let it touch you. If you don’t trust in what you can do no one will.

5. You are out of ideas : this happens if you don’t plan ahead. I, for example, plan the general themes that I’ll cover but never the titles or the more specific details. That is why I have a few Google Alerts set up. When you run out of ideas you’ll have something to be inspired. There are days when you’ll be hit from all sides and those are the toughest moments but again : stick with your plan.

When things go wrong always look forward

All the difficult moments that you’ll encounter from the moment you start your first blog to your moment of success are meant to tech you something and that is : you can’t succeed without failing first. Take any company you want : they all got doors slammed into their faces, kicks in the butt, refuses and critics. But those that succeeded were those that kept going forward. You think that all those great bloggers haven’t had their bad moments ? They did. And that is exactly what made them so big. That is why their blogs receive lots of comments and traffic. Because they kept going forward and they remained true to their plan.

Share what kicks you received and what made your success

I’m sure you all had your bad and good moments. I’m sure that your blogs were not that popular from day one. So please share your experience and help others to remain motivated and stick with their plan.

That is why you have to learn how to offer the image people might expect to see. I also made a video on this. It’s my first one so be gentle : I promise that it will get better. For the moment I’m still frozen in front of the camera but I’m learning.

I would also appreciate the comments and your opinions that could help me improve my videos.