11 Essential Social Media Tips from “The Art of Social Media”

A couple of weeks ago, the Zealify team went to a night put on by Chew the Fat where Ben Southworth, Co-Founder of 3 Beards, was chatting with Guy Kawasaki. Guy is the former Chief Evangelist of Apple and current Chief Evangelist of Canva; a legend in the startup world. The night was full of interesting stories from Guy, and at the end of the night everyone in the audience received a signed copy of “The Art of Social Media”, a book he and Peg Fitzpatrick have recently released.

We have spoken before about the importance of being digital, and this book goes one step further into the how. It is a book packed full of tips and tricks on how to become a pro at social media, whether you are looking to improve your own personal brand or a company’s online presence. The book is highly recommended as a must read that dives deeper than the majority of books giving social media tips and advice. It ignores what Guy so eloquently calls the ‘duh-isms’ like “engage your audience” or “make your profile good” and gives actionable advice.

In this post I will summarise what I felt are the best and most helpful points covered, specifically those that could help ambitious young professionals.

Optimise for 5 seconds

Guy argues that social media is like the dating app ‘Tinder’, in that people make snap decisions whether to follow you, reshare or like your post or not. This means you need to optimise your profile to give people a reason to immediately make the choice to follow you and read on.

Images

Go asymmetrical

Optimising for 5 seconds means the subconscious becomes involved. One thing Guy highlights in this respect is the need for your profile picture to be asymmetrical. This will instantly make you look more interesting. After all, you don’t want your picture to look like a mugshot in a lineup of criminals!

Creativity is for the Cover Photo

It is important that your profile picture is simply a picture of you, specifically your face, and nothing else. This will give the best impression of who you are. Your family, friends, pets, cars etc can come when you decide on your cover photo. This is where you can show more of your personality and creativity.

Image sizes

To ensure you look like you know what you’re doing, all images including your profile picture, cover photo and those that you post should have the correct dimensions. The blog post ‘Quick tips for Great Social Media Graphics’ by Peg gets updated regularly with the current dimensions of images you should be using for each social media platform.

Content Creation / Curation

The biggest daily challenge of social media is finding enough content to share. We call this ‘feeding the content monster’. There are two ways to do this: content creation and content curation.

Content curation is summarising other peoples “good stuff” (I’ll come back to this later), and sharing it. This gives you exponentially more content that you can share than if you were to write everything yourself from scratch. Below are some tips on what to share and how to curate the best content.

Pass the reshare test

This is the ultimate test that every piece of content you post should pass. Likes, favourites, +1s and comments are all great, but reshares / retweets are the actions that will get your name in front of more people. So before you share any post, ask yourself quickly “will people reshare this post?”

Use Curation & Aggregation Services

There are a number of sites and apps out there that can curate and aggregate the best content for you. Guy highlights some of the best ones in the book, including:

• Alltop — thousands of websites & blogs organised into topics. You can personalise which topics interest you.
• Buffer — suggests stories to share. More on Buffer later.
• Feedly — An RSS feed aggregator you can use if you know the blogs you want to follow.
• LinkedIn influencers & Pulse — Influencer contains a few hundred thought leaders who share their posts. Pulse is curated business content.
• Reddit — “The front page of the internet”. Displays the most popular stories as voted by users.

Other similar sites the Zealify team and I use are “Medium”, “Zite (app)”, “Inside” & “Quora”.

Guy also goes into more detail about Twitter lists and Google+ searches among other things. Twitter lists can be great for finding interesting people within a certain industry and sharing their posts. You can search for existing lists or create your own. Contrary to popular belief, Google+ can also be really useful in this respect, even if you don’t have a Google+ account. Some of the best content can be found on Google+, and it can sometimes be easier to find as there is less “noise” on the platform.

Perfect your posts

The social media principal is simple — the more “good stuff” (there it is again) you share, the more reshares, interactions and followers you will get. Everyone wants more followers; if they say they don’t, they’re lying — after all, your network is your net worth. So finally we get to what “good stuff” is. Guy argues it can come in four forms:

• Information — i.e. news
• Analysis — i.e. what the news means
• Assistance — i.e. how-to’s
• Entertainment — make people say “what the hell?”

On top of this, he says you must be interesting, bold and visual. This means sharing a broad range of different posts, expressing your feelings, and including more than just text in your posts. There are two important things to take note of here. Firstly, you should have an opinion, and having an opinion means not everyone is going to agree with you, but that’s OK. Guy claims “if you’re not pissing people off on social media, you’re not using it right”. Secondly, if you add an image, infographic or video with the content you share, more people will see that content. There is plenty of data to back this up. So literally every post should contain some kind of visual media.

Post Often (& Automation is your friend)

This idea is simple — you have to post a LOT. Guy argues you should be in the hardcore column of this table showing the number of times that you should be posting per day:

This might seem like too much, but bare in mind no one is going to see all of your posts, and with the same idea in mind, Guy suggests repeating the best twitter posts more than once.

Now nobody with a real day job would be able to post that many times a day manually. This is where automation (using tools to schedule and distribute posts) becomes your friend, and anyone who says it’s cheating is wrong.

Guy highlights a number of tools that can do this, the best one being Buffer. Buffer can schedule posts for most of your favourite social media platforms at specific times.

Optimise for individual platforms

The five Ps of social media: Google+ is for passions; Facebook is for people; LinkedIn is for pimping; Pinterest is for pictures; Twitter is for perception.

As alluded to in the above table, each platform must be used differently in order to get the most out of it. This includes the number of posts you should share, how long those posts are and the type of posts. The best advice I can give for optimising this is test, test, test. Best practices will become fairly clear after some time using each platform.

Personalised requests on LinkedIn

One point Guy highlighted that is incredibly important for job seekers and young professionals is the difference in etiquette needed between platforms. Whereas on other social platforms it is acceptable to add/follow someone without saying anything at all, he rightly states that on LinkedIn, you should personalise every request.

Remember Slideshare

“Slideshare is the unsung hero of viral content”. If you don’t use Slideshare you should seriously consider it. I won’t go into too much depth here but some things to consider are:

• Repurpose past successes (like popular blog posts)
• There’s no speaker so it can’t be as minimalist as a powerpoint presentation
• The title page is important to make people read on
• Links on the last slide are clickable — use these as calls to action to your blog or other posts
• Share — they look great embedded particularly on Twitter and LinkedIn

Guy closed with a code of conduct meant simply for life in general, written by Don Miguel Ruiz and Don Jose Ruiz. I really think the same code can be applied for your conduct when embarking on a job search:

- Be impeccable with your word

- Don’t take anything personally

- Don’t make assumptions

- Always do your best

- Be skeptical but learn to listen.

The one conclusion that I drew from this book is that these principles are applicable to everyone. Particularly if on a job search, social media is an invaluable tool for building your reputation and authority in your chosen field of work.

I’d love to hear your thoughts on all of this advice and if you have anything to add then please let me know. Some of it is slightly controversial (like sharing so much on twitter and repeating posts) so I’d be really interested to hear if anyone has had any experiences that contradict it.

Note: This post was originally published on 26th January 2015.