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Is Social Media Overrated?

August 18, 2014 by Marc Guberti Leave a Comment

On the social media blog of all places, responding with a big yes would be problematic. I’ll take the safe route this time and say that it depends on the individual, but I will also say that for most people, social media is overrated. Social media is a place to build connections and grow an audience. Many people use social media to procrastinate and escape their work. In this scenario, social media is completely overrated. As Abraham Lincoln put it, “You can’t escape the responsibility of tomorrow by evading it today.”

If you are spending more than an hour on your social networks every day, then it is overrated. That is too much time to delegate away from your work. In order to make revenue from social media, you need to have products that people would want to buy in the first place.

The worst part is that most people get addicted to the social networks. Some people are on Facebook for 6 hours every day. That’s absolutely ridiculous, especially when most of that time is you feeling bad about yourself because your friends posted pictures of themselves having a good time. Many people could write five extra blog posts every day if they cut down on the amount of time they spend on social media.

There is a way to use social networks that makes them pivotal to your success. By getting more done in a shorter amount of time and growing your audience, you will be able to tap into social media’s full potential. Some leaders got to where they are because of social media. In this case, if these people do not spend over an hour a day on their social networks, they are not overrated.

Social media has the power to grow your presence and allow you to become very successful. It can also eat away at hours of your precious time every day. With great power needs to come great responsibility. What’s your choice?

16 Ways To Build A Big Social Media Audience From A 16 Year Old

August 16, 2014 by Marc Guberti 2 Comments

Growing a social media audience and getting the best out of that audience is so easy that a 16 year old can do it (that would be me). In a span of less than 3 years, I have been able to get over 100,000 Twitter followers, over 14,000 Pinterest followers, over 10,000 Vine followers, and I’m working on Instagram and Facebook. My audiences continue to grow as the days go by, but many people wonder how I was able to get to this point. I decided to come up with 16 different methods you can use to build your social media audience (that has nothing to do with my age. That just happened to be the number I pulled out of my head).

Focus most of your time on one social network. If you master one of the social networks and sort of know the other ones, you are going to do very well with the social network that you successfully mastered. I decided to master Twitter because it is a social network of simplicity, and now that I know Twitter Domination by heart, I have been able to continue dominating Twitter while growing my presence on other social networks.
Use the big player social networks. Even if you have no plans on using a Facebook or YouTube account, create them. When you master one of the social networks, you need to learn how to master a second social network. It’s the whole idea of being bilingual is better than only knowing one language while being trilingual is way better than being bilingual. Creating the accounts now and tinkering around with them will allow you to be prepared to master them later.
Post on them all often. It is important to post on all of your social networks at least once every week. That indicates to all of your audiences that you are active, and being active is one of the crucial steps towards allowing your content to spread on those social networks.
Interact with your audience. Interacting with your audience will allow you to build stronger connections with the people in your audience. You want to be well acquainted with as many people in your social media audiences as possible. My recommendation is to look at your notifications three times each day to see if you can interact with any of your followers.
Post motivational quotes. No matter what niche you are in, motivational quotes hands down never fail at increasing engagement. Motivational tweets are more likely to get retweeted and motivational pins are more likely to get repinned.
Post articles on your social networks. Posting articles is a great way to provide informative content that your followers would enjoy.
Post valuable content. Valuable content is the kind of content that your targeted followers would like. You can’t satisfy everyone with your social media strategy (you can’t even do that in life. Shocker!) so it is more important for you to focus on satisfying your targeted audience.
Post pictures. Social media posts with pictures get more engagement than social media posts without pictures. We are a visual generation that needs to see everything in pictures. That’s why movies are more popular than books.
Grow your presence on all of your social networks. On the social network you are trying to master, you need to build a powerful presence. However, you should also be growing a bigger presence on your other social networks. Even if you are only gaining five followers every week on a social network you are not focusing on, that is still growing.
Find patterns. Some rules for one social network will apply to another social network. That means if you become successful at one social network, it becomes easier to be successful at other social networks. Here are some of the universal laws of all social networks that I was able to find.
Be an expert in your niche. People follow the experts, not the people who have no idea what they are talking about. Telling people that you are an expert in your bio is a great start, but you need to prove to people that you are an expert with valuable social media posts and a professional picture.
Be humorous. Whenever you can, mix in some humor with your other social media posts. There are numerous examples of content going viral because it was humorous.
Be creative. If your content is creative, then it will gather attention. Creative content is the type of content that the average person could not think of. There is a difference between valuable content and creative content, but if you mix the two together into one social media post, your content is going to spread faster.
Host a giveaway. Giveaways allow you to easily bring in more followers. Some people will follow you just for the giveaway. The only problem associated with the giveaway is that once the giveaway ends, many people unfollow the host of the giveaway. Esurance is a brilliant example of this. If you want people to continue following you after the giveaway, tell everyone that you will be hosting another giveaway three months later.
Interconnect your social networks together. That does not mean connecting your Twitter and Facebook accounts together so all of your tweets end up on Facebook. Linking those two accounts together is not even a good idea to begin with. I am talking about promoting each of your social networks and their posts on your other social networks. If you have a YouTube video, promote it on Facebook. In your YouTube video’s description, have a link to your Facebook Page. Here’s a more in depth analysis of how this strategy works.
Be patient. Don’t you wish certain things could happen faster? Unfortunately, when it comes to growing a social media audience, fast is not a part of the vocabulary. You are not going to get 100,000 followers in one day. You will most likely reach that milestone years after you create the social media account. However, by sticking with it and learning new techniques along the way, you will be able to dramatically grow your following.

Those are the 16 ways to grow your social media audience. What are your thoughts on the list? Do you have any additional methods on growing a social media audience? Please share your thoughts and advice below.

4 Ways To Increase The Life Span Of A Tweet

August 11, 2014 by Marc Guberti 4 Comments

On Twitter’s news feed, it is easy for a tweet to lose importance. Within a few minutes, the tweet that was once on the top of people’s newsfeeds is no longer to be found. The only way to view those types of tweets is to view the person’s profile and scroll down until the tweet gets discovered.

There is no such thing as the immortal tweet. Even Ellen DeGeneres’ famous selfie at the Oscars is not an immortal tweet. Although there is no such thing as an immortal tweet, you can increase the life span of your tweet. Here are four ways to do that:

Pin your tweet to the top of your profile. Pinning your tweet to the top of your profile will ensure that more people see it. My recommendation is that a tweet only stays pinned on the top of your profile for 1 week so you can have a variety of tweets pinned to the top of your profile.
Make your tweet something that others would want to retweet. In order for your tweet to have a better life span, it needs to spread on Twitter. In order to spread content on Twitter, your tweet needs to be something that others would want to retweet. Is it a motivational quote, a valuable article, or something else? Regardless of what that tweet is, it needs to be something that your followers would want to retweet.
Embed the tweet in a new blog post. As your tweet is about to become forgotten, you can write a new blog post that has the tweet embedded. In most cases, it takes longer for a new blog post to get forgotten than a new tweet, and by promoting that tweet in the new blog post, your tweet’s life span will increase.
Get more targeted Twitter followers. The bigger your audience is, the more powerful that audience will be in spreading your content. Power to the people! I almost forgot to mention these methods you can use to get more Twitter followers.

By increasing the life span of your tweet, more people will be able to see that tweet, and your content will spread across the powerful platform. What are your thoughts on the list? Do you have any additional tips on increasing the life span of your tweets? Please share your thoughts and advice below.

10 Valuable Articles From The Archives

August 4, 2014 by Marc Guberti 2 Comments

The problem with any blog is that as more content gets added to them, other content gets completely forgotten about. A tweet can only do so much to bring back attention to older blog posts that got published months ago. There are many blog posts on this blog that were written last year with methods that still work to this day. In fact, some of those blog posts are still popular, but they still don’t appear on the front page. I decided to dig through my blog to find 10 valuable articles that you should give a second look. They contain oodles of knowledge and things to think about. Some are longer than others.

100 Amazing Blogging Tips

100 Amazing Pinterest Tips

70 Amazing Twitter Tips

20 Thoughts To Live By

The Problem With Waiting For Something To Happen

What Do You Want To Be Remembered For?

Every Blogger Needs To See This Picture

New Year’s Resolutions: Memory Or Lifestyle?

Esurance Won The Ad Bowl By A Landslide. That’s what everyone was raving about when Esurance did its giveaway. The follow-up blog post is “Reanalyzing The Day After The Super Bowl: Was The $1.5 Million Giveaway Worth It?”

What The New York Times, Apple, Twitter, And JetBlue Have In Common

As a bonus article, I present Why Fast Food Restaurants Are Successful.

Which one was your favorite?

Are You Guilty Of These Five Twitter Mistakes?

August 1, 2014 by Marc Guberti 14 Comments

Twitter is growing, and its growth shows no signs of stopping. Even as it Twitter continues to grow, mistakes are still being made at a regular basis. Some of these mistakes make you look like a newbie while others hinder your growth and make you look like a robot. Out of all of the mistakes people make on Twitter, there are five mistakes that show up the most.

Not engaging with your followers. You need to engage with your followers to build strong connections. Your audience gets to know you better if you interact with them. If you do not engage with your followers, then some people will think you are a robot. Here are some ways to engage with your followers.
Not having a good avatar. If your bio picture is not a picture of you or your company’s logo, then you do not have a good avatar. Your avatar is how people see you on Twitter, so make that avatar something that people would be happy to see. If you are looking for an avatar, just take a good selfie of yourself with your phone and use that for your avatar.
Tweeting too much. Many people send out 10 tweets within 1 minute. That is too many tweets to send out in a short amount of time, and some people will get irritated to see the same person on their timeline 10 times in a row. That may result in some people in your audience unfollowing you.
Not tweeting enough. I always got confused when the blogger contradicted himself/herself, but this contradiction makes sense. People hear that tweeting too much results in unfollows, but that kind of tweeting refers to sending out too many tweets at once. You can schedule tweets throughout the day so your followers read your tweets at a comfortable rate. I send out one tweet every 20 minutes. Ever since I made the move, I have gotten more engagement and followers.
Not sharing enough of you the right way. “The right way” is in Italics for a reason. Many people promote themselves just for the sake of promoting themselves. Readers want value and won’t click on a link just because it’s your blog post. Your content needs to be the type of valuable content that your targeted audience wants to read. In addition, if your content is valuable for your targeted audience, they will want more of your content. In this case, you can tweet links to your blog posts all day long, and your followers will be grateful for the value.

Twitter mistakes are made too often. If you are making these mistakes, then you need to get them fixed as soon as possible. Are you guilty of these mistakes?