Where should you focus your social media efforts?

Jul 03, 2012

Just received a great question from a community member who asked we post her question. Of all the non-technical questions we receive, this is one of the most popular.

It’s not clear whether she’s interested in social media for learning, marketing or finding new jobs, but that shouldn’t really matter.

“Given the increasing number of social media options—blogs, Twitter, Facebook, Google+,Pinterest, etc—what percentage of time should I spend on each? Or should I focus on one?”

What do you think?

2 Replies
Andy Bowyer

This truly depends on your goal.

Positioning is important, so you have to have a clear mind-set when you start your social media marketing.  Do you want to become known amongst other eLearning designers?  Or do you want to become known as an eLearning designer to a specific niche (i.e. the mechanical or electrical or medical arena) market?

I've spent a great deal of time using Facebook (mostly for personal stuff) but found myself attracting other Voice-Over professionals to my pages and profiles than anything else.  And while that's nice, it's not putting very much food on the table.

I think it requires experimentation and a little time figuring out what "works" for you.  Then spend your time accordingly. 

ab

Mike Taylor

I'd echo Andy's comment about having a goal after all it's about what social media can help you DO and not just  social media unto itself, right? 8-) 

Generically speaking I have setup a system over time, for receiving information via RSS mostly that is filtered to my interests. The idea here is that you can cover an amazing amount of content by bringing it all to a single place (I use Google Reader) instead of trying to visit a number of different sites. 

The second step is to save/organize the things that you want to keep. I use a combination of Delicious bookmarks and Evernote which allows me to save things in an organized way by grouping/tagging the things that are coming in. For example here are all the Articulate related items I've saved http://delicious.com/tmiket/articulate

Finally, I share a lot of the better things I find that I think others would appreciate or could benefit from. This is usually via Twitter but for things that need more explanation, more space or generally more involved it may be via a blog post, screenr, etc.  You can see these here: https://twitter.com/#!/tmiket/  or here: http://tmiket.wordpress.com/

I'm convinced that the more you give/share the more you'll get out of it. 

Harold Jarche has some good insights on his blog along these lineshttp://www.jarche.com/2010/03/pkm-in-a-nutshell/

I think he's even running an online PKM (Personal Knowledge Mgt) course soon that might be worth checking out. http://www.jarche.com/key-posts/personal-knowledge-management/

I'd also recommend starting off by keeping it simple. Try a few blogs to add to your RSS reader at first. These will invariably lead you to others over time. Try different services that "fit" you best and don't be afraid of experimenting with different things...the only way to "get" it is to dig in and give it a try. 

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