How to Take Your Social Media to the Next Level

This week’s reading in the book, “The Art of Social Media”, By Guy Kawasaki, I learned how to excel in a Twitter chat. Basically, a Twitter chat is a live event in which people on the social media platform can include a hashtag in their tweets to talk about a topic. The host tweets questions to the audience with a certain hashtag and then the guests tweet an answer with the same hashtag. Audience members can then search for the hashtag so they can see the discussion and chime in with questions, retweets, and comments. I learned that in order for your Twitter chat to be successful, you have to use the right tools. These tools include Tchat and Twubs because they automatically include the hashtag in your tweets and also hide the retweets. With these two tools, you’ll never have to remember to paste or type in the hashtag, and the fact that you will never have to see the retweets will reduce the number of tweets in your stream. This will make it easier for you to follow along in the chat. The next way to have a successful Twitter chat is to pick a short and simple hashtag. This makes it easier to remember and it requires less typing for the people who may not use tools such as Tchat and Twubs. This also leaves more characters for the actual tweets that people will type.

In the next chapter, I learned how to avoid looking like you do not know what you are doing while on social media. The first tip I learned is to not look like an unethical person. This means don’t do things like complain about other posts. In the words of Guy Kawasaki "Edification is great, sarcasm is great, but belligerence is lame". Another thing I learned is to not tell other people what to share. This is because when you do this, it’s not just a look of cluelessness; It’s a whole billboard of cluelessness. When you do not like a post someone puts on social media or shares something that you don’t agree with, just don’t follow that person. Since you’re not paying to read the person’s post, you shouldn’t feel entitled to tell him or her what to share. A few more things I learned was that you do not buy followers or likes, do not ask people to follow you on any kind of social media; do not ask people to reshare your posts; do not announce your unfollowers; and do not ask why people unfollowed you. These are all tips we should take if we are on social media because they are very useful in making you look more professional.