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If you’ve been around the Internet much at all you’ve probably heard of Guy Kawasaki. The former chief evangelist at Apple (what a great job title!), he’s now the chief evangelist at the online graphic design company Canva (which I have played with a little and is pretty cool).
He’s also intensely involved in social media, and, along with marketing pro Peg Fitzpatrick, he’s sharing some of his tips for social media success without (so much) struggle in his brand new (released today) book The Art of Social Media: Power Tips for Power Users. (That’s an Amazon link but I’m not an affiliate because they hate Arkansas.)
This is not a beginner’s book to social media. It won’t tell you how to set up a Facebook account or why you should be on Pinterest. It also doesn’t suggest that “making it” in social, whatever that means, is a quick or easy process, or that the same things that work for one person will work for another or that they will continue to work all the time (Facebook, we’re looking at you).
What it does offer is quick, digestible, actionable items you can do today and keep working on to gain more followers and engagement.
It’s All About Content
At its foundation, social media is simple: if you share good stuff, people will reshare it, and you’ll get more interaction and more followers. Everything else is optimization (or delusion).
Kawasaki and Fitzgerald advocate “aggressive sharing practices” that include posting on Twitter up to 25 times a day and repeating posts as often as four times to increase views and engagement. That clearly works for him — and he says your right audience will accept all that noise — but I don’t think I would go that far. For one thing, it takes a long time to find all that content; for another, I think I’d get tired of myself after a while.
The key is to find things that your audience is interested in and to share them in such a way that your followers will reshare them.
“Resharing, not imitation, is the sincerest form of flattery on social media,” Kawasaki writes. The book suggests lots of places to find things to share and offers some ideas of how to keep on top of the “content monster.”
How tos and Strategies
The book includes tips on optimization for different platforms; how to rock special events, Google + hangouts on the air and Twitter parties; how to avoid looking clueless on different platforms; and how to integrate social media and blogging.
There are 10 steps to “Peg” your posts, showing what Fitzgerald does when promoting her posts different places online.
[Tweet “Rock social media step by step with The Art of Social Media. #ArtofSocial”]
There’s also a chapter called “Putting it All Together” that is focused on how to launch a nonfiction book in social media but also provides great ideas for other products or services you might be promoting online.
This book is a quick read that will leave you with a lot of to-dos and hopefully have you looking at social media as a tool that’s a little less overwhelming than it might feel right now.
