One of the great aspects of new social media technology is that posts aren’t just about being social, they’re also about being educational. Regardless of your own personal industry, you can use Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn, and many others to spread all kinds of great factual information.
In fact, many people will accept your opinions much more readily if your stream of content also has a lot of sourced, factual links and information in with it as well. The following three techniques will give you a few tips and tricks for using the idea of education to increase your social clout.
Using Educational Links
Twitter and Facebook are probably the most efficient ways of using educational links. These educational links can either be links to other factual sources, such as articles from newspapers, magazines, or journals; or they can be links to factual information on your own personal or your own business site.
By having a good combination of those two, you’re giving people a good opportunity to see that you’re trying to give a good, balanced view of all of the different facets of fact and information available in your given industry. And yes, Twitter is important for everyone, from politicians to physical therapy sites.
Moderating Only Sourced Material
One way to make sure that your links remain truly educational is if you use only sourced material. This means never posting any links to assumptions, opinions, commentary, non-backed advice, or personal beliefs.
This may be difficult, because that is a majority of the content out there, but the better your moderate your own links and material, and the better you moderate comments on your links, the more people will begin to believe that you aren’t trying to force your own ideas on people, and you’re rather just trying to promote tried and true information.
Updating on a Consistent Schedule
Another process that you can always keep in mind in order to make sure that people understand you’re promoting education is to keep your posts on a regular, consistent schedule. This means enough posts to keep things interesting, but not so many posts that people get annoyed or think you are being overtly promotional.
So what is the best speed of posts? Realistically, it depends on your industry. But, if you’re posting every 15 minutes on Twitter, you’re going to lose all of your followers. But, one post per month isn’t going to cut it. So, some type of weekly engagement is probably your best bet.
And, if you’re working with a team of people on a social media site, be sure that all of you communicate so that you know how well all of your information is balancing off of each other. One good way to organize a social media team is that every person posts one item related to their specialty every day, that way no one is stepping on anyone else’s toes.
