Don’t rush head first into social media

Everyone wants to benefit from social media tools : blogs, social networks, social sharing, microblogging. All these social tools have become the instrument we all can use for free to market our selfs and our products or services. It’s a great step forward because now television, radio and newspapers are no longer in control. You can have your own video channel on YouTube or Viddler and you can publish anything you want on your blog and share it with the whole world.

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.

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