Where Do I Start with Social Media?

“Sometimes I feel like I'm on an island by myself trying to figure all this social media stuff out and I don't know where to start. It's easy to get overwhelmed and not do anything.” These are statements that so many people make. They search and search for the answer to where to start in social media. The following steps are excerpts from The Start Here, Now Do This Social Media Guide by Tasting the Internet, One Byte at a Time. These steps make up the Social Media Sphere that encircles your online business and positions it as a major player in social media networking. Where Do I Start? Start with Twitter! Twitter is relatively easy to set up and understand. Once you have uploaded your photo, included a short bio and link to your website, all you have left is to customize your Twitter background. Twitter has templates available or you can design your own. Next comes finding interesting people to follow and to share your great tweets with. Next Stop is Facebook. Plan on hanging around here for a while. There’s a lot of opportunity on Facebook and you want to take advantage of every one. Create your personal profile, which is all about you the person. Next you can develop your Public Profile Page, or Fan Page, which is all about your business. There are lots of decisions to be made, so don’t rush this process. It will be worth the time to have your profiles accurately reflect you and your business. Moving on to LinkedIn. This is all about you the business owner. It’s based on a more professional platform and doesn’t really have a place for you to share personal information. You can upload your blog, import contacts and perform strategic searches for people, businesses, jobs and groups. LinkedIn is very powerful and another great social site to have your business connected to. Do you have a face for Video? Then YouTube might be for you. In as little as 1 hour you can have an account set up on YouTube, customize your channel, shoot a short video, upload it and promote it on all your other social sites. Now that’s online power! Everyone has a story to tell. Why not tell it to the world through a Blog. WordPress makes the process easy and quick. There are two ways WordPress allows users to blog, WordPress hosted blogs and self-hosted blogs. This might get a little techie for you, so check with your webmaster or us for more detail on getting started. Social Bookmarking is a mystery to many. Basically, social bookmarking is just like regular bookmarking or “favorites” only you share your bookmarks with your online friends. And to complete the Sphere, you need to Cross-Link. By using programs and applications like Ping.fm, Twitterfeed, Widgets, Badges and links, you can connect all your social sites to work together to ignite your online presence and boost your search engine rankings.