Getting started on social media can often be deceptively simple – What’s the big deal? You sign up. – or intimidating – Why am I being asked for my date of birth? – or overwhelming – How do I find people to friend or follow?

In actuality there are official and unofficial rules. It is easier if you start out knowing what’s what, and this is probably especially important if you’re more of an introvert.

Let’s imagine you already use email, search for information on Google, and read blog posts. But you’ve never joined any social media sites. How do you start?

1. Decide how comfortable you are sharing information about yourself. And the corollary to this – how wide a sharing of this information are you willing to do.

If you’re a book author and want people to buy your book, it’s a good idea to decide that you will share personal (although not private) information to as wide an audience as possible. If you only want to connect online with former high school friends, your target audience is much smaller.

If sharing information makes you somewhat nervous, think about what it means to be personal as opposed to private. Personal is a good marketing book you just read that you can recommend to help others; private is a fight you had with your business partner over implementing the marketing steps recommended in the book.

2. Ask online savvy friends that, based on your goal, which popular site they would recommend you first join. (And do start with just one while getting your feet wet in this brave new world.)

• If your goal, for example, is to have a wide audience, then Twitter may be the best choice because of its “open to everyone” format. – If you only want to search for high school friends, then Facebook may be the best choice as you can confine your information to a very small circle and can search by name for those long-lost friends.
• If you want to make connections to help with a future job search, then LinkedIn, whose format is set up for such a process, may be the best choice for you.

3. Once you have chosen the site you’ll start on, do a Google search for information on effectively using that site. That’s right, before you ever sign up, read some blog posts that provide guidance on effectively using the site.

Now this isn’t a research project that serves as an excuse for postponing actually joining the site. Just learn a few of the basic “rules.” And if you do this step, you’ll be way ahead of most other people who start on social media without first doing any research.

And why not learn this on the site itself? Because most of these sites have inadequate information for newcomers or an abundance of information that overwhelms newcomers.

Plus, to encourage you to sign up, the site’s home page says something like: To join now just do this. And it’s only after you’ve provided your name, email, password, etc. that you’re left wondering “What do I do next?”

4. If you’re starting on a site that doesn’t require your real name, choose a username carefully. You want to think about seeing this name used all across cyberspace as lots of social media sites pull information from other social media sites (with your permission, of course).

You may initially think, for example, of choosing the name of your first book. But what happens when you write a second book? Or perhaps using the name of the book won’t work well for a site that is focused on a non-book arena.

Keep in mind that whatever you do on the Internet can live forever. So this choice of a username should be considered carefully and for continued use in the long-run. (Once you’ve established a good online reputation with one username you don’t want to start at square one again with a new username.)

5. Immediately post a photo of yourself – a headshot in which sunglasses and a baseball cap are not blocking people from totally seeing your eyes. (This does not have to be professional-photographer quality but should not be blurry.)

This photo should be one that will also work on social media sites you will join in the future because you want consistency across these sites. You want consistency to help people recognize and connect with you on more than one site. (The same for your username).

Keep in mind that the photos for Twitter are quite small. And even if you’re starting on Facebook, only include a headshot of yourself. Do not include other people and preferably not animals and other props.

By posting a good headshot of yourself you’re signaling that you’re interested in connecting with people – real people such as yourself – and you’ll be off to a good start on your first social media site.

Now that you’ve read these five tips for starting on your first social media site, what are you waiting for? Join the cyberspace social media community today.

Give a comment to this post and receive 5 Free eBooks about Twitter instantly to your mail box! You can get them also here.

First, let’s define the term Explosive Results for our usage.

A standard social media campaign helps spread the word about you and encourages other people to as well.

An explosive social media campaign has inherent viral exposure, inspires community driven communication, helps make the web a better place, and even brings joy to people, however fleeting.

When you share in social media, if your goal is just to get more people to see your links, you’re on the right track, but at the same time, you’re limiting your potential. You may think that getting explosive results from social media will take more time, energy and money, but this doesn’t have to be the case.

If you’re a business owner, you know that working harder doesn’t necessarily mean better results – what if you’re working hard on the wrong thing?

Sometimes the remedy is working smarter. Here are a few small changes you can make to your social media approach that can propel your social media results from lukewarm to smoking hot.

Explosive Social Media Tactic #1 – Hot Content

The cornerstone to any social media campaign is the content. If you get this component wrong, it doesn’t matter if all other elements are perfect. Study what’s going hot in your targeted topic and find a unique angle to fit your content into what people already like, without stealing their ideas.

Explosive Social Media Tactic #2 – Niched Network Nuances

The more tightly focused your submissions to social media sites are, the more likely they are to go viral, whether they are links you share by other people or your own. Here’s the logic.

People follow other people with similar interests. They’re on sites like Google, Yahoo, StumbleUpon, Delicious and Digg actively looking for new content. Put those two things together and you have a whirlwind of clicks happening. The only question is, will it be your link that gets clicked or passed over?

Having 5000 connections on Twitter or Facebook is useless if you are connected to people who don’t want your broadcasts, and you’re just as useless to them if you don’t want theirs. If my interest is in improving my existing business and you’re trying to get me to sell your network marketing products, it doesn’t matter how many times you ask me. If I’m not interested, your continued broadcasts will be ignored, or worse yet, blocked completely.

It’s about the perfect balance of quality AND quantity.

And if I’m not paying attention to you, I can’t and won’t spread your message. If you are in network marketing, why not go after people who love the network marketing concept but can’t seem to find the right company? That’s a perfect match, and can dramatically cut down your search for the right partners and prospects.

Explosive Social Media Tactic #3 – Simplify Sharing

It amazes me how many people miss this one.

You’ve got great content. You’ve got a massive, niched network.

Why feed them content that’s hard to share? Does that report have to be in PDF format? If so, does it have to be behind an opt-in wall if you’re spreading it among people who have Already opted in? Anyone connected to your business through its Facebook page, or your Twitter stream is also part of your opt-in list. Yes, it would be best if they were on your email newsletter list, but what faster way to get them there than to show them you don’t need to hold them prisoner there?

If your whitepaper is of such high value that you don’t Want it to spread, well, that’s something different. But if you’re sharing it so other people will spread it, make it easy for others to share.

• Send your su.pr link so all they have to do is click the Thumbs-Up button.
• Put a few sharing links on your page.
• Make it easy for them to Retweet.

The easier it is for them to share, the more likely they are to do it.

Explosive Social Media Tactic #4 – Consistency

And now we come to the area I fail at the most. It’s one of the things I know I need to do, but I haven’t quite gotten the hang of how to brainstorm, create and distribute quality content consistency, and still give them best possible service and support to my customers and clients. I always err on serving people who have bought from me, figuring that next blog post can wait until tomorrow.

Then at some point, I noticed a decline in return traffic – people weren’t coming back because they’d already heard everything I had to say. The solution? I got help for my content creation process. The ideas are still mine, but I was able to barter help for research, transcribing, and editing. I am also able to get audio and video polished much less expensively than I thought, though I don’t always use this option due to time constraints.

The other thing that helped a lot was getting over my perfectionism complex. Release your content as soon as you can. I can’t tell you how much money I’ve left on the table from my old fear of the typo and grammar police. Not to mention the fact that I felt like I was leaving my audience hanging.

You subscribe to something because you want to get regular updates. If your favorite daily news show started coming on once a week, you’d probably switch channels. If you’re inconsistent without explanation, your audience numbers will drop and your network will fade.

Explosive Social Media Tactic #5 – Think Engagement

Measuring your results by page view alone is a thing of the past. When the web was mostly text and images, it made some sense that how many pages a visitor viewed at your site was a true measure of engagement.

Nowadays this isn’t the case. You want to look instead at how long people are at your site. The exception, of course, is when customers are coming to your site to buy, and the order processing system takes them off your page. But if people aren’t leaving your site because they’re ready to buy or subscribe, you truly must look at why they aren’t paying more attention to your content, and what changes you can make to get them to stay.

This is critically important in understanding which content will go viral naturally. What posts are people staying on your site to comment on? When do they take a few extra seconds to retweet? Are they watching your videos all the way through?

Once you know the content your audience is most connected to, and why, you can make more of it.

Explosive Social Media Tactic #6 – Three-Way Connection and Communication

That’s not a typo. Three-way communication is when the way you conduct yourself online is observed to a third party, who is also indirectly being addressed by your manner or statement. I wish I could credit the proper author of this, but I just don’t remember who it was who first observed that three people are positively affected by an act of kindness – the person giving, the person receiving, and the person observing.

One example of this in action is having a conversation with a peer about their new product on a social media site. Your friend is probably Dying to tell someone about the testimonial they just got, but don’t want to be rude or are too humble to brag. Ask them in front of your audience, and the conversation is exposed to your connections and re-exposed to theirs.

Connection is just as important – if communication is the conveyance of information, connection is doing so in a way that bonds. A several hundred closely bonded contacts will spread your message faster and farther than several thousand distant aquaintances.

Explosive Social Media Tactic #7 – What’s In It for All?

In the 80s, we all thought about what was in it for ourselves. In the 90s we decided to focus on others, hence, what’s in it for them. Today, we’re in the age of the win-win-win situation. Tell them how you benefit and tie it to their benefit.

Want someone to help you spread your stories? Make sure they know how important it is to you, why you came to them for help, and how they’ll be perceived for being the bearer of your good news.

You may look at the list above and feel that it’s intimidating, but it doesn’t have to be. Focus on doing just one of these things better each day for a few weeks, and before you know it, you’ll be doing them habitually. The results you’ll get will help these new habits stick.

Next, learn even more social media tactics for Explosive Results …
… and then watch this 26 Step-By-Step VIDEO course – yours FREE!

Social networking sites originally became popular as a way for friends to stay in touch with one another and to keep up-to-date with what was happening in their lives, but they quickly became a place for business owners to grow their networks too. These days you can use these sites as a business building tool, but, more importantly, you can get to know your prospects, clients, and colleagues in a more relaxed and friendly environment.

This means that if you’re active on these sites and regularly contributing and seeking out new connections you can very quickly build your network and have a ready audience of contacts who are interested in what you have to say, your services, programs, and products.

However, I hear of many solopreneurs saying that they’re spending hours of time on their social networking activities, whether that’s on LinkedIn, Twitter, Facebook, or one of the other popular social networking sites, but are not seeing any benefits as a result of their time i.e. the amount of time they put into social networking is not comparable to the returns they are seeing. And so they lose interest and wonder what all the fuss is about.

As with any of the list building strategies that I teach, the real key to success is consistency. If you decide that social networking is one of the lead generation strategies that you want to implement then you need to be consistent in your approach to make it successful. You need to be spending time each week (several times a week) visiting each of your social networks, contributing, and building relationships.

Even though there are many, many advantages to this latest marketing strategy, there are several pitfalls that can easily be avoided if you’re aware of what they are.

Today I’d like to share with you my top four social networking pitfalls so that you can avoid making these mistakes and so utilize this strategy to grow your network:

1. 1. Not updating regularly. If you’re a beginner in this area, then you may believe that all you have to do is sign up for an account at one of the more popular sites, add your details, and you’re all set. In order for this strategy to be effective, you need to be a regular contributor to the network, actively seek out new connections, and participate and post regularly.
2. 2. Your profile is lacking in information. Add pictures; make yourself sound interesting and fun! People want to know about you, what your interests are, and see you. Always include a photo, and, the beauty with social networking is that because it’s informal, you don’t always need your photo to be a professional head shot – a more informal photo works just as well; let your contacts see the ‘real’ you.
3. 3. Not thinking relationships first! Social networking is all about building relationships with those people in your network – it’s not about getting new clients. Although you’ve probably heard of colleagues getting new clients via social networking, it really is about creating and building relationships with those people in your network. Remember… relationships first!
4. 4. It’s not about sell, sell, sell! If all you’re doing when you visit the various sites and post your updates is pitch your latest program, product or service then it’s no wonder you’re not seeing results. Share information with your network, whether that’s your own information or you’re passing along information from clients and colleagues. The more you share, the greater your results will be.

Whichever social networking arena you’re active in (and it may be more than one) remember the “social” in social networking – it’s to build relationships, make new contacts, and socialize. Inform your network, not sell to them.

At a recent Social Media-themed breakfast event for New Hampshire’s Greater Manchester Chamber of Commerce, one speaker (Leslie Poston, co-author of Twitter for Dummies) told the assembled audience there were 537 different social networking sites online. 537! And that doesn’t even count all the networks on Ning and other services like it, which allow you to build your own social network using their templates, or custom-made communities like “Greenopolis,” or “Equestrian Life.”

So when it comes to deciding which social media platforms make the most sense to use, the options can be overwhelming – if you let them. However, with a little focus, guidance, and strategic thinking, you can just as easily simplify your choices.

What follows draws from our 6-week “Social Media Kick Start” Virtual Boot Camp, which expands on these topics with self-paced learning modules.

Let’s start by keeping these two very important questions in mind: Where is your audience now? And where are they going to be?

Even if your target audience isn’t on a particular social network right now, consider the fact that involvement is social networks is growing exponentially. (Heck, if Facebook were a country, it would have the 4th largest population in the world!) Not everyone was on the Web 5-10 years ago, but you could see where the trend was going. Same thing with social networks. Here’s how to dive in confidently.

1. Start with the Big Three.

That’s LinkedIn, Facebook, and Twitter. The odds that your audience is on one or more of these platforms right now is very high. And if they’re not on there, they will be by the time you finish reading this. Now, of the three, LinkedIn is the only one that doesn’t get tarred with the “It’s just for kids goofing off” brush. But consider this: The measurement company ComScore reported in April that the majority of Twitter users are 35+, and the 18-34 age group is growing as fast as the 55-64 age group. As for Facebook, InsideFacebook.com reports the largest group of users is between 26 and 44 years old, and the fastest growing demo is women 55 and over.

2. Budget your time and money.

These are your resources, and if you’re a small business owner, you’re using them with care these days. A platform like Twitter is about as simple as it gets – 5-minute sign up, a few communication conventions to learn as you go, then the Twitterverse is your oyster. Facebook, on the other hand, goes about as deep as they get in terms of customization opportunities. Consider learning and growing in this platform as a work in progress, and add, edit, expand and refresh as you go. Even LinkedIn has a lot of detail possibilities, too, but they also have a very helpful tool that tells you how complete your profile is, which can guide you through what options you need to finish to take maximum advantage of its features.

3. Follow the FUN!

It may sound frivolous at first, but there’s sound business sense behind it. First of all, as you play with each of the Big Three platforms, you’ll learn more about your own communication style, and how you like to experience your friends, contacts, and colleagues. Twitter presents quick snippets of insight, links, conversations, and opportunities to brainstorm on the fly. LinkedIn is more professional, following traditional and formal conventions. Facebook is all over the map, with nooks and crannies that’ll surprise you even after months of frequent use. In other words, if control is what you want, Facebook may be your nemesis, but if you dig spontaneity and possibilities from any direction, then hop on board.

The bottom line: if you pick a social network that you dread going to, you’ll find a way to put it off. If you’re not participating in the social network, then you won’t get much value out of it! What’s more, if you hate doing it, that’ll come through in your interactions. No one wants to connect with an unpleasant person. It’s just not good for business.

On the other hand, when you “follow the FUN,” you’ll make time for your social networking. You’ll laugh at the countless pathways – and diversions – available, and you’ll be able to get focused on the results you’re after with confidence and nimble clarity.

Then, as you expand beyond the Big Three, you’ll have a better sense of how to play in the social arena, and what features support your goals and style. Love taking photos? Love talking? Want to try out video? PowerPoint wiz? There are networks that support all media channels.

Some say at least 537, and counting.