Tweets And Facebook Likes For The Popular Kids

Everyone is into metrics these days – even your not-bothered daily tweeter, Mr Average Joe Facebooker, and intermittent blogger anonymous. Every single person wants their posts to be read – even those guys who write about writing for themselves and not caring what their imaginary audiences think of them. If you weren’t trying to communicate and wanting people to listen, then why would you be using such a public forum to, as you are claiming, effectively speak to yourself?

You post to be interesting; you write to be heard; you are funny to be laughed at. No one wants to be shouting into an empty room. The only sin in a social media world is to be uninteresting – your currency in an attention economy is derived from creating interest. It means that a lot of people are getting more savvy in what they put out there, even just on a personal basis. Creative people up the production values, and the means to do that are widely available for people. You can track how popular what you said was – it isn’t like those days of wondering whether people are listening or liking your contributions, you can easily pull up statistics that prove it.

How many friends do you have? How many people liked your wall-post? How many favorited tweets or retweets did you get? If you can’t create your own sparkling posts then you just have to develop a sense of what memes or videos or music posts are going to draw attention; the machinery is there to turn you into a social networking phenomenon. A lot of the time, what you like is going to be what your friends like, because you are friends and have some common interests. A little more stress is entered into the equation if you are trying to appeal to a wider audience, but you can learn from just talking to your friends and then scale the action upwards.

This first brick laid in the foundation of your personal advertising campaign, if you nail it, puts you in a good position, and gives you demonstrable statistics and something to show people for when that brainstorm becomes a business plan. The sooner you get down Social Media 101 and learn how to use the metrics that ever site from Twitter to Facebook is making available, the sooner you will transform yourself from an ugly little caterpillar into a much more colorful social butterfly. Even on  a personal basis, social media is, whatever platform you are using, something which people look at. If it wasn’t tweeted, posted, hashtagged or snapchatted, did it happen? You have to advertise that tree falling in the wood, and the one hand clapping has very bad PR … advertising zen is all about the metrics.