Adopting Social Media for New Users

I have been giving talks to networking groups in the area around Boston helping users get up to speed on the new Social Media technologies. I don't focus on the bleeding edge tools out there but the Elephants in the Room (pardon the cliche') Twitter, LinkedIn and Facebook - the job seekers triple threat. I'm finding discussions out there that align with my best practices for starting with social media - especially Twitter.


Tyson Goodridge recently offered some tips I agree with completely:

Step 1: Social Media is exactly that, it’s social. If you are the type of person who likes to surround yourself with lots of friends and colleagues, you’ll find social media easier to digest and learn.

Step 2: Yes, it’s public. If you aren’t comfortable sharing parts of your life besides your name, resume and the name of your company, this may not be for you, and that’s perfectly ok.

Step 3: It takes time: Rome wasn’t built in a day, so don’t try becoming friends with everyone online. You can’t fake social media. If you’re not the same person (or company) online as you are offline, people will call you out on it.



He has captured a great rule of thumb for personal use, there are also business application considerations. The initial consideration is identifying the appropriate balance of social forum building for your business. This includes considering manpower (don't have your one Marketing Manager sink all their time into Twitter, don't have an intern manage Twitter by posting randomly and sporadically), using the appropriate tools for your business Facebook could be a great marketing tool for a teen audience, but you need to keep your efforts diversified with traditional marketing when you're considering the Baby boomers who are abandoning Facebook. (See Switched's May 27th article)



Companies need to take a careful, methodical approach to building their social communities. Throwing the idea of using Twitter at a traditional marketer is not going to implement this as well someone who is passionate about using this technology and bringing it to the general population. Utilizing a careful, methodical and dedicated approach with a marketer skilled in the critical thought process attached to the roll-out of such technologies is the best practice when implementing social media marketing tools.