Increasing Your Social Media Influence
I’m always telling people that success at social media is not about money. You can’t measure your Twitter income or your Facebook revenue each day in the same way that you should be keeping track of your AdSense earnings or your affiliate income. It doesn’t work that way.
Social media is about relationships. It’s about networking. It’s about content. And it’s about influence. You want to build up your social media capital so that when you do want people to take action — whether that’s talking about your new product, signing up to a workshop or even just reading a blog post — your followers are interested in you and like you enough to want to do so.
That influence doesn’t come quickly. It comes through being interesting over time. Keep posting good content on your Twitter stream, engage with your followers, join their conversations and invite them into your own, and you’ll start to build that networking power. It happens gradually, but it does happen even if you can’t measure it.
There is a way though that you can shorten the time it takes to build up that influence. Get seen on the Twitter streams of other influential users and you can benefit from some of the influence that they’ve created.
And the secret to doing that is…
To be influential first.
It sounds like a Catch 22 but it’s more like a vertical spiral. If you’re building influence, it’s because you’ve got good content and positive networking. That means that influence-holders will want to share your content with their own followers. They’ll be happy to answer your questions, they’ll want your name on their timelines and they won’t mind retweeting your posts, your links and your requests.
I see lots of people ask twitterers with large followings for retweets, and it looks like a simple enough thing to do. It doesn’t cost anything, it’s free content and it can only bring benefits. But major twitterers don’t want to post content that their followers might not enjoy. Prove first that you’re building influence and attracting an audience, and you’ll find that the whole world of social media is open to you.
