5 Social Media Tasks You Might be Neglecting and You Shouldn’t

April 8, 2014 by Daniel Sharkov|

What does your social media routine come down to?

Is it all about tweeting a few links everyday and waiting for things to “happen”?

Yeah, that might be a bit of an exaggeration, but I am pretty sure a lot of you folks, could extend your social media reach. I mean what sometimes happens is you get stuck in the same tasks
and forget to explore the possibilities or simply ignore tactics that even you believe have a potential.

Well with today’s post I would like to help you remember that there are a lot of things going on in the world outside of the routine-zone…

The tasks I will be covering in the below paragraphs are based on things:

I myself have been neglecting lately I recently started doing and realized the benefits

and hopefully (because the post wouldn’t be useful otherwise) …

Some which YOU are not doing

Okay, that’s enough for an introduction, let’s move on to the practical part and namely the social media tasks in question!

1. Start accepting (or Ignoring) LinkedIn Invitations

Have you been active on LinkedIn in the past few months?

If the answer is yes, then good for you!

I’m sure though that like me (although I’ve been active for the last couple of weeks) , a lot of marketers shy away from this particular platform. One of the reasons for that probably has to do with the fact that it is a little different from your normal social network.

It is on a little higher level.

There are neither funny memes you see on Facebook, nor animated GIFs you see on Google Plus.

But what do you expect – after all it is a network for professionals!

But don’t let that fact scare you.

Instead let’s look from another angle.

Did you know that unlike most social networks, a rather high percentage of your contacts actually sees your updates?

Around 20% to be precise. That is a lot, compared to for instance Facebook’s shrinking reach (but more on that later on) .

And did you also know that a really
big part of what’s shared on LinkedIn is actually industry-related content?

What this means to you?

It means that posting content revolves a lot around sharing your expertise.

This means that you can more freely share your content (among interesting articles from other places) without having to mix it with other types of updates, because that’s exactly what LinkedIn users want – advice on how to grow in their respective niches.

So what I’d advise you to do from this point on, is to log into your (long-forgotten) LinkedIn account, check your invitations, see who is worth connecting with and who isn’t, and move on to becoming an active user!

Graphic representation courtesy of Buffer

2. (Carefully) Follow Back on StumbleUpon

It seems like lately StumbleUpon has been losing the popularity that it had a couple of years ago…

Over time there have been a few redesigns, which probably made a lot of people to abandon this place.

But the thing is StumbleUpon remains a great way to bring more visitors to your latest posts!

And if something has changed for the better, that has got to be the way sharing works now (sharing a piece of content on StumbleUpon means directly sending it to someone, so they get like a Facebook notification).

Back then in order to reshare let’s say your latest post with someone,
they first had to thick a checkbox and thus allow you to do so. Now what happens is that you can share content with everyone who has a mutual relationship with you (i.e. they follow you and you follow them) .
This of course makes the whole process a lot easier, because of the one action less that people have to take.

My advice?

Similar to what I said about LinkedIn – check out your StumbleUpon profile, see who has followed you, see what they are interested in and follow those who are relevant to you.

Once you’ve done that move on to becoming an active member.

Every now and then (doesn’t have to be everyday) use the StumbleUpon extension ( download for Chrome| download for Firefox) to like interesting content you come across. Also whenever you publish a new post and whenever you come across a really good piece of content, use the share feature we talked about above!

3. Share Content to (Relevant) Google Plus Communities

It’s been enough times that I talked about how important it is to join Google Plus and I hope you listened to  that advice of mine.

Now let’s make the next step!

Finding and joining a community is as simple as it gets, but I prepared a short guide just in case:

Once you click the Communities tab (by hovering over the “Profile” or “Home” tab, depending on where you currently are on Google Plus) , you will be taken to the “all communities” tab. On that page you can accept invitations to communities (which won’t always be relevant) . From there clicking the “Recommended for you” will indeed bring you communities that are highly relevant to your interests. Simply select the community you’d like to join, click on it and you will be taken to its page, where you can join it (sometimes depending on how the community is set you might first have to be approved).

So with that sorted out, let’s answer some important questions!

Is it okay to share articles?

Yes. While some communities are based on discussion only, a lot rely on relevant articles and infographics.

Is it okay to share your own posts?

I can imagine some of you readers scowling at this question, thinking self-promotion is not the way to go. Well I’ve personally always been an advocate of self-promotion. As long as its done the right way…

What is the right way?

First off, you need to select the right category. That is a very important step unless you want your post deleted or people telling you to learn to post properly: The second step is to upload an image (500 x 250 pixels are a good dimensions to start with) . Alternatively if you have a wider-than-500-pixels image, you can simply paste the link to the post and you will get a beautiful preview. Thirdly you need to add a short summary of what the post is about.
Ideally start with the title in bold and then add a short sub-headline with italics (great suggestion that Peg Fitzpatrickshared on Google Plus some time ago) , describing the topic better. Then move on to the key highlights and add a link.

How often should you post to communities?

While communities are a great way to reach new people in your niche, they should not be overused.

I’d say that a post once every couple of days is a good starting point. But of course there are a ton of communities, so one day you could share to one and the next to the other. Still keep in mind that a lot of the same people will be on those different communities.

4. Don’t Forget to Schedule Posts from Triberr (Joined it?)

While I talk a lot about Triberr, I often times get asked what it is.

Well yet again in brief…

Triberr is place where you can meet like-minded bloggers, join them in what’s called tribes and share each other’s content. Sharing is not automatic. Instead you have a feed like on Facebook, where you decide what content to approve and what not to.

Now for those of you who are on Triberr…

Don’t forget that the whole platform relies on the reciprocation principle. If people stop going through their streams and approving posts, the system will collapse and no one will benefit from that.

A few weeks ago an infographic was published about the top 100 Triberr usersand I was surprised to find my name under number six.

I’ve been joining a lot of tribes over the last few years. So if I wanted with the hundreds of tribemates that I have I could simply stop approving content and I would probably still get the same amount of sharing.

But you know what, I don’t do it!

Everyday from Monday to Friday I open up my home feed and start scrolling through all of the content, looking for stuff to share. What I would suggest you to do is:

Aim at approving at least 7-8 posts every day If you see people continually posting content that is not relevant to your niche, don’t hesitate to mute them. Don’t read posts from start to end but rather scan through or you will need a lot of time Every now and then share good content you find on networks other than Twitter5. Keep Your Facebook Page Updated (Against the Odds)

Just recently Jay Baer published a really good postabout why Facebook doesn’t really care about people complaining about their pages’ reach plummeting to the ground.

Why is that so?

Well there seems to be a correlation between the decline of organic reach and the rise of Facebook’s stock prices, as this graph shows (taken from the above post) explains:

So it seems like while a lot of small business complain, the bigger companies keep pouring (or pour even more) money into advertising, both to gain and reach new fans.

The real question is for how long will this continue?

Will those same big companies be able to sustain Facebook’s monetization strategy, as tons of smaller Facebook marketers slowly start converting to Google Plus marketing?

We will have to wait and see…

In the meantime however, counterintuitively, I would advice you not to abandon Facebook. While organic reach is falling as low as 1% it is still worth sharing your content over there.

The key is to start doing it very time-effectively
… or in other words simply adapt the content you share on Google Plus for Facebook.

First post on Google Plus and then reshare to Facebook. In the process consider removing the hashtags (they weaken the performance of Facebook stories) , taking off a few sentences out of articles’ summaries, always submitting by uploading an image (gets you the most views).

Final Words

Just having reached the 1,700th word I believe it is time to conclude the post. All in all those are what I believe to be some of the more important social media tasks that you need to stay consistent at in order to make steady progress.

Now I would really like to hear your thoughts!

Are you actively using LinkedIn to promote your business? Is StumbleUpon still one of your top traffic sources? What do you think about the changes Facebook is making to organic reach?

I highly appreciate all comments, so please take a minute to leave yours!

Also please share the post with your friends and followers if you enjoyed it!

Daniel

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