1. Reserve your username across all platforms
Reserve all your usernames across all the social media platforms even if you don’t need them now. These keeps off imposters, and trust me; you are going to need those usernames some day.
2. Decide which social media platform(s) best suits your needs.
Not all social media platforms are suitable for your kind of marketing campaign. Trying to build a presence and stay significantly active on all available social media platforms can be time consuming and counterproductive. Instead, you need to identify platforms that bring the best results and focus on them.
3. Optimize your social media platforms
Once you’ve decided on the platform you intent to use, focus on optimizing your profiles in order to get more followers. A few things to consider include using a real profile picture, write clear and comprehensive about pages for your profiles, and where applicable, include a link to your website.
4. Connect your social media accounts to your website
Having all your active accounts connected to your websites helps to keep the conversation going. Visitors on your website can link to any of the listed accounts and your followers on social media can find out more about your offer.
5. Find and follow leaders in your niche.
Find the most influential people in your niche and follow or favorite them. Chances are they will share useful information about your niche or share their progress about a certain project; and you can look over their shoulders for inspiration.
6. Don’t forget the hashtags
Yes, it’s not just a pretty function to make your phrase turn into a link and look cool. Most people actually use hashtags to search for stuff on social media. And it’s a nice way to make your stuff (like you upcoming product launch) trend on Facebook. Just don’t overdo it.
7. Stay social
Whether you are running a personal profile or company/brand’s social media account, you need to actually stay social and interactive. Follow other users, send friend requests, comment on stuff, like other people’s stuff, update your status regularly, share interesting stuff, and so on.
8. Stay out of trouble
Each social media platform has its own sets of rules, and some rules cut across all the networks. For instance, Twitter has a limit on how many people you can follow per day, Facebook has restriction on friend-requesting people you don’t know and so on.
9. Track mentions
This is where PR kicks in. Use available tools to track every mention of your brand across all platforms and find out what people are saying about you or your brand. Don’t miss a chance to neutralize any negative talk.
10. Post as many times per day but again, don’t overdo it.
The number of times to post per day will depend on the network, the numbers of your followers and how interactive your audience is.
