Get Found on Social Media – Part 2

In our previous post, Get Found on Social Media – Part 1, we started a series on how you can make it easier for people to find your social media efforts. In this post, we continue the series with some more ideas on getting found on social media.

Establish an Inner Circle

Groucho Marx famously said, “I don’t want to belong to any club that will accept me as a member.” Most people don’t feel that way, thankfully. Consider creating an exclusive club and offering some kind of benefit — perhaps only prestige — to its members. It might be as simple as first dibs on tickets to one of your events, or attendance at special briefings, or other exclusive access.

You might have various circles within the club, with the highest circle reserved for those who are your true evangelists, and who do the most to help build your community.

If you offer things for sale, consider creating a coupon club that lets participants get discounts. However, be careful not to establish the idea – in your mind or your community’s – that the only reason to interact with you on social media is to get discounts. Remember: social media is about creating and maintaining relationships.

Triangulate Your Social Media Presence

At the most basic level, what we mean by triangulation involves linking your social media properties together. So you should:

• Tweet about your blog
• Blog about your Facebook page
• Link your blog to your Website
• Link your Website to your YouTube channel
• Link your Twitter feed to your LinkedIn and Facebook statuses
• Put all your images on Flickr and link to them when you need images on your site or your blog

You get the idea: Send people who find you on one social site to your offerings on all your other sites. We mentioned the concept of social media as an echo chamber in a previous post. You’re trying to set up your own echo chamber to reinforce your presence. Of course none of this will work if you’re boring and don’t add any value on all your sites.

Beyond this rather mechanical view of triangulation, though, are other considerations such as your online brand. On all your sites you should use consistent graphics. Have your graphic backgrounds and logos professionally created, and use the same graphics everywhere. Include photos of you and your staff to personalize your brand.

Include links to your social media presence everywhere:

• Email signature
• Company letterhead
• Traditional advertising

The idea is to maximize the ability of your community to find out all you’re doing online even if they just happen to glimpse a single tweet and check out your profile. Not only will your Twitter profile point them to your other sites, but when they arrive, they’ll see a consistent graphic and branding treatment. If they later run into another of your sites, this consistency reminds them of their previous experience and builds your brand.