The best thing about social media is that there's so much of it out there - the good, the bad and the just plain cringeworthy.
Seen a Facebook page where every post gets a chorus of comments? Look at what works and add it to your own social media strategy. Or how about that Twitter campaign that's getting traction for all the wrong reasons? Watch and learn people...
It's all about keeping up with the Joneses these days. The good news is you don't have to spy over the garden fence to catch a glimpse. It's all there, plain as day on the company blog, in Facebook status updates, Twitter streams and on LinkedIn.
Go ahead, it's not spying. They WANT you to look!
For me at least, my Facebook profile is for personal use while I tend to use the rest of my social networks for work. Twitter is for keeping up with professional contacts and the latest news and I'm getting a lot out of Quora's discussions and recommendations.
So, what about LinkedIn, the business-oriented social networking site? I set up my profile years ago with the most basic of details and ignored the updates regularly appearing in my email inbox. I hadn't even bothered to update my career progression or a move to London and a new job, let alone get involved in new group discussions.
So, I've applied some of the recommendations I found online - filling out all my promotions and job changes, updating my interests and preferences, joining groups and discussions and accepting some long overdue requests and recommendations from LinkedIn. The result? I've already added a number of new contacts to my network and have already seen significantly more traffic on my page. I've learned my lesson, LinkedIn all the way.
