Want Social Media Marketing Success? Be an Active Community Member!

Neal Schaffer: 0:04

Welcome to maximize your social actionable 10 minute advice on how your business can maximize your social media presence. Now, the host of maximize your social social media author, speaker, consultant, and founder of maximize social business, Neal Schaffer. This is Neal Schaffer. And welcome to another episode of maximize your social, you know, of the time I've spent in social media, I'm beginning to realize, as I experienced this across a number of social networks, that those who are most devoted to the community in which they're a member of will become the most successful and social. Let me explain this. I actually realized this because over the last month or so if you know me, and you've been watching my tweets, I've actually been sharing a lot of infographics. These are infographics that I've also posted on Pinterest. But I've decided to selectively and strategically post some of them to Twitter as well. Now, what's been really interesting is that I've tried to take the same approach to Pinterest that I do to other networks where I am active on, it's impossible unless you have a staff to be equally active or deeply active on all social networks, you have to pick your poison, as they say, Now for me, it's always been Twitter. And the reason is simple. My main website or my main blog is maximize social business, which I'm the founder and editor in chief of and outside of organic search, the biggest driver of referral traffic, and I should say outside of people directly typing in maximize social business.com has been Twitter, it's been Twitter for a while there are days where a Facebook or LinkedIn, even Google Plus comes to the top, but it's been Twitter. And that's probably one of the reasons and maybe because it's been Twitter, or maybe I should say, because I have devoted so much time to Twitter into engaging others and responding to others and sharing a lot of great content, whether it comes from me or from others, and thanking people. I think that's probably a result of that. But I've been active on Twitter since well, I first joined Twitter, in November of 2008. I'd say I got pretty active on Twitter, after I finished the rough draft of window networking, understanding, leveraging and maximizing LinkedIn in the spring of 2009. I really haven't looked back since then. And probably because of all the time I've spent or what have you. That is one of the reasons, although there are other reasons why I seem to get a lot of traffic from Twitter. And that's really one of the ways in which I value the ROI, or I, you know, measure the ROI of what I do in social media definitely is website traffic generation. So that's sort of one of them. Now, my whole Pinterest, I want to experiment. But I've always been really intrigued by Pinterest have always known that it drives a lot of traffic to those who do it well. And to be honest with you, I was never really doing or being active in Pinterest on a consistent basis. So I decided about a month ago that I was going to spend more time being more active on Pinterest. And what I realized is, you know, just like there's a community on Twitter that will click on links that are related to social media. There is also a similar community on Pinterest as there is on LinkedIn or as in Google Plus, or what have you, that community may be a little bit smaller. But if you think about it, you know the same business people that are on Twitter, on LinkedIn, there's a lot of them that are on Pinterest. And once you understand the way that Pinterest works, and how viral it can be and how many repins there are, you begin to see how it's very easy for things that you post to appear very, very prominently on the news feeds of a lot of people and the news feeds on Pinterest only show a few on mobile, it only shows two at a time on top, on the desktop editions, four or five or so. So with that in mind, I devoted time now devoting time to a community means following others that might be relevant, whether it's following people or following specific boards. It means experimenting with community boards, which in all honesty, I really had never experimented with inviting others to my boards, as well as requesting to join other boards. It also means going back and looking at your followers and you know, following them back it also means pinning relevant content, creating pinnable images for your website and sharing other people's content. Right. So really, as a result of that, and I do believe as a result of really authentically being more active in the community and responding to comments on pins, which I don't know if everybody's doing that and really, you know, reaching out to people and freely sharing other people's pins when it makes sense to and creating more boards that makes sense in a strategic way that are aligned with what I do and maximize social business. It's been fascinating to see just over the last few weeks that quickly Pinterest has emerged as a prominent number to refer a social traffic to maximize social business outside of Twitter. And in some days, it's even number one, and it really hasn't taken a long time. Now that being said, I've been on Pinterest for a while, probably joined Pinterest maybe two years ago, I've always had my boards up there. I've always tried to participate. But I just didn't have you know what I call it the daily routine. The workflow really wasn't part of it. Well, now it is. And there's a lot of tools that you can use to help make it easier to analyze. I've included an infographic as part of my weekly maximize social business newsletter, which I hope a lot of you are reading and at least receiving, and I even for the first time created a really, really nice maximize social business infographic on a recent post by Julia Campbell on 12 free and low cost tools to create great looking Pinterest graphics. And once you start to create the infographic, and this is what really fuels the social media related shares or any shares obviously, it's either a photo or infographic. What's amazing with the infographic and this is a slightly divergent topic. But once you have an infographic, it can be shared everywhere. And it's about getting brand recognition by putting your name on the bottom, in this case, putting Julia Campbell's name, her website URL and then in the bottom, you know, this infographic brought to you by maximize social business. But just seeing that once you do that, the beauty about infographics is not only do people love to read them and share them, but you get access to one of the most influential crowds in social media, which are content creators. A lot of content creators realize that by embedding infographics in their sites, it attracts a lot of people. So just do the art of creating an infographic and submitting it to the right places and getting enough scale on Pinterest and being able to promote it on a few different boards at a few different times over the course of a few days. You're just exposing your content to a great number of people in a very, very viral way. And indeed the blog post they attach the infographic to and that blog post was published a few weeks earlier than I created the infographic for truly over the last few days went viral for a number of reasons. So that was my Pinterest experiment. And I talked about infographics. And it's funny because just today one of the few newsletters I actually subscribe to and read on a weekly or monthly basis is the MAS mo Z newsletter. They create a monthly top 10 posts of they curate content. And in fact that newsletter was sort of influenced the way that I re engineered the maximize social business newsletter, which is 50% curated content 50% content from maximize social business. One of the articles they introduced me to was how this gentleman got 1 million views for his SlideShare presentation. And you know what, it's sort of the same concepts, the same philosophy of being active in the community, right? That SlideShare has its own community, following others, making it part of your daily routine to spend time there, reading other presentations, following liking, commenting, what have you, those that truly engage, I believe, at the end of the day, come out on top, and you can engage as a business to those businesses and engage come out on top as well. So that's really my sort of nuggets of wisdom that I wanted to share with you today. It's all about really deeply embedded in for lack of a better word yourself in the community of that network and truly engaging and sharing liberally, with others and using or I should say, creating a community platform that you can leverage to help others that you respect with as well. I think the ultimate realization of that is the Pinterest Community Board, which may be the topic of a completely separate podcast in the future. But anyway, if you have any questions about anything, I covered a few different facets of Pinterest infographic save and talk about SlideShare hear about, you know, community of social networks. This is one of my more complex podcasts. I hope it all made sense to you. If there's anything you wanted to ask that I covered in this podcast, please feel free to reach out to me. And obviously, I'm sort of like a DJ always taking songs on requests. So if there's something you want me to talk about, please do reach out to me, trying to keep it simple. It's sweet under 10 minutes. I hope you enjoyed this edition of maximize your social. We'll talk to you again next week. Wherever you are on the world. Make it a great social Day. Bye Bye, everybody. Thanks for listening to maximize your social. We appreciate your iTunes subscriptions, ratings and comments. If you would like to appear on this show or recommend content, please contact Neal Schaffer at Neal at maximize your social.com make it a social day.