What should I post and do I need to join every social media website?

Today I read two very good blog post by Jill Clark title, “Social Media Sins – East Side Marios” and one by Michael L. Atkinson Social Media Tools Are Killing Their Own Value” at FOHBOH.

I highly recommend you read both post; more importantly, watch Jill’s video on the site. She explains the downside of abandoning and or ignoring your account especially when there are tweets or posts with negative comments. One solution would be to deactivate your account and she shows you how to do it, or you can get crack’in and start post’in!!! Imagine having more than one poorly attended social media site, and as Michael mentioned there are many more apps and things coming to our market real soon.

Let’s start with a poorly unattended twitter site. What do you post when you have nothing to say? I agree you don’t want to just post anything because it amounts to nothing more than noise; as a result, you’ll lose credibility with your readers and those that are loyal followers. However, just give it some thought because there is much to say that is relevant.

Those of you that are following my posts know I’m working with Crepemaker. I help them for free and they allow me to post my experiences on the web. It’s been fruitful because I’ve received great ideas and tips from other social media professionals.

Here are just a few posts (tweets) Cepemaker came up with this week:

1. ST. LOUIS CHURCH – FESTIVAL FOR THE POOR | Facebook Crepemaker participated in the festival for the Poor at The St. Louis catholic Church of the city of Pinecrest Florida…

 

2. Miami-Dade County Fair and Exposition, Inc – Fair Information Come visit Crepemaker at the fair. Best food in the fair! March 17th to April 3rd, 2011. March 21st to March 25th and March 28th to April 1st. Miami-Dade County employees $5 per person up to 4 people with valid …

 

3. Karaoke with Crepemaker – Crepemaker has a live band on Friday and Saturday nights, kids karaoke and every person gets a free small nutella crepe after their first song.

Don’t forget to use current events that are happening around us, spin it, and make it relevant for your followers. If Crepemaker can do 3 relevant tweets a week, just in three weeks they’ve tweeted more than the entire year.

Now that you know what to say where do you say it, and how do you choose your social media outlet? Michael brings up a good point with all the social media apps and sites online today does it make sense to get them all and why so many? I know that most people are familiar with Facebook, Twitter, Linkedin, and they have apps for your android and iphone to connect to these social media outlets. It can be overwhelming especially when you have to post to so many.

In most cases it’s safe to use Facebook and Twitter. You can survey your customers by putting out a card by the register. Here is an prototype of what we are going to try next week at Crepemaker. We’re going to create a “Quick Survey” card and put it near the register.

As always, I will report how they did and how effective was the survey. Selecting a drawing once a week also gives Crepemaker another post to enter in Facebook and Twitter; more over, they will get a better idea of the social media their customers are using. Allowing them to focus on the social media websites that matter most.

If you decide to use other social media outlets other than Facebook and Twitter, then I would suggest using a centralized tool that will allow you to post once, and will post to your other social media sites including your blog. The site is called; “Posterous” and I use it to keep my social media sites updated.

We’ve all heard the cliché, “Those who don’t know history are destined to repeat it”. I’m sure many social media websites are carefully studying the search engines of the 90′s. Eventually the cream will rise and those media websites that are used most often will emerge the leaders. We’ve seen it with search engines like Lycos, AOL, AltaVista, InfoSeek, and Netscape. As an experiment this evening, I asked my niece if she uses Lycos and Netscape and she looked at me like I had two heads. “What is that?” she asked. I told her they are search engines and she tells me, “Oh no, I just use Google”. Me too.

Happy Posting!