My Social Media Rant

I have been trying to make a living online for a few months now, and I am still not utilising one tool to its fullest potential! That is SOCIAL MEDIA!

It’s not that I don’t have many friends…it’s just that they aren’t people I want to talk to! That’s not me being nasty, it just frustrates me when I log into my Twitter account and all I can see is spam!

I admit, I have been there and done it myself. A few months ago, I bought a product on making money with Twitter, and in my newbie naivety, I started Auto DM’ing affiliate links, automated my Twitter posts with Twitter-feed, and just sent out random affiliate links!

What did I achieve? Absolutely nothing. My twitter homepage just looked horrendous. I hardly spoke to anybody, and didn’t use Twitter for what it was made for. People need to realise that it is SOCIAL MEDIA and not ‘GIVE ME YOUR MONEY MEDIA’.

I think Perry Belcher gives the best analogy on the subject, I’d try to come up with my own, but it would just sound lame!

He says that social media is like a party. You wouldn’t turn up to a party and start selling to people straight away, would you? What would happen if you did? I assume you would maybe get called a few names, and get told to leave.

What do you normally do at a party? You socialise, talk about sport, family…and maybe sometimes about your job! Once you get to know someone, you can then invite them back to your house (your blog) for a BBQ. Again, if someone came to your house and as soon as they came in, you tried to sell to them, they would probably leave straight away!

The key is to wait till you are on ‘the back porch’. This is where you can talk business, but again, don’t push the sale to hard, just do subtle things like have an op-tin box embedded in a post, so people know it’s there, but don’t feel like you are pushing it in their faces!

That is just a short summary of what the analogy he uses, which I think works really well!

So..I have made mistakes with social media in the past. I was chasing cash, which is something you shouldn’t do! BUT I have seen the error of my ways, and I am going to change!

What action am I taking? Well, it’s pretty extreme! As Twitter is the main social tool I use, I am un-following everybody, then re-following the people I want to interact with! I know this will result in my Twitter followers running away – if I don’t follow them, they won’t follow me, but why do I want people following me who have no interest in what I say? They just want another pair of eyes to read their affiliate links!

I know one of my friends, Matt Wolfe has done exactly the same as me, we decided to do it after we got onto the subject, and how annoying the spamming was!

Why don’t you join us in our quest to be social? You can use Twitter Karma to un-follow everybody, it makes things easier!

If you haven’t started using social media yet, then come and join the party, but remember, NO SELLING!

Rant over!

Tagged as: Analogy, Back Porch, Bbq, Blog, Faces, Job, Making Money, newbie, Perry Belcher, Tin Box, Twitter