Set Yourself Up on Social Media Sites

In our previous post, Buzz Creation Techniques, we continued our series with a discussion on techniques for creating buzz, and what you need to ante up to get started.  In this post, we continue with a series of posts on how to set yourself up on various social media sites.


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Set Yourself Up on Social Media Sites

“You will make mistakes.
If you are sincere about helping the community,
the authenticity will show and your mistakes will be forgiven.”

Zia Yusuf, executive vice president
SAP global ecosystem and partner group

OK. You’ve decided to take the plunge. You’ve done your prep work as we’ve suggested in the previous posts First Steps Toward a Social Media Strategy, Create Social Computing StrategiesHow to Engage with Social Computing, and Engage Your Community.

So now it’s finally time to set your organization up on social computing sites. In the sections that follow we walk you through tips, tricks, and techniques for setting yourself up on:

    • LinkedIn
    • Twitter
    • Facebook
    • YouTube
    • Blogging

Even if you decide not to use one of these sites right away, we strongly recommend you reserve it just in case. At the very least it will prevent others from camping on it, causing brand confusion and other problems.

In fact, as a defensive move you should even reserve your name on sites you not only have no plans to use, you’ve never even heard of.

Power Tool: Setting Up Sites

To check the availability of your preferred name or identity on lots of social computing sites quickly, you can use KnowEm[1] or other sites that search for availability of user IDs on multiple social computing sites.

KnowEm allows you to search for availability on more than 400 social sites with various levels of service from $99 to $599. It’s a cheap form of insurance in case the next Facebook is already out there, ready to pop.

Find Where Others Are

Chances are communities organized around your cause already exist. Before you consider creating your own community, or investing a lot of effort on your own fan page for Facebook, for example, be sure you see where else people are talking about you and your cause. If you find existing groups, consider joining the conversation as a good way to get started with social media. We talk about that in the previous post Find Your Community.

Be Consistent

We discussed online branding and consistent graphics in the Triangulate Your Social Media Presence post. Other kinds of consistency are key to your social media presence. Here’s a quick checklist to review as you prepare to start creating your sites.

All your sites should:

  • Have a call to action
  • Enable people to join your cause immediately
  • Provide information on organization activities and plans
  • Provide opportunities for people to get involved
  • Get employees involved
    • Establish guidelines for engaging
    • Suggest topics for blogging
  • Use consistent keywords — use the keyword lists you created in the Search Engine Optimization post throughout all your sites
    • SEO
    • Blog
    • Twitter
    • LinkedIn
    • Facebook
    • YouTube
  • Mimic the best techniques of your competition
  • Be everywhere they are

With all this in mind, you’re ready to start with your first site. Regardless of your other inclinations, we suggest you set up LinkedIn first. It’s a great way to gain access to lots of people who can help you and your organization in many ways, as you’ll see in the next section. Even if you don’t want to set up LinkedIn, at least read the LinkedIn chapter first since it covers lots of basics that we refer to in the other setup chapters.


Set Yourself Up on Social Media Sites is the 80th in a series of excerpts from our book, Be a Person: the Social Operating Manual for Enterprises (itself part of a series for different audiences). We’re just past page 240 . At this rate it’ll be a long time before we get through all 430 pages, but luckily, if you’re impatient, the book is available in paper form at bit.ly/OrderBeAPerson and you can save $5 using Coupon Code 62YTRFCV

Infinite Pipeline book cover

Get our new book, The Infinite Pipeline: How to Master Social Media for Business-to-Business Sales Success online here. You can save $5 using Coupon Code 62YTRFCV

What Others Are Saying

Infinite Pipeline offers practical advice for using social media to extend relationship selling online. It’s a great way to get crazy-busy prospects to pay attention.”
—Jill Konrath, author of SNAP Selling and Selling to Big Companies

“Sales is all about relationships and trust. Infinite Pipeline is the ‘how to’ guide for maximizing social networks to find and build relationships, and generate trust in our digital age.”
—Sam Richter, best-selling author, Take the Cold Out of Cold Calling (2012 Sales book of the year)

Infinite Pipeline will be the authority on building lasting relationships through online social that result in bottom line business.”
—Lori Ruff, The LinkedIn Diva, Speaker/Author and CEO of Integrated Alliances

Next up: Setting Up LinkedIn


[1] KnowEm: bit.ly/cfSBQL

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