<div><em><strong>Success favours the bold as well as the interesting on social media, so don't hesitate to express your feelings and agenda, writes Guy Kawasaki</strong></em></div><div> </div><div><em>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 optimisation (or delusion). This article (an edited excerpt from our new book) explains what it takes to create perfect posts that will add value to the lives of your followers, build your platform, and spread your story. We advocate the most aggressive sharing practices on social media, so buckle your seat belt, and put on your helmet.</em></div><div> </div><div>Be valuable. What do we mean by "share good stuff"? Your social media posts should come in four forms:</div><div> </div><div><strong>What happened?</strong> Example: Secretary of Defense Chuck Hagel says that he's open to reviewing the role of transgender people in the military.</div><div><strong>What does it mean?</strong> Example: Mother Jones explains why Uruguayan soccer star Luis Suárez's biting incident during the World Cup was a big hygienic deal.</div><div><strong>How can I do that?</strong> Example: CNET explains how texting to 911 works.</div><div><strong>What the hell?</strong> Example: Every year, two churches in Vrontados, Greece, stage a mock rocket war to celebrate Easter.</div><div> </div><div>The goal is to emulate the NPR model. National Public Radio provides great content 365 days a year. Every few months, it runs a pledge drive to raise money. It can do that because it provides such great value. Your goal is to earn the privilege to run your own "pledge drive," which in this context means promoting your organization, product, or service.</div><div> </div><div>Be interesting. Many people and most organisations mistakenly assume that their followers want to read about only a narrow band of subjects. Should we share only stories about entrepreneurship, innovation, and technology or about social media and blogging? Should Motorola share only stories about Motorola? The answer is no. To do so would be boring, and boring doesn't work on social media. You should think more broadly and take more chances. Here are some examples of how organizations can remain on-brand and at the same time be more interesting:</div><div> </div><div><strong>Restaurants:</strong> Atomic particles help solve wine fraud; the scientific way to cut a cake</div><div><strong>Motorola: </strong>The 100 best Android apps of 2014; six great Android tips</div><div><strong>Airlines:</strong> The last drive-in theaters in America; mindful travel photography.</div><div><strong>Design agency:</strong> Why it's okay to have an ad below a Web page's fold; key findings about retail-customer loyalty</div><div><strong>Monster:</strong> "Weird Al" Yankovic's parody of Pharrell Williams's song "Happy"; fun/scary jumps</div><div> </div><div>If you share this kind of interesting stuff, you'll earn the NPR-esque right to promote yourself to your followers, and your followers will help you get more followers.</div><div> </div><div><strong>#1 Be bold</strong></div><div> Success favours the bold as well as the interesting on social media, so don't hesitate to express your feelings and agenda. For example, if you think there should be more women CEOs, share an article that supports your perspective. People voluntarily followed you; they can voluntarily unfollow you if they don't like what you share. My theory is that if you're not pissing people off on social media, you're not using it right. There's much less leeway for organizations to be bold, although they can take strong stands on issues that affect them and their customers. For example, American tech firms can be bold about issues such as work visas for foreign citizens, and Planned Parenthood can be bold about pro-choice issues. But there are too many downsides, and it doesn't make sense, for example, for Apple to be bold about gun control.</div><div> </div><div><strong>#2 Be brief</strong></div><div> Brevity beats verbosity on social media. You're competing with millions of posts every day. People make snap judgments and move right along if you don't capture their interest quickly. Our experience is that the sweet spot for posts of curated content is two or three sentences on Google+ and Facebook and 100 characters on Twitter. The sweet spot for created content is 500 to 1,000 words.</div><div> </div><div><strong>#3 Be thankful</strong></div><div> Your created-content posts might not contain links, but when you're curating, by definition you're using outside sources so every post should contain a link. Links send traffic to the source as an act of gratitude; enable readers to learn more from the source; and increase your visibility and popularity with bloggers and websites. When you find content because of someone else's post, compose and share a post with a link to the source and then add a "hat tip" to the person who brought it to your attention.</div><div> </div><div><strong>#4 Be visual</strong></div><div> Every post-literally every one-should contain "eye candy" in the form of a picture, graphic, or video. According to a study by content marketer Skyword, total views of its clients' content increased by 94% if a published article contained a relevant photograph or infographic, when compared to articles without an image in the same category. A great graphic or embedded video is as important for the success of a post as the text.</div><div> </div><div><strong>#5 Be organised</strong></div><div> If your post on Google+, Facebook, or LinkedIn is longer than four paragraphs, try to use a bulleted or numbered list. This makes it easier to read, because the information is organized into smaller chunks, and it reduces the tl;dr (too long; didn't read) effect. I tune out when there's paragraph after paragraph of text. If I want to read a novel, I'll buy an e-book.</div><div> </div><div><strong> #6 Be sly</strong></div><div> I find posts titled "How to…," "Top Ten…," or "The Ultimate… " irresistible. These words say to me, this is going to be practical and useful. The folks at Twelveskip compiled a list of great title templates, so be sly and use it. Here are my top 10:</div><div>1.<span class="Apple-tab-span" style="white-space:pre"> </span>How to Rock ___</div><div>2.<span class="Apple-tab-span" style="white-space:pre"> </span>Quick Guide___</div><div>3.<span class="Apple-tab-span" style="white-space:pre"> </span>A Complete Guide to___</div><div>4.<span class="Apple-tab-span" style="white-space:pre"> </span>Questions You Should Ask Before___</div><div>5.<span class="Apple-tab-span" style="white-space:pre"> </span>Rules for___</div><div>6.<span class="Apple-tab-span" style="white-space:pre"> </span>Essential Steps to___</div><div>7.<span class="Apple-tab-span" style="white-space:pre"> </span>Most Popular Ways to___</div><div>8.<span class="Apple-tab-span" style="white-space:pre"> </span>Tips for Busy___</div><div>9.<span class="Apple-tab-span" style="white-space:pre"> </span>Tactics to___</div><div>10.<span class="Apple-tab-span" style="white-space:pre"> </span>What No One Tells You About___</div><div> </div><div><strong>#7 Be found</strong></div><div> Hashtags are a beautiful thing. They connect posts from people all over the world and add structure to an otherwise unstructured ecosystem. When you add a hashtag to a post, you are telling people the post is relevant to a shared topic. For example, #socialmediatips on Google+ connects posts that are about social media. Twitter, Instagram, Facebook, Tumblr, and Google+ all support hashtags, and we recommend adding two or three to your posts. (If you use more, you look like an #idiot who's trying to #gamethesystem.) Also, don't use hashtags on Pinterest, because people hate them there-perhaps because they interfere with users' minimal-text sensibilities.</div><div> </div><div><strong>#8 Be active</strong></div><div> By "active" we mean three to 20 different (that is, not repeated) posts per day. That's a guideline. As long as your posts are good, you can share more than that. But if you share one or two crappy posts per day, that's too much. Admittedly, you're reading a book coauthored by someone who repeats many tweets four times. But I'm sharing at a "hard-core" level - 3-4 Facebook posts, 8-10 Google+ posts, 4 LinkedIn posts, 10-12 Pinterest posts and 25 Tweets per day. When we decided to test the effect of repetition by sharing four identical posts with four different links to track clicks, we got about 1,300 clicks on the first, roughly the same on the second, 2,300 on the third and 2,700 on the fourth, for a total of 7,600 clicks. Would you be willing to risk complaints about repeated tweets to achieve 5.8 times more clicks? Those complainers will either get used to the increase or unfollow you. What matters is the net effect: are you adding followers and gaining reshares?</div><div> </div><div><strong>#9 Be distributed</strong></div><div> Using tools to schedule and distribute posts isn't cheating. It's what smart people do to optimize their sharing. Anyone who insists that you must manually share your posts is silly. Most followers can't tell how a post was shared, and if you have a life outside social media, you probably can't manually share posts throughout the day. Services you can use to distribute your posts include Buffer, Do Share, Friends+ Me, Hootsuite, Post Planner, Sprout Social, Tailwind, and TweetDeck. In 30 minutes, you could plan a day's worth of posts by using any of them.</div><div> </div><div><strong>#10 Be a mensch</strong></div><div> A "mensch," in case you haven't heard the term before, is a kind and honorable person who does the right thing the right way. "Give to others without having an agenda," says Mari Smith, the queen of Facebook. When you help others in this way, the reciprocity will surprise you. So share other people's posts, make positive and intelligent comments, suggest resources and solutions, and rack up points on the karmic scoreboard in the clouds. Goodness will eventually flow to your posts, I promise.</div><div> </div><div>Be promotional. We hardly ever do this, as a matter of pride and principle, but paying to promote posts on Pinterest, Facebook, and Twitter can work. The decision comes down to the math: does the revenue justify the expense of paying for the views? When Canva paid to promote to advertise a job opening, geo-targeting only to people in Australia, $60 brought approximately 14,000 views. If you refuse to pay to promote your posts (we'd respect you if this were your decision), you can "pin" your posts to the top of your page on Facebook and Twitter. This means that the post remains as the first visible story at the top of your Timeline. This isn't as effective as paying for promotion, but it's free.</div><div> </div><div><strong>#11 Be multilingual</strong></div><div> Héctor García translates Japanese news into Spanish, and because he's often the first person to share the news, his posts become the de facto source. This is a clever idea. If you are bilingual (or multilingual), try translating breaking news into another language and see what happens.</div><div> </div><div><strong>#12 Be analytical</strong></div><div> You can improve the relevance of your content (while keeping in mind my exhortations to share things that are interesting and bold) by analyzing the characteristics of the people who follow you. For example, Facebook's analytics are a rich resource for finding out who your fans are. Twitter provides extensive analytics for verified accounts, including the number of impressions per tweet and how many people engaged with each tweet (clicking, retweeting, replying, following, or favoriting). SocialBro reveals who follows you, helps you find new people to follow, and illustrates how your content is doing, and you can get similar reports in Sprout Social and Hootsuite.</div><div> </div><div><strong>#13 Be curious</strong></div><div> If you asked five social-media "experts" a question, you'd get seven different answers. Our advice is to field-test common generalizations such as "Share on Facebook on the weekend" and "Share on Twitter in the morning." Jay Baer, author of Youtility, shares posts a few minutes before or after the top of the hour. His reasoning is that this is when people tend to check their social-media accounts because they are between meetings. Like most social-media advice, it's hard to test scientifically, but it's worth trying. Everyone's followers are different. ABC (always be curious) and experiment to find out what works for you. Products such as Tweriod and SocialBro for Twitter, LikeAlyzer and Post Planner for Facebook, and Tailwind for Pinterest can help you measure the effects of changing variables such as timing, frequency, and graphics use.</div><div> </div><div><strong>#14 Be defiant</strong></div><div> In our opinion, most search engine optimization (SEO) is bullshit. There are 3,000 computer science PhDs at Google trying to make each search relevant, and then there's you trying to fool them. Who's going to win? Tricking Google is futile. Instead, you should let Google do what it does best: find great content. So defy all the SEO witchcraft out there and focus on creating, curating, and sharing great content. This is what's called SMO: social-media optimisation.</div><div> </div><div>(<em>The author, Guy Kawasaki, is chief evangelist, Canva</em>)</div>
