Continuing the series on How to get started in Social Media.

Getting fully engaged in Social Media requires time, commitment, and sincerity. The social aspect means that actual people read what you contribute, so if you use it sporadically, your listeners lose interest. The same goes for what you say – if you don’t come across as sincere on the subject, nobody will bother to hear your opinion.

Stay focused

Although you can dig down into detail with all sorts of tools at one time, try to ease into the social media arena, with one tool at a time. In time, you will be able to select which tools that work for you by trying them out for just five minutes. Until then, here is a place to start.

Here is a 5 step guide to getting started, and where to look for more information.

1. Define your purpose.
2. Identify your channels.
3. Subscribe and syndicate.
4. Share your findings.
5. Contribute.

1. Define your purpose

If you are reading this post, chances are you’re not sure which direction to take in social media, what you can get out of it and what you can contribute with. If that’s true, try answering this question: What is the single thing in your life that you are most passionate about?

Do you love being a parent? Is treasure hunting the most exciting thing you can imagine? Are you the type that always buys the latest cool gadgets? Cars? Snow plows? Do you prefer to watch grass grow? Anything that you are interested in, counts.

Except one thing. You. Telling people about how wonderful you are, will not spark their interest. Stick to hobbies, work, family life, growing grass or whatever – just don’t put yourself down as what you are most passionate about. That will earn you an audience of one.

The place to start is your passion. That’s what you focus your Social Media interaction on, to get started.

2. Identify your channels

Once you know what to focus on, it’s time to look for what’s out there, in your focus area. Here are a few tips. For this example, let’s say that your passion is “the Mozart Effect”.

• Google the phrase “Mozart Effect” blog and see what you find. Most likely, you’ll see opinions in a lot of different blogs, that mention pros and cons about you’re the Mozart Effect. Go through the results, and bookmark pages that are relevant to your focus area. These are your blog channels.
• If your focus is on the Mozart Effect for children, try searching for parenting websites and forums, and save those as bookmarks. If it’s the general psychological effect, try psychology sites.
• Search social bookmarking site del.icio.us for “Mozart Effect” to see what other people around the world have saved as bookmarks in your focus area.
• Try identifying any other websites that fit the definition of Social Media, and discuss your focus area. Since it’s your passion, you probably have lots of ideas already.

If you are interested in Social Media or Internet Marketing in general, add this post to your bookmarks.

Those are the channels you can start with. You will add many more with time, but these will get you going. Now, let’s subscribe and share.

3. Subscribe and Syndicate

You can do a lot more than simply bookmark your favorite web pages. Start by collecting your bookmarks in one place, online. First, pick your favorite social bookmarking tool. Two of the most popular are del.icio.us and StumbleUpon.

• del.icio.us has a very basic interface, simply listing links that you or others have saved. You can select browsing links that are popular, or the most recent ones, overall or based on one or more tags. If you use del.icio.us and surf with the Firefox browser, get their extension to post by the click of a button.
• StumbleUpon is originally based on a browser function, to let users “stumble on” to new pages on the Internet. It has grown to be a useful tool for saving (and sharing) your bookmarks with your friends and contacts. If you use StumbleUpon and surf with the Firefox browser, get their toolbar to post by the click of a button.

Syndicate your links and content in one place. Use an RSS feed reader (yes, you can retrieve your collected links in del.icio.us or StumbleUpon as RSS) to list all your chosen content in one place.

Select your favorite online feed reader, like Bloglines or Google Reader to collect all your information in one place. Once you have an account, you can subscribe to blogs directly, by adding their RSS feed to your feed reader. That way, you don’t have to search the web every time you want to find information on your focus area. Just syndicate all your information in one place – and categorize them by adding tags.

Tags are labels you can add to both bookmarked links and feeds. So if you have several nuances to your focus area, you can select one at a time, or all, to read up on.

… and add this blog to your feed reader if you like what it’s about.

4. Share your findings

Sharing what you have collected is easy, if you save your links to a social bookmarking service. You can choose to use several services, if you like. Reasons for that are covered in a later post.

If you use del.icio.us or StumbleUpon, you are already sharing your links. No need to do anything else there? Well, there are things you can do. Add your friends to the service, for example. Get your friends to sign up, and connect with them in the system. Del.icio.us even lets you save bookmarks directly to friends you are connected with (maybe it is of interest to them, but not to you).

5. Contribute

Once you are up to speed with your focus area and what’s being discussed out there, it’s time to add your own content. The best way to do that is by setting up a blog. There are two ways to do that, and they’re both free.

• Install a blog on your own domain / web hosting account. The web hosting is perhaps not free, but if you have a web host already, you can simply install the blogging software there. The blogging software is free. I strongly recommend Wordpress, which is the most popular blogging script out there. Download and install, it takes 2 steps to get it up and running.
• Use a free blog on Wordpress.com, Blogger.com. It’s a simple signup process, then you are good to post.

Blogging can be fun and exciting, but it requires a commitment to regularly add content. That’s the reason you picked a purpose or focus area to start with. It will help you keep focus and stay committed. Once you have been adding content every week for some time, you will get a reader base that will contribute via comments or links their own blogs.

Commit to posting at least once a week – and start with short posts, commenting on other blogs. If you like the post you’re reading now (or even if you don’t), comment on it in your blog if it’s relevant to your content. And add me as your friend on StumbleUpon or del.icio.us.

Moving on

What’s next? Having a blog is good, but you need to spread the word about it to develop a reader base. That is covered in the next part of this series – how to market yourself in Social Media. It’s not difficult, but it requires time, commitment and focus (plus sincerity, as I’ll get to).

Stay tuned for the next part of this series.

Filed under: Social Media Marketing
Tags:Networking, Social Marketing, Social Media, Social Media Strategy