Choice Chaos: Social Media Mix

Choose the community that is right for you

OMGoodness! Technorati. delicious. Tweet Deck. LinkedIn. StumbleUpon. Scribd. HubPages. Oookay—so I think you get the picture. With so many social media sites on the menu, making the choice is like placing an order at your most favorite bistro or café—Latte or Mocha Mint Espresso.

It’s enough to throw the most decisive person into choice chaos.

But hey—calm down a bit! Get out your laptop or handheld and let’s get started. Yup, that’s right! Let’s get started. First write down a social media menu and then ask yourself a few basic questions:

1. What’s the goal when joining a particular social site? To introduce products, branding, build business or share information and experiences?

2. What sites would be best for those goals? And, what supporting sites will help manage content and make it easily accessible, i.e. TweetDeck, TinyURL, bit.ly, etc.?

3. What are the targeted community bases? For example, are you targeting publishers, writers, gamers, filmmakers, Manga fans or your friends, etc?
   
   
4. How to package content to fit the chosen site?
   
   
5. How will you maximize the content published?

This is the beginning of your social media plan. There is no limit to the number of sites that can be joined—but don’t join sites to follow the crowd and boast about large numbers of fans. This will not achieve your goals and is a waste of time.

“With so many options available, it can be hard to choose the right sites and the best content to publish”, said Valencia Wood, MyRomanceStory’s Director of Media Development.

But joining the right site is a matter of choice and achieving the intended goals. For example, business professionals primarily use LinkedIn. So, if you want to upload pictures of the ComicCon event or Xbox LIVE Avatars, LinkedIn is not the place to hang out.

But, if your goal is to launch a new book, an upcoming appearance or get the word out, then sites like Twitter, Facebook or Technorati may just be the right sand box. Friend, fan and follower bases are community focused—who can be added to the page (targeted end users, industry professionals, venues, etc.) to increase visibility, awareness and create opportunity. 

Moving on—now the information needs to be managed. So get this, you’ve set-up your Twitter page and you’re tweeting into the sunset. What you ask—how can I follow Facebook friends, Twitter followers and the like all at once?

Ta da—Introducing TweetDeck. TweetDeck is a personal browser that allows the user to stay in touch in the now across multiple social networks. Information can be organized into customized sand boxes—okay maybe not that—but groups, searches, topics, pictures and more. Isn’t this the best?

And to shrink that long link to something that keeps tweets within 140 characters, TinyURL and bit.ly are the ones. For example, URLs with 50 characters are compressed to 40. How nice is that!

Phew—the choice chaos has been quieted! And, maybe you won’t have to escape for that Mocha Mint Espresso after all.

If you’d like a particular social media topic covered in a future issue, email your suggestions to myromancestorysocialmedia@gmail.com.

December 21, 2009

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