25 Tips to be a Good Friend in Social Media

A great read from Pam Moore:

1. Stop, look and listen before you share the tweets. Remember being told as a child to “stop, look and listen before you cross the street”?  Social media is the same way.  We should “use our eyes, use our ears and then use our tweets.” Take some time to listen and understand the ecosystem before you blast noise to the masses.  Listening, learning and advocating is a great way to learn the ecosystem of social media. Follow thought leaders, business leaders in your niche, friends and colleagues.  Watch what they do, how they speak, what they share, and where they hang out online. The more you can listen and learn the better you’ll be able to provide value for your audience.

2. Come out from behind your avatar. You can’t show any real advocacy if you are hiding behind a logo. Put that bright, shiny smiley face on your social media profiles. Logos are good but leave them for the Twitter backgrounds, Facebook welcome pages and blogs.  Let people know there is more than a logo, keyboard and 140 characters behind your tweet machine.

3. Have a social mindset. Do not focus on only giving to get. Focus on inspiring to connect. If you inspire your audience to connect with you, their giving in return will happen organically.

4. Relationships don’t happen overnight. Be realistic. Not everyone is going to fall in love with you at first tweet.  Give people a chance.  Most successful business people have a life and a day job outside of Twitter. Just because they don’t respond back to your retweet within 2, 24 or 48 hours doesn’t mean you should go crawling back behind the avatar and call it quits. Stay focused on connecting with people who have common interests.

5. Stop lurking. Are you guilty of visiting numerous Facebook pages, blogs, tweet streams and more but never comment, retweet or let the content producer know you exist? If yes, shame on you! No better time to start than now. Sitting on the lurk bench will do nothing for you, your business or your social relationships.

Read the rest: 25 Tips to be a Good Friend in Social Media