Social media isn’t always as social as its name would imply. For example, you can have conversations with people online and really not know them at all personally.

It’s possible that you’ve had a really deep and meaningful conversation on Twitter or Facebook with someone in your niche that you greatly respect, but if you passed them on the street you wouldn’t even recognize them, let alone stop and chat.

WebProNews spoke with IZEA CEO Ted Murphy recently about how sometimes, it just helps to pull back from the social media and really get social. It also helps to pull back if you want to create original content. That doesn’t mean stop using social media. It means don’t be strapped down by it.

“The Blogosphere and social media have become a bit of an echo chamber,” says Murphy. “The likes and the shares and the retweets and all that stuff – it’s great for spreading a message, but it’s like everybody now becomes programmed in the same way, doing the same thing.”

“So if we can teach people to pull back from that and say, ‘Ok, if I want to come up with a really original blog…a really original idea, I don’t want to know about all that other stuff. I need to unplug myself, and I need to just ideate,’” he adds.

In other words, get out there in the world and experience things first hand, and maybe you can find some inspiration for original content. Then, maybe the echo chamber will echo you, instead of vice versa. What are some problems, concerns, issues, or observations you’ve made running your own business? What are some you’ve seen with other businesses? Maybe you can use these things to bring something new to the table, or at least start a fresh conversation.

Even simply talking to the same kinds of people you would be conversing with online, in an offline setting can spark inspiration that may not have occurred from a conversation on Twitter or Facebook. Industry conferences are obviously a great place to meet people and to meet people that you have already had a professional relationship with online. Great ideas can come from these conversations, and they’re not online for the world to see (and echo) yet, so you can take those with you and create that content.

Chances are that if a subject was worth talking about offline, it was probably worth talking about online as well (as long as its topical).

“The reason that we come to conferences…is that it’s one thing to engage with somebody through Twitter or to do a chat with them or leave a comment on their blog,” says Murphy. “It’s another thing to shake their hand and look them in the eye and share a beer with them.”

“So I think the people that are going to get the most out of an experience like this are the people that spend the entire time trying to meet as many people as they possibly can, and not just coming here and staying with the people that you came here with,” he says.

“You should be coming home with stacks of…not just business cards and contacts, but experiences with those people,” he adds.

You don’t have to limit offline professional socializing to conferences though. You can do lunches or arrange other get-togethers. Don’t forget “tweetups”.

2010 has been a huge year for Facebook – arguably the company’s biggest yet. CEO Mark Zuckerberg was named Person of the Year by Time magazine, a Hollywood movie about the founding of the company was released in theaters, and attracted a great deal of critical buzz. The company launched the “open graph”, possibly the most important feature the company has ever implemented, as it connects nearly the entire web to Facebook itself. Then there was the messaging product, the privacy fiascoes, and much more.

January

It was a good year for Facebook right from the get go, starting when Facebook beat Google (in terms of traffic) on New Year’s Day, according to Hitwise. Also in January, the company launched a Fellowship Program for Ph.D. students, became a sponsor of the Apache Software Foundation, partnered with McAfee, got into customized data centers, and expressed the desire to be users’ news source.

Mark Zuckerberg made some comments related to privacy that raised a few eyebrows, though this was nothing compared to the privacy firestorm he would set off a few short month later.

Facebook added a feature that lets users reply to comments from their email, added a retweet-like share button, started letting app users get notifications through email, and started giving Facebook Page admins more stats.

Also, rival MySpace started integrating Facebook Connect into its site.

February

In February, Microsoft and Facebook adjusted their partnership, and Facebook celebrated its sixth birthday. The company announced it was approaching 400 million users, and redesigned the homepage.

During the Super Bowl, more people visited Facebook than any other site. Facebook was added to AOL Instant Messenger, Facebook passed 100 million mobile users, got a patent on news feeds, and was coaxed into opening a new office by the governor of Texas. Facebook announced people could pay for Facebook Credits using PayPal.

March

In March, Facebook began testing a “promote your post” feature, partnered with Omniture on ad data, expanded its Preferred Developer Program, made its Texas expansion official, and unseated Google as the most-visited site. Yahoo brought Facebook into its own inbox. Facebook tweaked its privacy policy and its search suggestions.

April

In April, Hitwise dubbed Facebook the most searched on brand in the US, Facebook acquired photo service Divvyshot, and the company clarified its stance on third-party partnerships. The Winklevoss twins (founders of ConnectU) said they would be filing more lawsuits against Facebook.

Facebook redesigned its safety center, announced its first batch of Fellows, and entered the stickers-for-businesses game. A report came out claiming that more business Internet traffic was going to Facebook than to any other website.

Then, Facebook dropped the bomb at f8 – the Open Graph and social plugins that would tie the web to Facebook via like-buttons and various other ways for content publishers to draw traffic and encouage engagement from their users.

May

In May, Facebook was exciting publishers with increased referrals (courtesy of those social plugins). The company announced expansion in Seattle and hired a former FTC chairman. Facebook also announced that the social plugins had already appeared on 100,000 sites since launch. Facebook introduced new login security features and overtook Yahoo in Display ads.

As privacy concerns reached an all-time high (courtesy of the Open Graph), Diaspora started to gain a great deal of buzz as a possible alternative to Facebook. Yeah. Meanwhile, Microsoft previewed its hotmail upgrade with Facebook integration.

Facebook reached a fiver year deal with Zynga, and launched a new mobile site. The company gave people a way to turn off third-party service and scheduled a privacy briefing for Congress. Then it acquired Sharegrove and introduced new privacy settings.

The official Facebook SDK for Android was released, and Demand Media made a move which would greatly expand Facebook’s open graph. Facebook began calling for beta testers of a Q&A product.

June

After so many privacy stories about Facebook and discussion of account deleting permeating the media, it was looking like people were not so eager to delete their accounts after all. It was also revealed that Facebook had seen a 400% rise in advertisers since early the previous year.

Search and social go well together, and the search engines are finding more and more ways to use them together. In fact, the right combinations of these two elements could eventually dictate who has the most useful tools for users.

It’s become more and more clear over time that having a strong social presence is helpful in building a strong search presence for a variety of reasons, but it’s not been so clear, just how the search engines have looked at things like Twitter and Facebook profiles when it comes to organic search ranking.

Search Engine Land Chief Danny Sullivan posted an important article about this very topic, with some rare and surprisingly direct answers from both Google and Bing. While, neither exactly gave away their respective secret sauces, it would appear that they have set some things straight.

Google

Google reportedly uses when an article is retweeted or referenced in Twitter as a signal in organic and news rankings (even though links on Twitter are nofollowed). They also use it to enhance the news universal results (based on how many people share an article).

Google “computes and uses author quality” for when someone tweets. When Sullivan asked if they calculate whether a link should carry more weight depending on who tweets it, Google Responded, “Yes we do use this as a signal, especially in the ‘Top links’ section [of Google Realtime Search]. Author authority is independent of PageRank, but it is currently only used in limited situations in ordinary web search.”

Google says it treats links shared on Facebook Fan pages the same way as tweeted links, but they have no personal Facebook wall data. Authority for Facebook Pages is also treated like Twitter.

So, the more authoritative the crowd sharing links to your content, the better. Not that different than PageRank.

Bing

When it comes to Twitter, Bing tells Sullivan it also looks at social authority of users and more specifically, looks at how many people they follow and how many follow them, adding that this can add “a little weight” to a listing in regular search results (though it carries more in Bing’s separate Social Search). Bing decides when links should carry more weight based on the person who tweets it.

As far as Facebook, Bing currently looks at links shared on Facebook that are marked as being shared to “everyone” and those from Fan Pages. “We can tell if something is of quality on Facbook by leveraging Twitter,” as Sullivan paraphrases Bing’s response. “If the same link is shared in both places, it’s more likely to be legitimate.”

Bing does not use its new Facebook data in ordinary web search…yet.

On a related note, Bing is finding other interesting ways to utilize Facebook with search.

So, clearly it pays to tweet and build a credible Twitter presence. This means gaining a significant following in number, but also getting authoritative users to follow you (and hopefully retweet your links). This would appear to be good for plain old fashioned organic rankings as well as other supplemental search results. More importantly, it pays to create good content that will attract authoritative Twitterers to share it with others.

These things of course pay anyway, but it’s nice to know that they actually do have an effect on search rankings as well.

It’s not surprising that Twitter is currently playing a more important role in to search engine ranking than Facebook, simply because Twitter is public by default. Facebook is much more walled, meaning that most of the good Facebook data is private. Though it will be interesting to see what happens when Bing does integrate its newly acquired Facebook into its regular search offerings.

This wall of Facebook’s is also a factor into why Facebook could potentially unleash its own legitimate search engine. It’s got a search feature now of course, but there is a great deal of potential for them to do a whole lot more and really get under Google’s skin. More on that here.

Sullivan provides more background and context around the search engines’ social signals, as well as the full with both Bing and Google, and details about the Twitter Firehose’s lack of nofollow.

MySpace has been given a second life, and been included in the facebook family.
MySpace and facebook mashup is now available to all current MySpace and new Clients.
Mashup turns your Likes into real content on Myspace, creating a personalized entertainment stream full of videos, music, and more just for you. Now you can share your content in two places and increase your links and ranking in google thanks to the Mashup between facebook and MySpace.

You’ve no doubt heard or read about Facebook’s new messaging announcement this week. If not, the company announced a new messaging system to combine email, SMS, IM, Chat, and other forms of online communication, bringing them into one inbox. Along with this comes @facebook.com email addresses. CEO Mark Zuckerberg described the system as “starting from scratch” as opposed to being a Facebook email product.

Pat Matthews, SVP of RackSpace’s cloud computing business, which includes business email, shared some thoughts with us about the impact Facebook’s new offering will have on the email industry. RackSpace itself powers business email for over 2 million users.

“I don’t think Facebook will encroach on business mail, at least not anytime soon, mostly because of the security and privacy implications,” Matthews tells WebProNews. “Facebook is very consumer oriented and I don’t see this crossing into business anytime soon. Mark Zuckerberg has specifically stated the company is all about consumers. His focus is leading them to greatness.”

“I do think consumer mail is at risk,” he adds. “Consumers live in Facebook, not on Google. I think that Gmail and AOL should be worried.”

Still, Google has Google Apps going for it, which it has now expanded to encompass most of the company’s offerings. That could play a significant role in keeping businesses using Google, though Gmail has always been a part of Google Apps. I have to wonder if Google’s news wasn’t somehow spurred by Facebook’s.

“Facebook users will use Facebook mail as an extension of their already popular messaging services,” says Matthews. “I have no doubt this will be extremely popular.”

“Facebook is one of the most innovative companies on the planet,” he adds. “I think that they will influence all types of applications, business and consumer.”

It’s no secret that businesses are already placing a great deal of emphasis on reaching Facebook users, and it will be very interesting to see the impact the new messaging system has on their strategies. I’ve already speculated that we’ll start seeing more businesses utilizing personal profiles to try and get into Facebook users’ primary inboxes (as the system filters messages that aren’t from “friends” into a secondary inbox).

Social media and email have been getting closer and closer with one another for some time already. “In the past, organizations supported collaboration through e-mail and highly structured applications only,” said Monica Basso, research vice president at Gartner, who predicts 20% of employees will use social networks as a main business communication tool by 2014.

“Today, social paradigms are converging with e-mail, instant messaging (IM) and presence, creating new collaboration styles,” she said. “However, a truly collaborative, effective and efficient workplace will not arise until organizations make these capabilities widely available and users become more comfortable with them. Technology is only an enabler; culture is a must for success.””

When asked what Facebook’s new system means for the larger trend of social networking and email converging, Matthews told WebProNews, “Consumers want one view for many things but they also want very different views for their personal and business lives. This is why I really think Gmail should be worried.”

It is worth noting that the conversation with Matthews took place before Google’s announcement, so I’ll have to find out if this changes his opinion on that.

Facebook is so popular that business owners can simply no longer consider it a site only appropriate for socializing and game playing. In fact, in September 2010, Facebook surpassed Google in regards to the amount of time users spent on their site. Facebook states that users spend over 700 billion minutes per month on Facebook!

With 500 million active users, Facebook is the new behemoth on the Web. With its popularity across diverse age groups, integrated email application, and new Bing search integration, a Facebook user may simply no longer need to visit Google for Web searches or log off to use an email application. They may be able to experience the Web fully all from inside Facebook. With more than 50% of the active users logging into Facebook every day, according to Facebook, Facebook is now so important to your potential customers’ lives that it makes sense for you as a business owner to have a presence where your prospects are hanging out on a daily basis.

Let’s clear up a few things that have confused business owners about Facebook. First, a Business Page is not to be confused with a personal profile. They are two separate entities and provide different options and ways to interact with friends and colleagues.

Are Business Pages Also Called Fan Pages?

Many of you who have been using Facebook for a while will remember that Facebook used to call Business Pages – Fan Pages. Additionally, it used to be that someone “fanned you.” Now they “like you.” Don’t get confused in thinking that a Fan Page is a different product than a Business Page – they are one and the same.

All Facebook Business Pages start with the set-up of a personal Facebook profile. That’s right, a personal profile! You can’t just jump to Business Page set up. The email address and name you use for your personal profile must be one tied to a person and not a catchall email like info@mydomain.com. Remember, that if you have an employee set up your Facebook account and the personal profile portion for your Business Page, you don’t want to tie the new account to the employee’s email address. If the employee does so and leaves your employ, you could lose access to your Facebook Business Page, all of your accumulated fans, and information without recourse.

For set up, I typically recommend that one of the business owners create a new email address specifically for Facebook. Once you have set up the personal Facebook profile, you are ready to get started. But, don’t take time to add information like education and other details in this special account unless you plan on using it for your personal use. You are just setting up this account to have a platform to launch and access your new Facebook Business Page.

While logged in to your new personal account, visit this link: www.facebook.com/pages/create.php. It will take you to the Facebook Business Page creation tool to actually create your new page.

On the right side of the creation page under the heading the “Official Page” look for “Create a Page for a:” and then select “local business.” Enter your page name and then tick the box next to the statement that says you are a legal business representative and allowed to own the page. It is important to understand that the name you choose for the title of your Facebook Business Page will appear at the top of your finished page.

I recommend you use proper spelling but not use hyphens or underscores in your selected name. It used to be that you had to enter hyphens or the spaces would show as non-HTML characters in the page name and URL, but Facebook has grown beyond that. For example, enter in “My Business Name” (note the proper use of spacing and capitalization), not “My-Business-Name.” This name will appear in your new Business Page URL as well.

Once you clíck create, the next page you see will be your brand new Facebook Business Page. It is that simple. Later, after you’ve had 25 people “Like” your page, you will be able to select a vanity URL, but we’ll talk about that later.

Do My Personal Updates Show on My Business Page?

After you have set up your Facebook Business Page, you can “lock down” your personal profile that was used to launch your Business Page. To do so, just alter the privacy settings in the personal account to not show your personal information to others who are not “approved” friends.

When Facebook was first created many business owners including myself, started with a Facebook personal profile for their business. Now that Facebook has created Business Pages, you can easily change the privacy settings on your old personal profile to funnel your business traffic to your new Facebook Business Page, keeping your old personal profile just for family and close friends.

When you change the privacy settings on the personal profile attached to your Business Page, it does not impact who can view information about your Business Page. Conversely, if you post pictures of your kids on your Facebook personal profile that is the launch pad for your Business Page, and you have your personal profile limited to “friends only”, your kids’ photos will not appear on the wall of your Business Page.

Why Exactly Would a Business Owner Want a Business Page and Not Just Use a Personal Profile?

Several reasons to have a Facebook Business Page are: the ability to contact all people who “Like” or who “Fan” you with one clíck newsletter type notes, interact with discussion questions like a forum, set up events and invite fans to attend, and even create specialized welcome and shopping pages. Your Business Page can almost be a mini website!

Creating Your Business Page Vanity URL

Once you have 25 people who have clicked that they “Like” your Business Page, you can select a short easy to remember name to promote on your website and business card. Your Business Page goes from something like http://www.facebook.com/pages/Waldorf-MD/mccord-web/129943573719686?ref=sgm to something like this http://www.facebook.com/mccordweb. Just visit this link www.facebook.com/username. You can have vanity URLs for both your personal account and Business Page.

It is very important to understand that once you have selected your vanity URL you will not be able to change the name, so select carefully.

Best Practice Tips for Keeping Your New Facebook Business Page Updated

No one wants to be spammed, but sometimes new Business Page owners get excited and post what seems like a constant flow of information on their wall. It is important to understand that what you post on your wall is posted on the wall of the people who have clicked “Like” on your page. We encourage our clients, when they are doing status updates themselves, to be courteous and post about twice a day. Facebook is not Twitter and so 5 to 10 status updates a day could get you blocked or hidden by fans when they feel you have inundated their wall with your daily or hourly updates.

Conclusion

I hope that this white paper has helped to introduce you to Facebook Business Pages in a way that helps you to feel that you can easily set one up and have fun doing it. If you haven’t set up your Facebook Business Page, now’s the time to consider setting one up. Facebook is only getting more popular and is actively seeking to woo the business community into their portal with demographic based pay per clíck advertising and the new integrated search with Bing.com.

Coming up with a social media plan isn’t always the easiest thing to do for businesses. There are so many factors that come into play, even beyond the landscape of communities that actually exist. For example, business leaders need to ask questions like: How much time should be spent interacting with social media sites? How many people should be representing the company on social sites? How much of their time should be dedicated to it? Should it be the full-time job of one person? The full-time jobs of more people? Only part of the job for a lot of people? Etc. Etc. Etc.

No matter how much time and how many resources are spent on your brand’s social media presence, more can always be done, so many will have to find they have to be selective in areas of participation and time spent. If your budget and time aren’t as restricted, you can build an enormous social presence around the web in the places that matter. Just remember, more can always be done. We at WebProNews certainly have plenty of room to expand and improve our own social strategy, and chances are you do too.

So, with all of that in mind, here are some ideas you can use to build your social presence.

Twitter

1. Post regular Twitter updates everyday. That doesn’t mean spam or post them constantly all day long, but there should be enough regularity to where your followers know you’re there and don’t forget about you. That said, don’t talk just to talk. Have something valuable to say. If you produce content, share your links. Some may not think it’s a good idea just to pump out your own links on Twitter, because it’s “about the conversation”, but the way I look at is this: if someone is following me, they’re probably interested in what I have to say. If I’m writing articles, those are in essence, what I have to say. That doesn’t mean that it’s not about the conversation.

2. You should engage in conversation on Twitter. Start conversations that don’t necessarily pertain to your own links. Listen to what others are saying, and join conversations with them, regardless of if they are directly related to your brand or not.

3. Monitor your brand. Respond to @mentions (good or bad). Respond to direct messages.

4. Post pictures and videos using services like TwitPic, TwitVid, Yfrog, etc. These things can help humanize your brand and increase engagement with others. They can be conversation starters. People like visuals.

5. Create relevant lists. Create lists of other Twitterers that can provide value to others. You don’t necessarily have to, but it might be a good idea to create a variety of lists for subjects related to your niche. If you have a car blog, for example, you might have a list of car brands, a list of other car bloggers, a list for mechanics, a list of auto part vendors, etc.

Facebook

1. Have a Facebook Page for your brand. If you’re running a business, you need a Page, not just a personal profile. What you do with your personal profile is up to you, but your page should be up, and it should be promoted.

2. Post regular updates throughout the day. Just like Twitter, I see nothing wrong with sharing links to your content here if you write articles or blog posts. I should note that this should be actual helpful content though – not just posts about why people should buy your product. Nobody wants to be a fan of a page that does that.

3. Respond to comments on your Page. Get involved in conversations.

4. Update your photos and videos. You don’t have to use third-party services for this on Facebook.

5. Experiment with landing pages for your Facebook Page. It doesn’t have to go right to your wall. You can direct fans to any information you want to provide.

6. You can use “notes” to put blog-style content right in Facebook should you choose to do so.

7. There is a virtually unlimited number of Facebook apps. Look for ones that might be able to add value to your page and get people engaged in a helpful way. This will also take some experimenting.

YouTube (and other video sites)

1. If you create videos, you need to have them on YouTube and other video sites/networks. This is key for getting your videos out to a wider audience.

2. These sites are also communities. Respond to comments and subscribe to others. Make friends in the communities.

3. Push subscriptions to your channels. Keeping people subscribed means keeping them engaged as you continue to produce content. This can help build a following.

4. Even if you don’t create your own videos, it doesn’t mean that you can’t get involved in conversations and comment on others’ videos.

5. You can create “favorites” lists of videos that can be helpful, even if they’re not your videos (similar to the Twitter lists).

MySpace

1. MySpace may not be the current flavor of the week, but make no mistake – it’s still got a lot of users. Makes friends on MySpace with like-minded individuals and businesses, and expand your network here.

2. Like anything else, keep up with your comments and direct messages, and engage in conversation on and off your own page.

3. Have a professional-looking design for your page.

4. Highlight your best content.

5. Update your page regularly with new status updates, blog entries, videos, etc.

Google Buzz

1. Update Buzz regularly throughout the day with links and general conversation. Basically, treat it similar to Facebook or Twitter.

2. Engage in conversation on and off your own Buzz posts.

3. Spend some time making your Google Profile (which is connected to Buzz…and appears in Google search results) the best it can be. Provide links to your other profiles.

4. Integrate other options that are available and applicable to you (Google Reader sharing, Picasa photos, Orkut, etc.)

5. You can apply these to other networks like LinkedIn and FriendFeed as well.

Digg, Reddit, Delicious, StumbleUpon, etc.

1. Share links to others’ content on social bookmarking sites like these regularly. This will help you build a following.

2. Have buttons to make your own content easy to share on these sites.

3. Engage in conversations in the comments of links you share and links others share on these sites.

4. Become friends with others like-minded and interesting people on these networks.

Forums

1. Find relevant topics in forums that are also relevant to your business and get involved in existing conversations.

2. Start your own relevant conversations. Don’t just get in there and link to your content. It’s tacky and people will see through it. You can often provide your link in your profile anyway.

3. If you have built up enough credibility in a forum, you might be able to share a link of your own from time to time in a legitimate fashion, like for example, if you wrote an article on the topic being discussed that helps to answer a question that is being asked.

4. The more actively you engage in useful conversation, the more credibility you will gain, and you can come to be looked upon as an expert in your field.

Blogs

1. If you have a blog, keep up with the comments. Respond and stay involved in the conversations. If people disagree with you, which they often will, don’t make a big deal about it or try to prove them wrong. You might just be driving them away. Keep it constructive. Respectfully disagree and maybe elaborate on why you stand by your position, or if they change your mind, maybe tell them you hadn’t looked at things that way.

2. Take the time to participate in conversation on other relevant blogs. You can basically think of blog comments as mini forums. The same rules pretty much apply.

Photos

1. As I said, people like visuals, especially current users of sites like Flickr and Picasa. Update photo sites regularly. Again, this can help humanize your brand and even open you up to different audiences.

2. Participate in conversations in comments on and off of your own photos.

3. Promote your presence on these sites. On your own site/blog, maybe have some links pointing to these accounts.

The Right Person/People for the Job

1. You want to make sure you have the right person or people representing your brand in all of these communities. You don’t want someone that doesn’t really understand your company’s vision or position to be out there giving people the wrong impression.

2. Whoever is representing your brand should have a grasp on current news and strategies related to what your business provides. In other words, they should be knowledgeable. It wouldn’t hurt for the people involved to have a designated amount of time each day just reading news.

Finally, just keep everything up to date and current. Don’t let profiles go sour. Don’t let comments, questions, and messages sit there to rot. You’ve got to keep up with it all. So, with that in mind, don’t bite off more than you can chew in social media. Look at how much of this you actually want to do, and plan time and resources accordingly.

This is by no means all that can be done. There are plenty of other communities I didn’t mention, and probably a great deal more strategies that I didn’t touch upon. I think the things mentioned in this article should be a good start though.

The Issues as We See Them

The real issue is that professional real estate agents/ investors are being wrongly advised when it comes to creating and sharing content. Those things they are told might be relevant to their efforts – simply are not. Using information without taking a good look at the source of it will quite likely result in a real waste of your time and efforts. If you’re told that you should be tweeting, twittering, posting, and endlessly sharing, the advice you’re being given should be moderated by your good sense.

While other self-proclaimed experts may be leading you down a path, or giving you misplaced hope, the reality is that you probably will not be markedly successful in getting a social media campaign off the ground in a week or two. The best advice that you will get from anyone is to use your common sense and do yóur own thinking. There simply aren’t any quick fixes or instant gratification arenas for those who want to get social media campaigns working for their benefit.

Most important of all, social media campaigns require relevant and excellent content to achieve. You can learn those strategies that it will take to share them, but the reality is that first that content must be created. The creation as well as the sharing of solid content will take time and learned skills to master.

What Are Your Next Steps?

Three key components are going to be next in line for you to get any measure of success. Identification, Recognition, and Organization.

Identification – what is your role in getting solid, relevant content for your website or your customers? If you’re a creator, or a writer, or a curator, then you already know where you fit into the equation.

The Creator can identify the need of the audience and can help to address that need. The solutions offered may be video, media of other varieties, written content, or even brochures. It may be a complete mixture of every type of content, including a blog that goes along with social media postings.

A Curator for the content is someone who will sort through all of the internet content that is out there and find those things that may be applicable to their chosen or intended audience. This is quite literally a hunter-gatherer of the internet. Sharing links, offering tweets, getting articles and rewriting them, selecting what will be a good draw for your chosen audience and then creating something like that is what a curator/creator does.

The Challenges that You Will Face

Among the other challenges that you will face when you are furnishing content will be those of frequency and a balancing act. The content that you provide to your readers or viewers comes to them as a representation of you. Too much means that you are nothing more than a marketer, too little means that you don’t really care. This content doesn’t just come from your brand, it tells them a great deal about you.

You’re going to want to not only balance the frequency of the content, but also to be sure that you check it yourself prior to offering it on your website or other venue. Whether you elect to share that content in a feed, on a website, or on a single page, check it out first. Watch the videos and read the articles that you are offering as content to your audience.

Poor advice, poorly written content, grainy videos that share information that is not relevant or aren’t well done, reflect badly on you. If you don’t create the content yourself, then at least take steps to vet it for quality and relevancy. Your end goal is to share content that you believe would be good for the customer or client. Offering them less than a helpful tip or good advice makes you look bad. Your primary purpose here is to expand your reputation, as well as to give them content that will help them. If you give bad advice, it’s far worse than no advice at all.

Frequency – No one wants an endless stream of things that say nothing at all. Lincoln once said it was better to remain silent and be thought a fool, than to speak up and rémove all doubt. That’s good advice whether you are speaking or offering content. Selecting a great deal of content and striving to provide an endless stream that gives no real benefit isn’t going to be in your best interests. Choose your content carefully and release it in drips, rather than in floods.

Let your motivation be to release content that adds good quality advice to the lives of those who read it, not merely an endless stream of drivel. Tweeting, Facebooking, Digging, are all important aspects of getting your content out there, but make it good quality content that improves the outlook or the knowledge of your reader, not merely reminds them you are alive. The whole thing is about adding quality-to the reader’s life-as well as yóur own. Be a well-trusted source of advice, not an endless stream of drivel.

The hype around social media just keeps getting louder. Every week a new campaign and a new platform is released. So why has social media gone mainstream?

Online networks, including social ones, evolve and take on a life of their own. In the real world, for multi-celled organisms to exist a number of cells must work together to make something bigger. When individual cellular components work together multi-celled organisms evolve and these can evolve into complex life forms over time. A branch of these complex life-forms evolved and eventually became humans. Human civilization has in turn evolved to where we are now because we have mastered the art of continually grouping together into teams, tribes, cities, and nation states to create something that is bigger than the sum of its parts.

Networking and collaboration is fundamental to what it means to be human. In our bodies are atoms working together to create cells and cells working together to create our organs. In our brains neurons work together to create our thoughts, feelings and language. In your company people are working together – to create something bigger and more exciting than the sum of its parts. We can take this thinking and look at the development of the personal computer and see a very similar pattern emerging.

Before anyone had a computer or a smart phone, everything was a social event. Meetings were face-to-face, or over the phone at least, and communication in general was human to human based. In the last 30 years things have changed. Initially, the personal computer made everything a private and secluded affair. Games, for example, could be played without the help of another human and work could happen sitting in front of a screen. The advent of the early Internet showed how powerful many computers networked together could be, but from a personal perspective ‘computing’ was an insular activity.

The first social networks, forums and blogs worked with a huge number of anonymous users. While this was a step forward in person-to-person networking, the anonymity allowed people to behave in ways that they wouldn’t ever dream of in real life. This left many of these networks to be the domain of the very early adopters and special interest groups. The ‘rules’ that govern effective social networks were yet to be developed.

What has happened recently, particularly with Facebook, is that it has become far easier to transport your real identity around the web. This means that increasingly people are joining new social networks with their ‘real identity’: their real name; their place of work; and other details that define them as a person in a movement – sometimes referred to as the ‘Open Web.’ Naturally this makes people think more carefully about what they say and how they behave on social networks – because they ‘own’ their comments the common rules of society come into play. When a person’s reputation is attached to what they say it makes them think carefully about what that comment might mean to others.

Of course people can still misbehave in social networks, like they can in real world networks, but the networks are now being governed by majority rule so this behavior is quickly dealt with. This makes cooperation and collaboration much easier and because of this the barriers to entry are dropping at an astronomical rate. Companies can now start to feel more secure in setting up their own networks knowing that majority of users will join to get value out of the information that is provided and quickly deal with other users who lessen the overall value of that network.

So when thinking about why social media has become so widely adopted and pondering about where it is going avoid getting distracted by the leaps in technology. These are important, of course, but it is the behavior of the network and the developments of new social norms that are really driving the progress. Every individual in this massive network is doing what he or she is pre-programmed to do – communicate, collaborate, and continue the march of our civilization’s evolution.

The future of the Social Web will see openness and ownership of communication adopted on a much greater scale as the tools to do so become more wide spread and easier to adopt. The potential economic benefits of social media will force this to happen. Companies can and will want access to increasingly granular data about their ‘stakeholders’ – employees, supporters, and consumers. Knowing what individuals are saying, how they are behaving and who is influencing them is critical and valuable information.

With Facebook’s release of its new developer tools in April this year, there has been an even bigger push towards the Open Web – something that many market analysts are predicting will make the eventual float of Facebook bigger than that of Google’s IPO. The rules governing online social networks are beginning to mature. Unsurprisingly, they closely reflect those that exist in offline world.

One of the great things about the work I do is that I have a bird’s eye view of what’s working and what’s not when it comes to social media. Every so often I like to give sort of a “state of the union” on Facebook and Twitter best practices, because as I am sure you know, social media is constantly growing, changing and evolving.

As you’ll see, some of the strategies I am recommending are tried and true-they have been working since day one and will probably continue to for the considerable future.

However, there may be a few here that you’ve never considered-or may even be surprised by. But they are what I see as being the biggest keys to success and results for business owners on the two hottest social networks on the planet: Facebook and Twitter.

1. Find your peeps.

What this means is that you want to become part of the community you are looking to serve. The first step of course is to be clear on whom it is you want to serve and what problem you are solving for them. Once you know that, the goal is to go where they are hanging out.

There are specific tools you can use to easily find and interact with your target market. Two of my favorites for Twitter are wefollow.com and search.twitter.com.

2. Concentrate on conversing and building relationships, instead of broadcasting and selling.

One of the most common yet biggest mistakes that people make when they are first introduced to social media is to focus on pushing their product or service in a spammy way. That approach fails miserably in social media because most people are there to build relationships and interact.

There’s nothing wrong with letting others know what’s going on with you or your business sometimes–just be sure to intersperse your tweets or Facebook updates with some two-way conversation.

3. Use a Facebook personal profile AND a Facebook business page TOGETHER.

This might be a little “controversial” – and don’t get me wrong, your business SHOULD have a Page — but when you have a personal profile, you are able to interact with other people much more easily.

As a business Page, a Page can’t go comment on another person’s Wall or profile or in their Group or on THEIR Page AS that Page. You are really contained inside the space of your own Page. This might be something to consider because a lot of the magic of Facebook and the relationship-building and rapport-building comes from that ability to interact.

4. Cross-post and cross promote.

Once you’ve decided to make social media a part of your marketing strategy, you don’t want to keep it to yourself.

There are lots of ways to spread the word, for example: you’ll want to advertise your social presence on your blog, add links to your email signature and use one social media platform to post to another.

5. Use a social media dashboard like Hootsuite and other productivity tools to accomplish more in less time.

Hootsuite.com is my hands-down favorite, free social media tool, and the reason why is because it does so many different things. For example, you can use it to update many social networks at once, including Twitter, Facebook and LinkedIn; you can use it to pre-schedule tweets and status updates and more.

6. Get them on the list.

In most cases, people aren’t going to buy from you right off of sites like Facebook and Twitter. You need to shift your thinking from “how can I get this person to buy from me or hire me now?” to “how can I bring this person into my community and strengthen the relationship with them on an ongoing basis?”

One of the best ways to do this is to offer people a way to provide their email address via your blog or website so that you have permission to keep in touch and build an ongoing relationship with them.

7. Measure and track your social media results.

Measuring the ROI of social media isn’t exactly cut and dry. I am often asked how you can tell whether the time you’ve spent on social media activities is really making a difference.

Some of the best metrics? Blog comments, blog subscribers, newsletter subscribers, social media profile engagement, number of friends and followers and website traffic to name a few.

No matter who your target market is, you can be sure that at least some segment of them is using social media. The important thing is to understand that social media is a great way to get in front of that target audience.

And remember, you may not be able to equate your interactions to dollars now, but what you are doing is planting seeds which can have big payoffs later on.

Most of the strategies I’ve mentioned here aren’t really “strategies” unless you keep applying them over time-so stick with it to reap those results you’ve been searching for.