Social media rules every entrepreneur needs to know

Beyond the chatting, socialising and generally getting your personal business into people’s faces, on Facebook, Twitter, Tumblr or what have you, social media serves a very powerful tool – getting your company’s business out there, beyond your own physical reach. As much as the social media has been designed in such a way that makes it function as the level playing field between industry leaders and upstarts, between multinational corporation executives and small-business owners, making peers of all participants, in the words of Brian Patrick Eha, assistant editor at Entrepreneureven.com with that, experts on social media have found that yes, just like George Orwell’s Animal Farm, “all social-media users are equal, but some are more equal than others,” as Eha, puts it.

So, what makes some social media more equal than the others? The first rule you must know is quality content. You, as an entrepreneur, need to produce quality content, Eha advised. You need to remember that when sending any message on social media, you should be providing relevant, thoughtful information and sharing information that is also generated by others, experts have advised.

Second rule is to listen and create feedback (i.e be open and engaging). Why? It shows your followers that you care about them. A customer who feels cared for becomes a loyal customer eventually. Being available to your followers, listening to and responding to their comments, shows them that you’re listening and providing feedback and that suggests to them that you actually care about them. Make sure that while you’re responding, your messages are original and thoughtful.

Third rule is to create a niche and stick to it. Eha quoted Mari Smith, a social-media marketing expert and author of “The New Relationship Marketing: How to Build a Large, Loyal, Profitable Network Using the Social Web”, as saying that “Social media is extremely noisy. You’ve got to be able to stand out.” He then went ahead to advise that instead of being a generalist, you should strive to be a specialist because the specialists, “tend to bend more ears than generalists.”

Fourth rule is to use the social media to build your business. This rule is taken off Eha, who said an entrepreneur “should back up your thought leadership on social media with a real profit-making enterprise.” What does this mean? It means you, as an entrepreneur, should demonstrate your expertise on the social media. Use social platforms such as blog posts, Twitter, Google+, Linkedin, Facebook, etc to broadcast your posts business/company and then the resulting visibility to market yourself for speaking engagements, coaching sessions and more.  

One great example that comes to mind is Japheth Omojuwa who uses Twitter handle @Omojuwa to get his lengthy blog posts/website contents across to his over 60, 000 followers. On his tweets, he focuses on specific areas of his expertise to get speaking gigs for himself across the world.
These, in turn, increase his social media following. Through this, he has been able to carve out a place for himself by being an early adopter of social platforms.

The fifth rule is to embrace each social network’s unique culture. Smith said  that each social network has a unique culture and this suggests that “the best users embrace it rather than sharing identical content across platforms.”

On Twitter, you should post more frequently, retweet, thank your followers for retweeting and answer questions posed to you.

Also, create hashtags. Hashtags are a popular way of marking your tweets for a specific purpose or larger conversation.  

While on Facebook, try not to bombard people on that platform.

Instead, find more elaborate ways to intimate your community of your activities and get them involved in such activities.

SOURCE- NIGERIAN TRIBUNE