The best part of social media is being social. So don’t limit yourself to being social only on the web; nurture your connections by taking them offline. Today, I’m giving you 3 tips for keeping the social in social media. 

1. Help Connect

It’s not just about your product, brand, or organization now that the conversations have kicked off and you’ve made all these amazing connections. The people you’ve been communicating, interacting, and engaging with really need to connect with each other, too. Events are really important for community building. Create meetups, tweetups and other offline events to get your community together and interacting – not just with your brand, but with each other. Facilitate introductions to help others get connected, and build their networks both online and off.

2. It’s All About Relationships

Think of social networking the same way you think of networking offline. It’s all about relationships. People want to do business with people they know, and support the people they like. Make time on your social calendar for attending industry events. That will provide an opportunity to meet your followers one-on-one, reconnect with clients, meet new prospects, and deepen your relationships within your community. The personal connections you make at these events will also help drive referrals to your social media channels and corporate website.

Platforms like Eventbrite (see: others like Eventbrite) can help you find and share events to attend. Don’t stop there though. Let your community know where and when they can find you, by sharing this information on your website and in your blog.

3. Close the Circle

Once you get back to the office, be sure to close the circle with all those great people you’ve met. Let them know it was great to meet them and thank them for chatting with you. Also, take a moment to think about projects you can work on collaboratively. When you genuinely take an interest in what others in your online community have going on, they’ll be more inclined to check in and see what you’ve got going on as well. Real connections help you to feel more invested in people’s projects.

Cement these relationships by meeting routinely. If you’re bound by geographic restrictions, pick up the phone (or use FaceTime, Zoom or Skype) and connect. Face-to-face connections are wonderful, but when that isn’t practical, hearing someone’s voice is the next best thing.

Do you connect offline with the people you met online? What’s one simple step you would add to help keep the social in social media? Let me know in the comments below.

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If you’re new to social media, you’re probably wondering what the heck hashtags are and do I use them effectively. You’re in luck! In this blog post, I’m going to cover those questions and so much more!

What The Heck Are Hashtags?

Hashtags assign topics to your posts, status updates, and articles. Using the pound sign # {or hash} on a social network {think Twitter, Instagram, Pinterest, Google+ and even Facebook}, turns any word or group of words that directly follow it, into a searchable link, allowing you to organize content and track discussion topics based on those keywords. That means, if you wanted to post about your visit to NYC like I did above, you would include #NYC in your status update to join the conversation. Click on any hashtag to see all the posts that mention that topic/subject in real-time.

How to Format Your Hashtags

The first thing you should know is that you don’t want to use spaces – even if your hashtag contains multiple words. But you do want to differentiate those words by using upper and lower case. For example, Pen Island would look better, and make much more sense, as #PenIsland than as #penisland, don’t you agree?  Uppercase letters won’t alter your search results so people searching for #abc will get the same results as people searching for #ABC.

Numbers are supported, so #EasyAs123 works. Sadly, punctuation marks are not supported. So commas, periods, exclamation points, question marks, and apostrophes are out. While you’re at it, skip asterisks, ampersands and any other special characters.

There Are No Presets

There isn’t a master list of hashtags, but you can search your social networks {and search engines} to see if there’s a hashtag already in use for a particular subject or topic. You can even check services like HashAtIt, Hashtagify, and Hashtags.org. Remember, every time you add a hashtag in front of a word or phrase, you’re creating a hashtag. Try it out!

How You Can Use Hashtags

Hashtags are supported on Twitter {where they started}, Instagram, Pinterest, and even Facebook, now. There are so many different ways you can use hashtags, the possibilities are almost endless. However, I wanted to give you a few ways you can use them, along with a few tips.

• Don’t forget, hashtags turn words into searchable links
• Always start with a # and leave out spaces
• Use upper and lowercase to differentiate words
• Use them during conferences and events
• Use them in conversations around specific topics
• Use them for Twitter Chats
• Use them during television shows (#CNN, #GreysAnatomy, #JurassicWorld)
• Hashtags can be used anywhere within your post or update
• Use them to find like-minded individuals
• Use them to find people discussing the topics you’re interested in
• Use them to create a following for your brand/blog/business
• Use them to complement photos you share on Instagram (This helps you discover new accounts and pick up followers)
• Use them to show off your personality, brand voice or tone
• Use them for fun!

Again, these are just a few ways you can use hashtags while you’re using social media. What would you add to this article to help people trying to understand hashtags? How are you using hashtags? Let me know in the comments below!

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The South Florida Twitter Community Don’t Confuse your Community with Social Media Acronyms Three Tips for Finding your Brand’s Voice 5 Super Simple Tips to Make Your Brand More Enchanting

You’re at your desk, a cup of coffee in hand and you’re ready to start your day. You can’t wait! Soon, you’ll be representing your brand across various social networks. The first order of business on your list today is to begin reading some of those great social media blogs that were suggested to you by your friends and followers. You open up your RSS reader, dive in, and suddenly realize within the first few paragraphs about CRM, sCRM, ROI and KPI that you’re overwhelmed by all these acronyms. What the heck do they mean and how can you focus on the point of the article if you have to keep stopping to look them up?

Keep It Simple

It happens. Sometimes professionals forget that not everyone in their audience knows exactly what they know. This isn’t exclusive to social media either. It doesn’t matter what industry you’re in, every industry has its own terminologies and they can be quite confusing at times. Therefore, when setting out to share industry-related knowledge across your social networks consider keeping it simple. Think the KISS method = keep it super simple.

It doesn’t matter what social network you’re on or if you’re writing for the corporate blog, consider that on any given day your audience might range from someone who’s learning about your brand for the very first time to the industry insider who’s considered an influencer. You want to build a community based on your brand. Doing so means not only talking with others in your industry but perhaps educating consumers as well. If you want to use acronyms, instead of assuming that everyone knows what you’re talking about, explain exactly what each acronym means the first time you use it. The same goes for industry terminology too. Don’t get caught up in technical jargon. You don’t need it to present yourself as a thought leader and you may find yourself alienating part of your community if you don’t take the time to educate and inform when necessary.

Become A Resource 

If you find yourself using acronyms and industry terms quite a bit, think about creating a glossary post on your corporate blog that can be used as a resource within your community. You can link back to it and reference it as needed. Plus, one of the best parts about creating it on your own site is that you’ll have the ability to update it as needed. You may even want to take it a step further and create a white paper that others can download and share.

About Those Social Media Acronyms

Because social media terminology is ever-evolving, like social media itself, it would be quite an undertaking to try to list every single social media term. I also didn’t want you to walk away without anything, though. So, here are a few of the popular social media acronyms and what they mean. Again, this isn’t a definitive list but rather a few of the more popular terms I thought you’d like to know:

• B2B: Business to business
• B2C: Business to consumer
• CGM: Consumer-generated media
• CMS: Content management system
• CPA: Cost per action
• CPC: Cost per click
• CR: Conversion rate
• CRM: Customer relationship management
• CSS: Cascading style sheet
• CTR: Click-through rate
• DM: Direct message
• ERP: Enterprise resource planning
• FB: Facebook
• FF: Follow Friday
• HT: Hat tip
• IG: Instagram
• KPI: Key performance indicators
• PM: Private Message
• QR Code: Quick response code
• ROI: Return on investment
• ROR: Return on relationship
• RSS: Real simple syndication
• RT: ReTweet
• SCRM: Social customer relationship management
• SEM: Search engine marketing
• SEO: Search engine optimization
• SERP: Search engine result page
• SM: Social media
• SMB: Small and Medium business
• SMM: Social media marketing
• TOS: Terms of service
• UGC: User-generated content
• URL: Uniform resource locator

You can also check out Aaron Friedman’s Digital and Social Media Acronyms post at Digital Highrise for a more detailed list.

Remember, your goal is to keep your community engaged, enchanted, and educated about your brand, so make things easy to understand. Looking to learn more? Read all my How To posts.

Do you find technical jargon, acronyms, and industry terminology distracting when reading articles or trying to follow conversations? Are you using them yourself? What popular acronyms am I missing? Please let me know in the comments below.

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