1. You’re an authority on a topic their interested in.
2. You’re an interesting conversationalist.
3. You’re funny.

While it would be nice to be all three, it just isn’t likely. When it comes to Social Media the only one on the list above that matters is number 1! You must be an authority on the topic or topics you make your living at. Even then getting people to follow you on a consistent basis can be a difficult task. Follow these simple guidelines and you’ll have more followers (and more customer) than you’ll know what to do with.

Be Clear and Concise

You may be an authority on your topic but if you’re not clear and tend to ramble, you’ll lose your audience fast. Before publishing, ask a friend or relative to read your content and then have them relay your main ideas back to you as they understand it. You may be surprised at what you here.

Know Your Facts

You may be an authority but even the pro can get it wrong. So be sure to check your facts.  Nothing will lose your followers faster than when they find out your wrong! They will then post that fact in as many places as possible to make them look smarter to those around them.

Be Objective

Keep emotion out of it. Emotion can tend to cloud your judgment and in will come through in your writing. If your followers feel you can’t be objective they’ll stop listening.

Above all, Provide VALUE!

You can be all of the things above, but without adding value in some form, it’s all for nothing. Weather it be information value, discount value or entertainment value doesn’t matter. Without VALUE nobody will stick around

Remember these few simple to follow tips on posting to your social media accounts and your followers will be around for a long time.

To your social media success!

Steve & Beneta Nelson

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The last time I checked, the more clients a business had, the more money they made. And money (correct me if I’m wrong) is a good thing. We all need it in order to keep doing our jobs… and we all need it in order to survive.

So, if you understand that more money can come as the result of having more clients in your business, the question then becomes, “How do you attract more clients?”

Based on my experiences, the best way to do this is through the creation of social proof.

Social proof is something one creates in order to prove to others that what he or she says or does is worth paying attention to. In short, it’s a way of building yourself up so that you can sway the actions of a large group of people.

The principle behind social proof is that since most people make the assumption that the people surrounding them possess more knowledge about a particular situation than they do, they will deem the behavior of others as more appropriate or better informed… and therefore, follow in the footsteps of those around them.

Social proof gets people talking about brands. Social proof convinces people to buy a particular product. And social proof sways clients to buy from one business and not another.

The more social proof your business has, the greater your chances of attracting new clients.

In order to attract more clients and make more money, however, you need to create an ever-increasing amount of social proof around your business.

Need more money? Get more clients.

Need more clients? Create social proof.

If you can create enough social proof, you’ll have clients begging to buy from your business. With enough social proof you’ll have clients clamoring to your business.

Social proof is powerful.

If you understand this, you’re on the right track! But the question then becomes, “How do you create social proof within your community?”

One way to do it is through the use of SOCIAL MEDIA.

What you may not realize about social media sites like Facebook and Twitter is that not only are these tools an excellent way of communicating with the citizens in your community… but sites such as these are also one of the best (and fastest) ways of building social proof.

To build social proof with social media, you need to do three things.

1) Increase your follower counts. The more people you have following you on Twitter, subscribing to your RSS feeds, or becoming a fan of yours on Facebook, the more important your business will seem.

2) Get your business’s message to spread online. The more your business’s content is Re-Tweeted, emailed back and forth, voted on, Digged, or StumbledUpon, the more “popular” your organization becomes.

3) Have people talking about your business in the real world. When the story you spread about your business is so great that it has people talking about your institution outside of the World Wide Web, then you know you’ve succeeded in generating positive social proof.

The formula looks like this:

• Need more money? Get more clients.
• Need more clients? Create social proof.
• Need social proof? Harness the power of social media.

Social proof is created by continually proving that your business is an amazing place; that you’re constantly pushing the boundaries; and that your business is doing something special – something others will want to be a part of.

If you are not yet using social media in your business as a tool for communication, marketing, promotion, and social proof creation, now is the time to begin!

Social proof doesn’t just pop up over night. It takes time to build and grow. The longer you wait to get started, the longer it’s going to take before your community starts talking about you and your incredible institution.

What are you waiting for? There couldn’t be a better time to harness the power of social proof through the use of social media! Join the Social Media Schools Master Course Today! Start creating your Socia Proof before your competition does!

Photo by Malkav

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While attaching locations to tweets has been possible for several months now through multiple third-party applications, Twitter.com itself has done little in regards to “geo-location” until very recently. As far as I can tell, it was on March 11th, 2010, that Twitter first started to roll out these new geo-location options.

You should note, however, that turning the geo-location feature on is entirely optional and many Twitter users will simply opt out of using this specific feature for whatever reason. That said, many Twitter users will activate this new feature… and this is good news for you and your school!

The following is a screen shot showing the check box that you are required to select in order to activate the new geo-location options.

You should also note that if you do decide to activate the “Tweet Location” option and then later decide to opt out of this specific feature, you can go back and delete all location data from your previous tweets if so desired.

Once this feature is activated, the geo-location data is easily and automatically included with your tweets. Any tweet that has a location attached to it will appear with a small location icon located at the end of the byline of that tweet. Clicking on the icon will bring up a Google Map showing the location where that tweet was sent.

The reason this feature is such big news is because up until now it was a somewhat difficult process to find active Twitter users in your immediate area. Up until this time, Twitter was a global phenomenon and unless you had a global business, connecting with the people in your local vicinity was difficult, if not impossible.

But now, with these new features enabled, it is easier than ever to find the parents, teachers, students, and community members that are both active in and around your school.

To find Twitter users in your immediate area, there are several ways to search them out.

Twitter Search

One of the best ways to find local Twitter users is simply to search for them on Twitter Search. Using the search box on this page, you can simply enter the name of your town or city and get a real-time stream of all the people tweeting from your location (or near it). The results here are based on the location field of people’s Twitter bios and this new geo-location date.

To search for Twitter users in you area, you can simply enter the name of the town you happen to be in or you can use a search code like this to find Twitter users within a specific range of your postal zip code:

near:93001 within:5mi

You will need to change the zipcode in the search above to your local code. Also, you might try searching for people in a 10 mile, 20 mile, or even 30+ mile radius (depending on the size of the city your school happens to be situated in).

Twellowhood

Another easy way to find local Twitter users is to search for your city on Twellow.com.

Twellow is a sort of like a yellow pages directory for Twitter. It allows you to search for Twitter users by topic, name or location.

In order to navigate the site and find local Twitter users in your area, simply visit the site, click on the map to zoom into your area, and browse the list of local tweeters. The site even lets you view recent tweets and follow new users directly from their Twellow listing page.

Over To You

Now it’s your turn to get out there and starting using Twitter to connect with your parents, teachers, students and community members.

If you are not yet using Twitter in your school or you are unsure as to how to use this new tool to your advantage, please consider signing up for the Social Media Schools Master Course. The course is designed to take you by the hand and teach you everything you need to know in order to get up and running with Twitter and Facebook in your school – ASAP!

And for those of you who are already using Twitter in your school, how else (besides the methods I have described above) have you been able to successfully connect with the people in your immediate area on Twitter? Leave a comment below and let me know!

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