Just Learn, Baby!

Posted by Gabe on December 17, 2009 under Facebook, Social Media, Twitter | 7 Comments to Read

What’s the first thing you think of when you think of social media?  Is it connecting with others?  Maybe.  But why are you doing this? Do you need more friends?  Would you really have time for all the people you connect with on a regular basis in real life?  I think the main reason many of us engage in social media is that we are promoting something.  I make no bones about the fact that I do this to promote Kids Are Heroes.  Would I drop out of it if all of a sudden Kids Are Heroes ended abruptly? Maybe not, but I can guarantee you I would not be doing it as much.  Don’t get me wrong — the “social” part of this makes it fun and I honestly do consider many of my connections strong ones.  I do think there may be people who do this just for fun, but more of us do it to promote something, whether it be business, charity or something else.  Is that bad? I don’t think so.  However it is how you promote things that can directly affect your success.

To date I have been treating Twitter and Facebook mainly as promotional/networking tools.  They are indeed a great way to get the word out about something. But lately I have found another great use for social media.  I have always known about it, but for whatever reason am more aware of it now that I have been using it more for this purpose. That is, learning. This is true especially for Twitter.  I have learned a lot lately from one of my Twitter colleagues whose name is @JohnHaydon.  His videos have taught me how to “trick out” my Facebook page, and I discovered ClickToTweet through him among other things.  I just signed up for his “31 Day Challenge: Optimize Your Blog For Social Media” which starts in January as this is a topic I am focusing on right now. I look forward to discovering more new tricks.

When we started our Kids Are Heroes venture the web site was it. Period. KidsAreHeroes.com was the entire effort.  Then we branched out into social media and all of a sudden we had a blog site that supported it.  Now we also have a Twitter, Facebook and Youtube presence among other things. I now look upon it as one big package.  It all has the same message to get kids involved in philanthropy and we try to work on each individual spoke of the wheel to make it better.  Take SEO for instance (for you ankle-biters that’s ‘Search Engine Optimization’).  I know a little bit about it, but want to know more.  I want people to have the best chance of finding our web site or blog when I’m not there to direct them.  So what do I do? I use TweepSearch and search for “SEO” in people’s profiles.  This is a wonderful tool to discover people from all walks of life.  I can then subscribe to their blog to learn more or even ask them direct questions.

Another obvious way to learn is to just ask.  I have a social media training session coming up and I lack in one area as I do not update Twitter with my phone.  I know how to do it, just don’t have much sense of what tools are being used and which are more popular.  By sending out one tweet I found that ‘Tweetie 2′ for the iPhone is a big one, and also came across a great resource to discover Twitter apps. OneForty.com is a new web site developed by my old Twitter friend @Pistachio. (You can also follow @oneforty). If you click on iPhone you will get a list of Twitter apps designed for it.

It is great to know that people are so generous with their knowledge. Google’s results can be so overwhelming sometimes. And for the record I do like to pass on what I learn and give back too. See a catalog of my posts on Twitter.