Top 5 Tips for Using Social Media

Our Top 5 series continues this week with tips on using social media. This series is curated by our intern Sophie Lovell. It aims to give you short snippets of publishing and writing advice from industry professionals.

1. “Your profile page is an ad. Its purpose is to convince people to circle, follow, subscribe, or like you. It should communicate that you are a likeable, trustworthy, and competent person.” –Guy Kawasaki
2. “Spend your time and efforts interacting with specific people in your niche(s) who can not only benefit from your individual attention, but from whom you can benefit as well… [Make and interact with] a list of 15-20 people in your area of expertise who have a similar or slightly larger follower base than you.” –Nick Thacker
3. “Keep trying to get better. Hank and I made more than 100 videos before we got our 200th YouTube subscriber.” –John Green
4. “8 out of 10 of your shares should be valuable and relevant to your audience — while the rest can be self-promotional… the purpose of your blog is to provide customer service. It is not about you, it is about your audience!” –Cendrine Marrouat
5. “The only followers that matter are the ones who read your books and blogposts and interact with you. Any others are meaningless….Buying thousands of Twitter followers and calling it a “platform” is like renting a lot of empty safety deposit boxes and saying you’re rich.” –Anne R Allen