It’s easier than you think. If you;

• Do nothing but worry over ROI,
• Con yourself out of trying a platform for any reason,
• Convince yourself it’s all a load of hooey before diving in head first, (or)
• Dive in head first, experience cold-shoulder-shock, and immediately stop…

… You might just suck at social media.

But it’s ok! You can get better at it – that part’s easier than you think.

First, stop worrying over how many followers you have, and start keeping track of how many points of interaction you create. How many blog posts are you writing per month? How many tweets are you sending per day? How many questions are you asking, answering, and participating in answering on LinkedIn groups?

Next, stop reading the stats about interactions and start counting the percentage of your interaction points which get taken advantage of. Look at your blog post-to-comment ratio and figure out how to encourage more comments and discussions. Look at your Klout score to see if you’re keeping up with the replies and long-lasting conversations over time (because a given Klout score is useless – the trend matters). Pay attention to how many questions are asked on your LinkedIn groups, and how many answers you’ve given – bonus points when your answers are not the last in the thread.

And whatever you do, don’t burn yourself out with hard sprints of activity that you can’t keep up. That’s the worst. If you can’t commit to posting on your blog five times a week, don’t do it in the first place – that’s what scheduling is for. If you can’t commit to answering every question on a group, don’t make one – join another and participate.

Participating in social media is always more straight-forward than curating it. Bonus points if you can stop worrying about building communities before you’re ready, and spend your time endeavouring to enhance the communities already in place by joining and taking active part.

And if you really don’t know where to start – you know where to find me.

Image by josh-n.