Social Media begs you to people watch!

So you are no longer on the fence – you are on the other side and ready to go full speed with Social Media to enable your product/service and support existing initiatives – glad to hear it.

Where do you start? Glad you asked.

PEOPLE WATCHING!

It starts with knowing your people. Who are you interested in? How old are they? What do they do online today? What do they need? What do they want? How much of that can you provide them? What do they use today or where do they go today to obtain what you offer? Why will they perceive yours to be better?

Forrester offers a cool tool that allows you to profile the social technographics of your audience based on some basic data input.

If your audience are more spectator than creator, perhaps you don’t want to ask them to upload content or create vlogs.

If your audience are creators – your static 1.0 site will probably not have them returning to your site any time soon.

What else can you do? Well… start playing with and testing stuff!

Monitor what is being said about you/your brand/your product/competition. Try these … Free Social Media Monitoring Tools.

Start your blog! I like wordpress – I also like Mr. www.stevesaylor.net who can work magic with your wordpress blog to make it a kick ass site. Blog regularly. At least every second day if not daily.

Create profiles on communities. Loads of ‘em. I was going to suggest you check out Atomkeep to manage multiple social profiles with one click but I think Ben Parr’s blog on HOW TO manage multiple profiles is a far more robust and helpful post than just directing you to AtomKeep. So take the time to read it.

Get mucked in to the convo. Now! Comment on people’s blog posts. respond to questions on linkedin/twitter. ask questions. Have a bloody opinion… even if it’s not the opinion of the majority. It’s ok.

Find the brilliant minds in this space today. Observe them. Read their articles. Read their case studies. Ask them questions. Learn from them.  How do you find those brilliant minds? Start here. www.Mashable.com

Gather insights, data, learning from your online activity. Monitor who is coming to your site(s) and what they’re doing on them. This analysis will be a really good indicator as to what your next steps should be.