Category Archives: blogging

Robert Scoble on how to increase your social media presence – Some great ideas there!

Answer by Robert Scoble:

Some ideas:

Improve your inbound. I spent a LOT of time organizing my friends and adding new people who are bringing me interesting stuff over the past year. Now my feeds are much more interesting. If you don't have interesting inbound it'll be hard for you to have interesting stuff to say.

You can increase your inbound easily by adding some lists, by the way. I've created several here on Facebook:

• 902 entrepreneurs: https://www.facebook.com/lists/1…
• 128 tech VIPs: https://www.facebook.com/lists/1…
• 495 tech news journalists and bloggers: https://www.facebook.com/lists/1…
• 572 tech investors: https://www.facebook.com/lists/1…
• 2,382 startups: https://www.facebook.com/lists/1…
• 201 things for programmers: https://www.facebook.com/lists/1…
• 151 big tech companies: https://www.facebook.com/lists/1…

Get rid of feeds and people. Last year I deleted 11,000 people here on Quora and my feed got dramatically more interesting (I cut down the numbers of topics I was subscribed to too). Same on Instagram. Same on Facebook (you should also put EVERYONE onto a list, whether it be your close friends list or your acquaintance list. That will make your notifications better too.

Make more original content. Most social media people aren't making original content. For instance, I'm making content on:
YouTube (video): http://youtube.com/scobleizer
Soundcloud (audio): http://soundcloud.com/scobleizer
Flickr (photo): http://flickr.com/scobleizer
Blog (text): http://scobleizer.com
This is in addition to social media stuff I do on Google+ (at http://google.com/+Scobleizer or http://facebook.com/RobertScoble )

Curate other people's content. I continually am clicking "like" or "sharing" or "retweeting" other people's content. That usually shows up on their notifications so they know I'm reading them, but also gives my readers a stream of awesome content.

Throw a party. Invite people who are good social media folks to it. These people will get to know who you are, be more likely to link to, share, retweet, republish, your content. Extra points if it's a Google+ video hangout that you broadcast and push to YouTube.

Be original. You won't get noticed if you just do what everyone else is doing. Can you do something no one else can? Show it off! Or, tell us a story in a unique way? I remember one guy got us all to pay attention by doing a puppet show on YouTube.

Answer Quora questions. They get pushed to social media and if you do a great job people will post those in Twitter/Facebook/LinkedIn/Google+.

Start a fight. I once asked Mike Arrington (founder of Techcrunch) if he was a blogger or a journalist. He answered "neither, I'm an entertainer." He often picked on people and started fights. Fights aggregate attention. We learned that in high school. A fight always got the entire school to run and see what was going on.

Do something worth commenting on. Or sharing. Or liking. What is that? It could be playing a song, if you are talented. It could be printing something on a 3D printer. It could be a new robot. A new startup. A new project.

Get some insight no one else will be able to get. For me I kept interviewing startups over the past few years and saw that many of them were talking about context. So now I'm writing a book about that. What insights are you able to see that the rest of us aren't?

Make sure your details are public AND up to date. Over on Facebook lots of people have locked down their accounts. That makes it hard to search for you. Also, make sure your details are up to date on all your social media (including that bio, your location, and your company details). Any way you can increase the chances people will find you in searches is good in my book.

Get off of social media. It's so boring to talk with people who do nothing but social media all day long. So, get off and go surfing. Or to a library and read a book. Or have a conversation with someone interesting (I've had two today and a famous photographer is coming over for sunset, where we'll go for a walk making photos).

Just some ideas. I'm looking for more!

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