Getting the most out of Social Media

Guy Kawasaki and Peg Fitzpatrick's book "The Art of Social Media" gives readers useful tips for making the most out of your social media profiles. Some of the topics in the book seem fairly obvious. An example of this is when they discuss how to get more followers and one of the tips is to share good content. It seems fairly obvious that to get more followers you share good content, but to some spewing out lots of content may seem like a better way to get more followers, the more information that is out there for people to read then there will be more people that will find it. 

Once you have more followers you may be interested in holding a social event on social media. As the authors mention multiple times throughout the book using a short and simple hashtag for your event is the best way to go. With a short hashtag people will be more likely to remember it and it will be much easier to search for the hashtag. For your event use that hashtag for everything, that way you can leave a trail of all of the things that happened during the event so that people who are searching for it can see everything that has happened. The authors also point out that during the event someone should be designated to run the social media outlets. If everyone at the event is supposed to help run social media it is likely that it will be neglected because there are many other things that will be pulling the staff in all different directions. 

If you are not holding an event in person you can still do it online, the authors give tips on how to use Google+ and the hangouts app to stream a meeting on air. There are some important notes for streaming anything on the internet where the visual focus is on you speaking. The equipment that you use will have a big effect on your presentation. It doesn't matter if what you have to talk about is extremely interesting, people will not want to watch your stream if it looks and sounds terrible. I found this tip interesting while I was reading the book and that is to wear solid colors, wearing stripes can cause unwanted visual effects. Finally some good advice for any presentation is to rehearse before you go on air.