Practical Steps to Getting Started in Social Media: Step 7 – Finally, Incorporate

If you’ve followed the previous 6 steps, you should be a pro at your new social media platform. Now you’re ready to incorporate what you’ve learned through your personal use of the platform to lead your company, non-profit or church onto that network.

As I’ve said from the introduction to this series, I believe you’ve got to understand a social network as an individual before you can engage with other individuals as an organization.

That’s why the 6 previous steps have all been geared towards helping you use a new social network as an individual.

1. Learn
2. Listen
3. Mingle
4. Develop Your Voice
5. Set Goals
6. Implement & Adjust

The final step is…

Leveraging your personal social media experience to launch your organization

1) Repeat steps 4-6 for your organization.

Your organization needs its own voice and its own goals. It will need to make its own adjustments. Because you’ve already gone through these steps once personally, you’ll be able to do them better and much more quickly. That’s great because while people are usually pretty tolerant of newbe mistakes by individuals, they’re not very tolerant of organizations that do dumb things in social media.

2) Post about your organization

When you started on this platform, you had to start from scratch. But, now that you’ve developed some relationships and a following, you can leverage your personal presence to launch your organization much more quickly. Tweet and post about your organization from your personal profile. Not only does it help to get the word out, but you are also passing along your credibility on the platform to your organization.

One word of warning: don’t repost/retweet everything your organization puts out or you personally will be perceived as merely a mouthpiece for your organization and lose credibility.

And that’ll do it for this series Practical Steps to Getting Started in Social Media.

While there are lots of other resources out there that provide tips on getting an organization started on a specific social network like Facebook, Twitter, Linked, or YouTube, this series is intended to provide broad principles that are important and useful for all social networks. I hope it’s been helpful for you.

What questions do you have about getting a business, non-profit, or church started in social media?

Or if you’ve gotten an organization successfully engaging with people in social media, what other advice do would you offer others just getting started?