How To Increase Your Social Media Presence

I just came back from a conference in California on how to increase your social media presence online. It was fascinating. I learned a great deal and really wanted to write a post sharing some of the key things I learned while attending this conference.

What Is Social Media?

To avoid any confusion, I first want to define social media, as there are a lot of conflicting views on what it actually is. Social media are sites that allow people and organizations to create and share content. For example, Facebook and Twitter are some of the biggest social networking websites we all love and use. For personal use, this is really simple. You use the platform you like most and in particular, you use the sites where your friends hang out on. If your friends are on Twitter, you probably use Twitter as well.

From a business point of view, it gets a bit more complicated. What I learned from the conference however, is that it’s important to be active on different social networking websites. Below I’ll give you an example how a business can do this.

How To Get Your Message Out To Customers?

In California, I met a dentist who is setting up a website allowing people to find the best dentist in their area. Their website can be found at . We had an interesting conversation about how they are setting up their social media profiles to reach more users. The key takeaway from the conversation was that having just a website isn’t enough anymore. For example, they are setting up different social properties to be able to engage much more closely with people looking for a new dentist in their neighborhood. Social media is making this much simpler, especially with the advent of smart phones.

As a quick example, the website mentioned above is building out a . Such a blog helps them to connect with its users and allows them to share news, pictures and updates with their growing audience. Tumblr has 226 million different blogs on its network, and is one of the biggest blogging websites on the internet. If your business is not on Tumblr, you might want to make some time to ensure you set up your own blog on there to increase social exposure. What’s more this website isn’t going anywhere, as it’s owned by Yahoo.

While this is very time intensive, there are a few platforms out there which are much easier to use. One of them is Twitter, which you probably use already. What you might now know however is that they have an estimated user base of 284 million. This is massive! Especially if you understand that 500 million Tweets are sent every day. I can’t even comprehend how that’s possible. What is evident however is that if you are working on building out a brand, you need to be on Twitter. This is where your audience spends time online every single day so you just can’t miss the opportunity to talk to them at least every month. I personally am not a fan of the 140-character limit but despite this, I’m still using this to talk to my audience.

Hopefully this recap of what I learned in California will help you to build your own presence online.