Social Media Tips

Brands are not people.

Yet, if you’re online, you will likely encounter corporations pretending to be people every day as branded profiles and pages on nearly every social media channel.

Admit it. Sometimes, your Twitter life is messy. You follow hundreds of people - maybe thousands. Staring at your timeline is about as intelligible as reading a stock ticker. How do you bring organization to your Twitter life? How do you rise above the confusion, cut through the complexity, and become a superstar on Twitter?

You post to your Facebook page, hoping you've hit upon something that works. How great would it be know that the post you just published had the best chance of maximizing clicks, likes, and comments. Facebook posts especially-given the dramatic dip in reach-can feel like a mystery.

Whether you're an entrepreneur, marketer, or student, building strong relationships can help you achieve your goals. Doing this isn't always easy. When there's so much noise on social media, how do you stand out? Relationships require trust and rapport, which is built through consistent interaction over a period of time.

I have a blog post to write. This blog post, to be exact. And in the course of researching, outlining, writing, editing, and writing some more, I also have other hats to wear. Email marketing. Social media strategy. Blog promotion, blog design, and anything else that should happen across my plate.

We've all been there before. You've written a great blog post, and you've plopped a featured image in there to represent the post on social media, your blog's main page, and so on. Then, you hop on your social media accounts and paste the link into a new post.

During the past year, the social media world saw a variety of poorly executed ad campaigns, but these 12 standouts, from companies including CVS, DHL, Outback Steakhouse and Starbucks, are complete disasters, according to social media experts.

How did you end up learning the unwritten rules for social media etiquette? For me, it was a lot of watching and waiting, a bit of experimenting, and tons of trial and error. When I first started out on social media, I had just the most basic rules and intuitions.