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A review of social media-pro Guy Kawasaki’s book, “The Art of Social Media”

Sure, you’re engaging in social media efforts for your clients, but are they reaching the right people? Did they make any impact?

If you are already implementing, or are planning to implement, a social media campaign, Guy Kawasaki is a name you need to know. Formerly an advisor at Google and Chief Evangelist at Apple, Guy is an authority on all things social media.

In his book, “The Art of Social Media”, Guy outlines best practices and tips that all circle back to the main focus: Are you earning the right to promote?

What does that mean? It’s easy to share your latest news article or link to your event, but what does that offer your audience? That’s right: little or nothing. It’s too promotional.

Guy uses the example of NPR. Every day of the year, NPR offers commercial-free, quality news, which provides a true value to its listeners. It’s for that reason, a few days per year, they are able to run a pledge drive. NPR has earned the right to promote the drive with 363 days of uninterrupted, respected content.

“The Art of Social Media” uncovers various ways to make sure that you are continuing to provide new, and useful content.

One example is using curation and aggregation services – many of them are free and can provide a wealth of articles and the latest studies to share. Examples that Guy provided include: Alltop, Buffer, Feedly, Google Scholar, LinkedIn, NPR, and Reddit.In addition to these tools, it can be helpful to set up Google alerts on key terms: competitors, industry hot topics, etc. This way, you receive up-to-the-minute information that is worth sharing.

Once you have the content, the next step is to share. There are best practices in how to craft posts for the various channels.

• Be brief: Posts on Google+ and Facebook should be 2-3 sentences and Twitter has a limit of 140 characters, but 100 characters is really the best practice.
• Be visual: Every post, no matter where it is, should contain “eye candy” in the form of a picture, graphic, or video. According to a Skyword study, views of a client’s content increased by 94% if a published article contained a relevant photograph or infographic.
• Be sly: Use key phrases that let readers know they are about to get useful and practical information (i.e. “How to rock___, Quick guide to ___, Essential steps to___)
• Be active: While this seems obvious, it’s one of the most important tools. Don’t be afraid to repost the same exact post a few times per day. According to Moz, the prime lifetime of an average Tweet is only 18 minutes! It’s much more likely that you’ll gain new followers, retweets, likes, etc. by posting the same content multiple times than it is you’ll lose any due to annoyance.

By Alyson Kurtiz, Strategist