How to use social media effectively

Baby Got Booked The Podcast

My guest today is a guy who’s helping me get over my resistance to all things social media. Phil Gerbyshak is the Director of Social Strategy at Actiance Incorporated. He’s also an award winning speaker, author of four books, several thousand articles and over 50,000 tweets. Phil has spent the last ten years dedicated to learning, teaching and sharing all that he can about social media. His work has taken him all over the world to share his insights into building relationships using social platforms. He has been featured in The Wall Street Journal, USA Today, Financial Times and many other publications.

Social media: Social media is but one weapon in your arsenal of things to do, it is not the only thing. There is no silver bullet so anybody who tells you that they have the answer to how to get you to do anything is completely wrong. There’s many answers. Some take more effort, some take more time, sometimes you get lucky but all of them require work.

Using social media effectively: The key is to get something worth talking about that has some sort of news angle. With a 24/7 news cycle almost everything can be news worthy, you just have to think about how it works for your audience.

Choosing a social media platform to focus on: Where is your audience? Where do they hang out? LinkedIn is an awesome place for business people looking for professional insights from other business people. If you’re talking to consumers and are very visual a combination of Instagram and Pinterest is recommended.

Generating pre-buzz: As soon as you’re booked post a little lead on social media saying you’re excited to be going on this show. Then the morning of or the afternoon before post a reminder for your audience to tune in. Tip from Geeta: If you’re going onto a visual medium or if you’re doing a photo shoot for print one of the ways she loves to generate pre-buzz is to post three different outfit choices and get her audience to vote on which one she should wear.

Hashtags: A hashtag is a pound sign and a word with no spaces, dashes or underscores. It looks silly but a hashtag offers a way to instantly click and search for everyone who has used that hashtag.

How to use hashtags:

• To index your content to make it easy to search for
• To add humor to a post
• To tag yourself to build your brand with the people in your life

How many hashtags should you use? It depends on the platform. Two or three is appropriate for Facebook and one or two is fine for Twitter. You can use a lot on Instagram.

Do you want ROI or ROE? To get to 10,000 of the right followers could take your entire life. But if you targeted and tried to connect to 5 or 10 of your ideal customers and worked on those investments you could see a ROI very rapidly. Put in the effort to add maximum value to their lives and business so they can see you as a resource. If you’re not talking to anyone in particular and just want to get your voice out there you might get a lot of ROE (return on ego) but no buyers. Set your intention correctly. Focus on the one or two people that can most benefit from your message not that can help you the most.

• Twitter: @PhilGerb
• [www.philgerbyshak.com]
• Write headlines no journalist can resist, with the 58-headline template pack [http://babygotbooked.com/headlines]