Social Media Development — Three Case Studies, Part 2 of 4 - Page 3

Communicate Continuously
From the time you join a site until you decide to retire, you need to communicate with the other members.

Imagine a social media site as a convention. It runs 24 hours a day and 365 days of the year. If you attend the convention, but never speak a word, how will anyone know you are there? There’s far too much conversation, development and interaction happening for anyone to spontaneously be attracted to your silence.

Wherever possible, respond to people’s questions, comment on their status updates, post your own status updates, make presentations and write articles. Be involved in your community.

And none of this needs to be “original” content. What I mean is that anything you write for your own blog, a local newspaper, or a trade journal is the kind of thing you want to tell members of the online community about. The content you provide can, and should be, reproduced (or re-used) from other places.

Wrapping it Up
In Sean’s case, expanding his reach, building his credibility, and communicating with his community resulted in first place in Blog Off II. During the competition, Sean achieved:

• 5,157 views of his posts
• 4.5 minutes average reading time, and
• 93 comments

NOTE: These statistics are the final, weighted results.

These results came from leveraging the audience Sean has built. The ability to leverage that audience — being able to ask for their support and participation — comes from having developed a relationship with the audience members.

You can see a video of Sean on Thrive America where he describes his five-step process. I suggest watching the video because it gives depth and personality to Sean, and enhances the value you get from this article.

Sean is the first of the three case studies being presented in this article series. Sam Diener is next, and he is followed by Tim Ruffner. You can read the introduction to the series here.

What are you doing to achieve success with social media? Have you developed your strategy and decided which sites to use? Share your thoughts and plans here and I'll help you refine your strategy.

Article Author: TheConradHall

The Conrad Hall is host for Social Media: Cheap and Easy. A weekly radio show that looks at what's happening in the world of social media and makes it easy to understand, useful and profitable for business owners.

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Visit TheConradHall's author page — TheConradHall's Blog