How to Start Real Conversations Using Social Media Communities

Social media conversations are just like real conversations.

The key to a great conversation is to start by listening. What are other people talking about in your industry? Does it differ from social network to social network? Spend a few minutes searching around to get a scope of the landscape.

You probably wouldn’t have the same conversation in the library as you would in a bar, right? Even if you end up talking about the same topic, you’re likely to abide by different social norms (whispering versus yelling) and have something different in your hand (a book versus a beer).

Consider social networks in the same light.

The nature and style of your conversations are going to depend on 1) the specifics of your online brand and 2) the social norms of the social network.

→ See if you can start a few relevant conversation on each of your social networks. I’ll explain some of my favorite ways to do this to help you spark some of your own ideas.

Twitter

Conversations are happening on Twitter all the time. Find some active businesses or people in your industry and see what they’re saying. Search for relevant hashtags and see what questions people are asking. Is there an obvious knowledge gap where you can be most helpful?

Here are a few specific ways to take advantage of Twitter conversations.

1. Alert someone to your article.

This is particularly useful if you actually wrote about them, but it can also be great if they fit into your target audience. When I wrote 12 Twitter Tools to Improve Your Online Reputation, I spent time personally tweeting each of the businesses I wrote about, letting them know I had shouted them out.     

It took maybe 10-15 minutes, but I couldn’t believe the engagement I received. Nearly all of the businesses retweeted me, and some of my tweets really blew up. Just for letting them know!

When I tweeted @Canva, I got favorited 7 times, and probably earned some new Canva-lover readers in the process.

2. Ask a question.

Twitter is a great place to ask questions. If you trust a particular thought leader in your industry, consider targeting them. Otherwise, just ask the general public what they think about a particular topic or article. It won’t always blow up like Buffer’s tweets do, but you may spark some fun conversations along the way.

3. Start a conversation.

Did you read an interesting article recently? Chances are you’re not the only one. Try searching the title of the article on Twitter and seeing who else shared it recently. Tweet at them and tell them what you think. You never know what kind of conversation your tweet may spark.

You can also tell your audience a fun fact, a useful tip or an industry-specific anecdote.

When I tweeted @Crowdfire back in August, I received the most engagement I’ve ever received on a tweet in my life. 128 favorites! I hadn’t even written my 12 Twitter Tools article yet, but it made me realize the potential for articles like that.

4. Engage your active audience.

Sometimes you might tweet something and find that someone else tweeted back at you. That’s terrific! Take advantage of that low-hanging fruit and keep the conversation going!

Or, if someone has shared your content, take a second to thank them for the support. You’d be surprised how much a heartfelt thank-you can mean for long-term engagement.

NOTE: You can also get involved in Twitter Chats, where a group of Twitter users meet at a pre-determined time to discuss a certain topic. I don’t have too much experience there yet, but Buffer has an incredibly in-depth article about Twitter Chats if you want to learn more.

LinkedIn

Here are four ways to spark conversations on the professional networking giant:

1. Comment on status updates

This is pretty self-explanatory. If someone shares an article related to your industry, make a relevant comment and try to start a conversation. Ask what they thought about a particular point or provide them with another article that gives a different view.

2. LinkedIn Communities

LinkedIn Communities are a fun way to have discussions with groups of like-minded peers. Find some communities that make sense for you and start by weighing in on popular discussions. Respond to existing comments, provide an insight or opinion, or even ask a thought-provoking question.

See what topics and discussions are resonating with members the most, and start asking similar questions to encourage engagement. Be wary about including links to your sites, especially at the start. You want to be seen as a valuable part of the community, not a self-promotional salesperson. If you’re diligent, you’ll eventually be recognized as a top influencer, which allows your posts to be seen by more people in the group.

3. Use status updates for engagement

You can obviously use status updates as a self-promotional tool. But a great way to get engagement is to share OTHER people’s articles, especially when you can tag them in your post. Use the @ sign just like you would to tag someone on Twitter.

4. Messages

Private messages on LinkedIn have a connotation of being spammy, but your efforts may be worthwhile if you can personalize your message for a few specific people. Consider asking for some folks’ opinions on an article, their thoughts on an industry topic, or feedback on your latest post.

Quora  

There are three primary ways to engage in meaningful conversations on Quora:

1. Ask a question related to your industry.

Quora is a terrific place to get answers or start conversations among industry experts. Remember to first check whether or not someone has already asked your question!

2. Answer someone else’s question.

Quora is a great place to share some of your industry-specific knowledge and link back to an article if it’s appropriate. If you have a terrific answer on a popular question, you’re likely to get hundreds or thousands of views on your content. That’s a huge opportunity!

3. Ask someone specific to answer a question, either yours or someone else’s.

Quora’s ‘Ask to Answer’ feature is pretty neat. It lets you target specific people in your industry to get the quality answers you seek. You can ask 15 people per question, so make your choices mindfully.

Closing Note:

There are countless ways to engage people on social media. You can find Google+ communities that match your niche, comment on Slideshare accounts that fit your brand, and ask questions about a particular Instagram post. These are just a few of my favorite ways on some classic social networks, but I encourage you to explore your own.

How to Grow Your Instagram Following, Quickly and Organically

I'm going to show you an easy process for growing your Instagram following. 

I’ve used it to grow my following from just a couple hundred to a couple thousand in a few weeks’ time.

And it’s not just the amount of people following me. Look, my likes have skyrocketed over the same time period:

Not bad, right?

So let’s get started. For this process, you only need Instagram and Crowdfire on your phone.

Open the Crowdfire app, connect your Instagram account, and then click Copy Followers.

Enter the name of someone relatively big in your niche on Instagram. The goal here is to find someone whose followers are likely to want to follow you too.

I picked mealsandreels (they are DevourPower now if you want to check them out.) I love their food content and their followers will hopefully like mine too!

Then go to town clicking the + button. You’ll be quickly following the most engaged followers of the account you chose.

Do it until Crowdfire tells you to chill out. Why the limit? Well, Instagram puts in follow limits to stop spammy behavior so we’ll have to wait another hour before doing this again.

Rinse and repeat as you desire. Then, go back a few days later and open up Crowdfire’s Non Followers section.

Now go through and mass unfollow everyone who’s not following you back until you can’t anymore. Obviously, feel free to continue following accounts that don’t follow you back. But this is how you keep your ratio of followers to following nice and tight.

The last step is to dive back into Instagram and check out who you’re following.

I review each account for a second to see if they have a feed that interests me. If they do, great -- I’ll keep them. If not, then I’ll unfollow them.

I’ve had people tell me “but that’s so mean! You follow them just to unfollow them?!”

Look at it this way...if your feed looks anything like this, there’s just no reason for me to be following you.

And that’s all there is to it! Continue using the combination of 1) mass copy followers 2) unfollow non followers 3) unfollow uninteresting accounts individually.

How to Make Custom Pinterest Pins on Canva

Canva allows you to make killer slideshows and infographics, but that’s not all it’s good for. You can also craft your own made-to-order Pinterest pins.

Now why would you want to do this?

Well, let's say you just finished writing an article. You’ve shared it on Twitter and LinkedIn and now you’re ready to expand your audience to Pinterest users.

You could just pin it from your blog, but then you only get a simple image. 

Not bad, but when people are scrolling through hundreds of pins, your image gives people little indication of what you’re actually sharing.

See how my article gets lost in all the noise? It's colorful but the other pins are longer and have great-looking text right on the image. Makes them awfully clickable, doesn’t it?

So let’s do the same thing to our pin.

Open up Canva and get started on a Pinterest Graphic.

Throw in the image you want to use. I like to enlarge it and see if there is a good spot to put the title.

Obviously, this one worked out well because of the convenient speech bubble. But you don’t need that to make this work.

Here’s another I made -- I just found some empty space on the bottom and threw the title in there.

Check it out -- my pin is much more obvious now thanks to the title and vertical layout.

Next time you finish an article, try this strategy out and see if you can get a bit more engagement on Pinterest and drive more traffic back to your blog.

Reach out on Twitter to show me what you came up with!

How to Turn Your Slideshow Into an Animated Video

Today, I’m going to show you a quick and easy way to create original video content for Youtube.

Youtube has the potential to rank well for your name -- you just need to nurture it and let it prosper.

One of the easiest ways to make videos? Animate your slideshows.

We’re going to use Keynote to make the magic happen. If you made your slideshow on Keynote already, then great. 

If you did it on something like Canva, just import the JPG files and drag them one by one into Keynote as slides.

Once you’ve done that, it’s time to start adding animations.

Click Animate in the top right corner.

Then click on your first slide. You need to have the slide selected so you can make a “transition animation.” Otherwise you’ll be making an “action animation” for one of the elements in the slide. 

Under Transitions, click Add an Effect, and choose one to see what it does. I like Doorway, so I chose that one.

Go through each slide and do the same thing. Feel free to keep the same transition for each slide to give a consistent effect, or go for different ones to switch it up.

If you made your slideshow in Keynote, you can animate different elements within each slide as well, but there’s no need to go overboard with this. I like to keep these simple so they don’t come across as cheesy.

Once you’ve finished adding transition effects, it’s time to add some audio.

There are a number of websites that offer copyright free tunes. My favorite is Incompetech but you can do a quick Google search and find more.

Once you’ve downloaded a royalty-free mp3 file you like, go back into Keynote and click Document at the top right corner. Then click Audio.

Drag your audio file into the Soundtrack section. 

Then it's time to export.

Hit File → Export to → Quicktime.

Hit next (or change your playback settings if you wish) and save the file.

And that’s it!

Now all that’s left to do is go into Youtube, upload the video and give it a title and description. 

Give me a shout on Twitter if you’re having trouble and I’ll be happy to help.

And the Oscar goes to...

Time for the Social Media Blitz!

Today’s a relatively easy day. You're going to go through and spend 5-10 minutes on each of your social networks. Queue up articles on Twitter, pin your favorite pinterest posts, and share your recent articles on Google+.

The goal is to share your articles and other industry posts to promote your brand in an organic way. We also want to ensure we keep our social properties active. Remember, Google likes consistent, organic activity!

Activity Recap

→ Spend 10m working on growing your Twitter following using the strategy from Day 14.

→ Refill your Twitter queue in Buffer with your most recent Slideshare slideshow, your 2nd article, and a few others from RightRelevance. Go back to Day 9 for a reminder.

→ Login to Instagram and Google+ and tackle 5-10m of activity on each. Follow the instructions from Day 11.

→ Spend 5-10m on each of your other social profiles. Keep them active!

→ Login to Quora and follow the instructions below.

Answering Questions on Quora

First make sure your Quora profile is optimized properly. Use the 6 step process from Day 6 if you’re not sure. Then follow these steps to start answering questions:

1. Login to Quora and use the search bar to see if there are any questions relating to your two most recent articles.

2. If you find a few relevant questions, briefly check each one out to gauge which one you should answer. Generally, the questions that are more recent and have more views are better than the older ones with less traffic. If you really can’t find any questions at all relating to your articles, then ask one anonymously to start a conversation.

3. Try to make your work easier by using your already-published material to answer the question. Of course, you may need to alter things a bit to make your answer really fit.

4. Naturally link back to your article in your answer.

To extend the organic reach of your answer:

1. Before you hit submit, click the checkbox to post your answer on Twitter.

2. Re-ask the question.

3. Find the ellipsis and click “Ask to Answer” and choose some of the people that Quora suggests for you. You can choose 15 people per question. This will hopefully get some more activity on that question, which will increase the people who view your answer.

How to Organically Grow Your Twitter Following

Growing your Twitter following can be invaluable.

A larger following increases the authority of your Twitter profile and broadens the reach of your own content marketing efforts. It opens up lines of communication in your industry, helps build upon your positive online presence, and offers you a pool of potential leads for your business. You’d be hard-pressed to find a downside to growing your followers.

Today I'm going to share with you a cool trick to growing your following with users in your industry. It’s a scalable process, so use it as much or as little as you’d like.

Let’s take a look:

The Tools You’ll Need

We’ll be using 2 tools for this process: Tweepi and RightRelevance.

1. First, connect your Twitter account to Tweepi. You’ll be using this tool to trim the fat -- that is, get rid of folks who don’t follow you back. Tweepi is an easy way to keep track of that and much more.

2. Then, connect your Twitter account to RightRelevance. We’ll use RightRelevance to easily find the users you want to follow.

 

The Strategy

Once you’re logged into RightRelevance, type in a category that’s related to your industry or niche. For me, I’ll try 'personal branding.'

Add it as a saved channel so you can refer back to it later.

Then click the influencers tab and decide whether you want to filter by people or organizations. I want to target individuals, so I’ve clicked the “Person” option.

Finally, decide if you want to tailor it even further by location. I want to filter my followers based on New York City, so I’ll click that option.

Now all that’s left to do is scroll down and follow the people that interest you. I’m not going to be too picky because I’ve already let the filters do that tailoring for me. I know that the accounts I follow are going to be people who fit squarely in my industry and live in my city. Perfect!

You can use this method to follow 20, 200, or 2000 people, depending on your goals and time limit. Don’t forget to switch to a new category and do the same thing all over again. I’ve already used “personal branding,” but I could also try “reputation management” and “content marketing."

 

The Clean-Up

Once you’ve followed a batch of users, give them a few days or a week to follow you back.

Then log into Tweepi and click on the category of users called “Not following back.”

The “not following you back” section is pretty self-explanatory. It shows you all the users who, well, haven’t followed you back. You can also see some interesting stats about when they last tweeted, where they’re located, their follower count and follower ratio.

Go down the list and “unfollow” anyone who you’re ready to cast aside. There are bound to be some people or organizations you want to still follow despite their unreturned thanks, so just keep your eyes peeled for that as you fly down the list.

 

That’s it!

Now that you’ve got the hang of it, try it out using other categories and other filter settings to see if you get different results. And let me know how it goes in the comments section below!