Get Social

I’ve been pretty impressed, as I started the week with 135 LinkedIn connections and sit before you on a Friday evening with 220. I finally held my breath as I read through the list of 700+ people from my Outlook contacts and GMail address book. After removing awkward first dates, a workplace stalker, and difficult former clients, I sent invites to the remaining contacts. Each time an email comes through confirming how I’m now networked to someone I vaguely remember interacting with in some way (or not), I’m impressed with the near blind willingness to accept.

The process of “friending” on Facebook is super personal, and there’s that awkward moment early in a workplace relationship when you need to evaluate if you should befriend someone. On Twitter, I’m moderately selective, and don’t automatically follow back new followers. On Yelp, I accept nearly all requests, but occasionally turn down users clearly building huge friend lists who otherwise have no content to add to the site.

Don’t get me wrong, I really appreciate these people accepting my invites as I beef up my social networking profile and brand myself more professionally online. And some of them have really cool jobs; I’m now connected to a woman who I approached in a sales role and runs Miami Culinary Tours and producers at National Geographic who must reside in my work email list. I’m just kind of digging how all I did was ask, and since LinkedIn is legit (the IPO this week probably didn’t hurt), I’ve added nearly 100 people to my growing professional network.

Speaking of asking, The Atlantic put out this infographic last Friday, citing how nearly 100% more “asks” come from twitter (“follow me,” “RT to win,” etc) than Facebook. Makes sense to me, since I’ve been championing the uses of Twitter for small, hyperlocal business marketing, but have to really think up  innovative ways to draw followers to my clients’ Facebook pages.

Every day, social media legitimizes itself more as a force to be reckoned with and a necessary business tool and investment. So, whether we’re growing the reach of a client brand or we wanna improve our own social network “klout,” it can never hurt to ask.

Twitter v. Facebook, Round 1.

Today, I stumbled upon this article, one of may highlighting the Facebook “like” as a show of support for a business. Countless others speak to the number of users on Facebook versus Twitter. (Here’s one diminishing the reach of the latter.)

It’s been my gut feeling that Twitter’s the easier “quick fix” marketing solution; I help clients expand their reaches by following relevant tweeters en masse, and most follow back because it’s a low-impact way to stay in touch with a brand. I use Twitter’s mico-blog style to share links and images, set a call to action for contests, etc, and have no trouble building a solid following. But Facebook is a little more tricky. For me, anyway, liking something on Facebook is 1)both more of a commitment and 2)often triggered by a friend or a sense of personal connection. I’ll explain:

I follow a network of people I actually know on Facebook– friends, coworkers, old contacts from school, etc. To “like” a brand, I need to really like it, or feel some kind of connection. I’ll typically like a coworker’s band, a family member’s business in an irrelevant part of the country for me, or a cause page a friend is passionate about. So, how do the brands I don’t love from experience or feel a call to action to like hook me? Here’s how they do it, and you can too.

Successful cross-platform marketers are sharing unique content on Facebook. Today’s post was triggered when one of my favorite brands to follow online, Seven for all Mankind Jeans (Twitter) shared that they’d posted new product shots to Facebook. Naturally, I took the plunge, made the commitment and checked it out. Sharing photo galleries, hosting a giveaway, making an anticipated announcement…mention it to your twitter fan base and actually post the content on Facebook. No brainer, right? Maybe not.  It’s a real, deliberate effort for me to remember to share certain things only on Facebook and to ask my Twitter followers to venture on over. Time will tell if their “likes” stick.