Social Media is Social
Why do you use social media?
If your answer is anything other than to be “sociable” you may be doing it wrong. Trying to sell products or increase traffic to your blog are not the only reasons to be on Twitter or Facebook.
On CookEatShare there is a group called “Twitter Cooks”, the idea being to make it easier to follow your friends on Twitter. It’s a great idea, finding people to follow can be hard – it’s hard to be sociable with “celebrities”. The first post was a “Hi, my name is @X”. However the second post was along the lines of “I’m @Y. What tools do you use to you promote your blog on twitter?”.
I think this is looking at it the wrong way, and not because the guy was trying to promote his blog. Sure we all want to promote our blogs, we think our content is useful of course we want people to see it. It was because of the tools.
What tools do you need for Twitter? A web browser and a login. As far as I can see that’s all you need to promote anything on twitter.
The post went on to outline the “strategy” he was using already – scheduled daily tweets to both Twitter and Facebook.
Sending auto generated messages out day after day in order to get people to buy products or click links, could be seen as spam.
Social media is about being social, trying to fake it will mean that people don’t follow you in the first place, or they ignore most of your tweets.
You need to interact, and show that you are a person, respond to tweets in your feed, ask questions, get conversations going.
Talk about your successes and failures, I like the failures the most. You can learn so much more from a failure than from a perfect experience and it’s always good to laugh 
Talk about stuff unrelated to your blog. The idea is to be a person that people like. Then people will want to follow you, they will trust you and will want to follow links that you tweet.
So my strategy, when I have time, is to be a person and use Twitter to talk about my life, sure I automate links to my brand spanking new posts, but that’s the only automation I do.
Why do you use Twitter or Facebook? Or if you don’t why not?
You can follow me on Twitter I’m @CoffeeMuffins.
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August 27th, 2010 at 5:00 am
I’ve been sharing my life mostly on facebook, youtube, and blog and I actually find it quite rewarding. As a consequence, business and traffic is slowly creeping up. People can spot authenticity and they are intrigued. I have pretty much paused most activity on twitter because I am sick of the spam. In other words… I totally agree!
Jon Ham … Zion National Park – The Subway Hike – Jon and Cari Go From the Bottom Up
August 27th, 2010 at 8:29 am
Hi Jon, nice to hear from you. I find what you said about using facebook and youtube interesting, as I hadn’t really thought about using them. While I am not sure I’m quite ready to put videos up, trying facebook could be worthwhile! Thanks
September 1st, 2010 at 11:27 pm
Hi
I’ve also been thinking about joining Facebook (finally!), not a personal account but one for Hungry Jenny – but not for the purpose of just trying to ‘promote’ my blog, but just to keep the interactions and stuff food related and to find new foodie friends etc.
I use Twitter to find interesting food people to follow and to find new blogs to read. I have a feed set up to automatically tweet when I have a new post but I do try to tweet regularly too. I find it quite hard though because I’m not always online so there are periods where I’m just logging on to do a blog post and not finding time to do more ‘social’ things online if that makes sense.
Hungry Jenny x
Hungry Jenny … The Un-Chocolate Un-Marbled Orange Cake
September 4th, 2010 at 11:58 am
I agree anyone who is ignoring the social bit in social media is getting it wrong. Its fine to automate some stuff e.g. new blog posts but you have to interact as well to make the most of it. And the different media are good for different things. Even the big brands who get it right are interacting with people not just churning stuff out. Perhaps from a big news service low interaction is fine but from bloggers and small or medium businesses the best results are by interacting. And like any kind of socialising/networking it takes time. But its a great way to talk to people with similar interests, and if you are a business and you do it right you can win work through it too.
Good post
goodshoeday … Competition time