Social Media 101 – 8 Foundational Principles

The first ever Social Media Mania will take place on Wednesday, February 19th, 2009 at 8 am EST and will last 24 hours.  This will be a non-stop social networking opportunity for you to expand your network.

To get the most out of this event (and out of ALL of your social networking experiences), I’ve prepared the basic principles which you can follow to become more effective with all of your social media efforts.

The principles listed below should be studied, memorized and used as guidelines for all the social networking you do.  These are the basics.  More advanced topics will be covered in future blog posts. This will help you to attract a highly targeted, highly responsive social following.

Principle #1: Know your Niche.  Know exactly what type of person it is that you want to attract to you.  You should be able to define your niche(s) in a simple sentence.

Principle #2: Know your Niche keywords.  Keep a list of the top 20-50 keywords for your niche.  Think about what people in your niche would search for in google.  Know the names of the best selling books & authors.  Know the names of the top selling information products, coaching programs, & seminars in your niche.  Keep this list. Memorize it. Use these keywords as much as possible (without overdoing it) in the titles, subject lines, headlines, tweets, group names, and your social media account profiles.

Principle #3: Have a good profile picture. Find the best picture of yourself, that shows you as a happy person smiling.  This is the first impression people have of you. Most people won’t even add you as a friend if you don’t have a profile picture.  It’s essential to have this picture, or your pretty much wasting your time with social media.

Principle #4: Use multiple social media accounts.  Have accounts with the top social sites.  This gives you increased effectiveness for each action you take with social media.  The various social sites become more powerful when you use them together.

Principle #5: Know the social players in your niche. You should research who the main people in your niche are on all of the social sites you’re on.  Ask around, look at who is posting the most quality to your niche.  See who is commenting on all the niche related stuff.  For each social site you are on, keep a separate list of the “players” on that site.  This may sound like extra work, but when you implement the theories I’m going to teach you later – it will be the biggest time saver you ever integrate.

Principle #6: Make tons of friends.  You want to get to 500 friends on any social site as fast as possible.   Once you hit this milestone, you can be more selective.  This gives you enough power to get your message out there.  Don’t overlook this essential step.  I personally never turned down a friend request (until I reached 5,000 on facebook and they forced me to). You want your presence to expand.  It expands by having friends.  The more the better. Ideally you want people who are active within your niche.  Once you get the intial 500, you’ll attract more people in your niche by following the other principles included in this list. Once you get 500, only send friend requests to targeted people within your niche.

Principle #7: Take it easy. Know your limitations for the social sites. A basic rule of thumb you can go by is that you don’t send more than 30 friend requests on any one social site in a single day.  The beauty of having dozens of social sites to choose from is that you can spread your friend requests across multiple networks and won’t get banned for being too aggressive.

Principle #8: Don’t message all your friends at once. There are exceptions to this that I’ll cover later. But for now, play it safe and don’t message all y0ur friends on any social network until you know when & how to do it properly.

This list gives you the most basic social networking success principles.  By constantly applying these concepts to all of your networking, you’ll quickly become one of the top people in your niche on the social sites you’re on.

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