Recently, I bought a dress from an online company. Now this was no ordinary dress. I was able to customize the sleeves, neckline, and hemline. I input each measurement into the online form, which required some standing on one foot and wrestling with a tape measure. After a wait of a few weeks, the dress arrived. And wow! It was incredible, fit like a glove, and was beautiful. Not just because of the embroidery, but the fabric was soft and sturdy. The hems were well stitched, and you could see that the overall the quality was there.

Why am I telling you this story?

Social media can be a lot like that dress. You might pay extra for a good logo, avatar, or headshot, and devote extra time writing your profile, but ultimately it’s worth it. Sometimes it’s difficult to judge the value of a social media account, but there are ways. I haven’t written about this for awhile, but I believe it’s good to review what makes for good social media value. In fact, here’s an article from the Wayback Machine: Creating an Awesome Twitter Avatar. Can you believe it’s from 2012?

Your social media banner should be eye catching

If you have a banner, it should have good balance. It should catch the eye and leave a good first impression. It should definitely be in focus and easily identifiable. By the way, here are some beautiful Twitter banners from Canva. Looking at other social media headers can give you an idea of what you’d like yours to look like. And one pro tip? Make your avatar and banners easy to identify across all your social media accounts. That way, when people travel from Facebook to Instagram to Twitter, they can easily identify you and your brand.

A well-written profile creates good visibility

Does your profile say something about you, what you do, and what’s important to you? And do you change it up occasionally? Or do the things that you’ve said stay the same year after year? Sometimes they do stay the same. Brands may keep the same messaging, but change their logos, for instance. On a personal profile, it’s good to review your profile every year or so. New Year is a good time to do that. Neil Patel has an excellent article about the 10 elements of a successful social media profile.

High-quality posts determine your survivability

Sharing from other pages or accounts is a good way to create engagement. When you share, other people are more prone to share your posts, too. And don’t forget that commenting is a good way to create engagement. People will follow you and share your posts and your account will survive if you post and share. How do you measure it? I like a ratio of 80:20 of shared posts versus original content. It’s pretty simple, but it works.

Measure What Works

Don’t forget to measure what’s working for you. Among some of the things you might like to measure? Although follower count is a vanity metric to some extent, I think it’s important to have a few followers. You don’t want to be talking to yourself, after all.

Different Platform, Different Analytics

Facebook has its own set of analytics, as does Twitter. For Instagram and Pinterest, you need business accounts to see your analytics. Although engagement can be difficult to measure correctly, look at your best posts and see what’s working. Impressions is a measure that some really like. I like checking about once a month, although some like to check more often. Reach is another measure that you might like to check. I won’t go into a lot of details here, but you can use a spreadsheet to track these.

Being a Hater is Easy

While it might be a lot easier to discuss all the reasons I despise social media, many people have already covered that ground. Being a hater is easy. Defending social media is not so easy. We have more and more choices as far as where we land on social media, which platforms we use, and which part of our audience we follow and where.

Find Your Friends

With the pandemic, making new friends hasn’t been easy. But with social media, you can not only make new friends, you can reconnect with those you haven’t seen recently, and deepen your already-existing relationships. Although I dislike the word tribe, it’s very nice to have a circle of friends who talk to you when you’re online. And searching for old friends is easier than ever using Google, Facebook, and LinkedIn. Here’s a WikiHow you might like: How to Find Old Friends Online. You can also do searches for professional friends on LinkedIn or military friends using military records. Speaking of friends, you might like this article: Friend Sourcing: the New Way to Content Creation?

Share Common Experiences

Not only can you share photos, but it’s fairly easy to discover platforms now where you can share your experiences. Whether you’re concerned about disabilities, special hobbies, or A/I, you’re sure to find a Facebook group for your specific interests. Not only that, but there will be someone nerdier than you who’s been involved in your interest for years or decades! For instance, two of my interests are knitting (a new hobby) and Pan American Airlines (because my father was an employee for many years). These groups and many more are on Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram, as well as other places online. Also: following and searching on the hashtags of your interests is also easy-peasy. If you want to know more about hashtags, try this: How to Discover a Wealth of Friends with Social Media Hashtags.

Share Your Personal Background

There’s a wonderful Hafu page on Facebook that I just love. This page is for people who are half Japanese (like I am). I enjoy seeing people share their victories or recently, share their issues because of discrimination. And there’s always a good recipe or two for tonkatsu! There are groups for social media managers, differing age groups, bird watchers, and just about anything you can think of.

Delve Into Topics…or Just Absorb the Good Vibes

If you’re unsure whether you want to post within your newly-found group, you can lurk in the background for a while. This way, you can check out what others are saying as well as how many posts go out daily. There’s no need to jump into any conversation right away until you’re comfortable. Just scroll to your heart’s content.

Friend sourcing. I just made it up, so you’re not missing out on something new. Yet. It’s like crowdsourcing, but among people you already know, even if you’ve only met them online. After all, don’t we all have more and more friends online? Especially during this past year, when the pandemic influenced how many people we could socialize with.

Here’s How it Works

Ask your friends what they think of a topic, then take what they say and create content with that. It’s like when you attend #DigiBlogChat and then create a blog post about it, like Jim Katzaman (@JKatzaman) often does. You’ll get more eyes on your piece because people love to hear about themselves. It’s easy, fun, and clever!

Don’t Believe Me?

If you need to see how friend sourcing works, take a look around the interwebs. Check out who’s retweeting whom, who’s sharing whose pictures, and which posts get shared the most. Friend sourcing posts may not always be the most popular (animal posts are very popular, too), but they do get shared. A lot.

Friend Sourcing Is Social

Remember when social media was actually social? No, neither do I. But these days, you really need to be social more than ever. Engagement counts for a lot, and I predict it’ll count for even more in the future. Need to know more about engagement? Check out For Better Social Media Results, Focus on Engagement.

Get Started

Attend a chat (#DigiBlogChat is a pretty good one!) or start a conversation on social media. Ask a question or create a poll. Collect ideas from your friends. Ask if they’d like to be included in your piece if you want. Or tell them later. Or apologize later. Your choice! There are no wrong answers here.

Collaborations Are Gold

Collaborate with someone to create something, write something, or do something together. You could be in a challenge together, too, like the 46-mile Mt. Fujii Virtual Conqueror Challenge that @MistressPrime and I were in together. We both walked the miles, checked in, and got our (real metal!) medals. But the walk was all done virtually, so anyone can participate.

Write or Vlog About it!

Now create your piece! You could write a blog post, talk about it on your YouTube channel, make an art piece to share later, etc. You might want to take pictures of whatever it is you did, said, or created together. Make sure you tag your friends when you do share the piece. People usually love being mentioned!

Share and Share Again

If your piece is evergreen (for more information about evergreen posts, see: How Long Is Evergreen Content Actually Good for?) then share it more than once! After all, you’ve put in the work, right?

Recently, I’ve been seeing more and more sales gimmicks. Sites where I’d normally shop anyway are now regaling me with Spin the Wheel! and Mystery Discounts, along with cute fuzzy animals. I might have shopped there anyway, but does the focus on games make me trust them more? No! Quite the opposite.

Does There Always Need to Be a Game?

Why does shopping have to be made more fun? Haven’t we been told to plan ahead, make a list, shop online, get in and get out as quickly as possible when shopping in person, shop around the edges for the best dietary choices, etc.? Do we have to go on a Treasure Hunt and make our online shopping trip more amusing? You’ll probably guess what my answer is to these questions. By the way, you might like this article about the Gamification of Social Media.

Budgets and the National Debt

Ok, maybe I’m ranting now, but as Americans don’t we already have a problem with overspending? According to CNBC, “The average American has $90,460 in debt. Meanwhile, millennials have seen the largest increase in debt in the last five years.” So gamification probably makes the debt problem even worse. Maybe there’s some sort of moral obligation to make sales as boring as possible to help bring down the national debt! Yes, people want to sell more, but how about a little mercy for everyone during these panicky, pandemicky times?

Just Say No

Maybe our collectively ginormous credit issue stems in part from our difficulty in saying no. Setting boundaries is hard work and depends upon knowing what we want and don’t want. And what about that darn pandemic? Gosh, maybe if we spent less to begin with we wouldn’t even need as much darn money from the government in the form of stimulus checks. Maybe we could even–gasp!–spend within our means! Not to say that some need the stimulus checks–they do. It’s just that right now we need to be budgeting our money so it stretches farther, not looking for excuses to spend more money. And certainly not making a fun game out of overspending. Oh, and get off my lawn, you darn kids!!! By the way, I talk about boundaries in Best Time Management Hacks for Your Online Life.

Scams and Rabbit Holes

Maybe people are more sophisticated than I give them credit for. Somehow, I don’t think so. Tons of my friends fall for scams. When people with unknown numbers call, they often pick up and talk to the callers. And give away their bank account information. So this emphasis on games doesn’t bode well for many. At the very least, it’s a waste of time heading down that rabbit hole of online shopping and games. I know we’re all bored. But why make it easier for someone else to get into debt? Leave me a comment if you feel like it, but only if you aren’t procrastinating on doing your budget.

Some people seem to think that there’s some kind of magic involved in improving your engagement on social media. There’s no magic involved, but you can use some science. Don’t worry–it’s nothing that costs a bundle. But having some science and just talking to people will help a lot.

The Science behind Tweepsmap

This week on #DigiBlogChat, a chat on Twitter, our special guests were Samir Al-Brattan of @Connexinet and Tweepsmap and Jayna (@JTweepsmap). We discussed how to increase engagement. Here are a few ideas from that chat. By the way, Tweepsmap has a terrific YouTube channel, if you prefer to listen to tips. Don’t forget to subscribe! 

Hashtags and Topics

If you want to supercharge your time on Twitter, you can find out which hashtags and topics will get you the most oomph. Yes, oomph isn’t exactly a scientific word, but you know what I mean. This is not to say that you’re going to be broadcasting. You’ll still be interacting, but in a smart way. If you’re already tweeting about one of the topics mentioned in your Tweepsmap, why not add a hashtag to your post? Did you know there’s a the hashtag suggestions tool embedded into the Tweepsmap scheduler? Not too many hashtags, though! Just one or two.

How Do I Talk to People?

Start by saying hello. Do you know how to make small talk? If you still go to the grocery store, or walk your dog past your neighbor’s house, you’ve been forced to say hello before. Then ask about them. How are they doing? You can also retweet with a quote. Simply click on the retweet and then you’ll get the quote retweet choice. That way, you can add a remark to the original tweet.

©Przemek Pietrak2013

Don’t Just Broadcast

Gone are the days when you could post an out-of-focus picture of a lemon and get a thousand comments. Comment on what other people are doing and saying. People love to hear about themselves. Some people may even say something back to you. You can use some of the suggested topics and hashtags within Tweepsmap if you get stuck for ideas, too.

©GotCredit2015

Add Value

Sometimes value includes encouragement. You can also post educational material, humorous things, or resourceful ideas. As Melissa Drozdowski, director of social media at marketing and brand-builder company Interprose mentioned during the latest #Digiblogchat “Repeat after us: it’s all about adding value. People engage for a reason. You have to provide something of value for their time – a new perspective, something followers can learn from, a resource they didn’t have before. Add value and they will come (and stay).”

©Adam Bautz2015

Don’t Get Discouraged

If someone doesn’t want to have a conversation, move on. There are plenty of people who will want to talk to you.