3 Things You Must Know About Getting Started with Social Media

Welcome to episode 315 of Hit the Mic with The Stacey Harris.

This episode is for those of you who feel like you just can't figure out where to get started. For those of you who are struggling along with social media, this is also worth giving a listen to because sometimes the struggle stems from a lack of foundation in our social media. I really want to talk about the three things you need to know, you have to know and you have to execute on when it comes to getting started with your social media because again, a lot of the struggles I see clients having, a lot of the struggles I see with our members at Hit the Mic Backstage, it really stems from not having those foundations in place. From not having these things figured out.

Number one, I think this applies to literally everything and not just social media. That could just be me raising my hand on that one. Stop trying to do all the things. You don't need to be on every single network. You don't need to be doing social media 24 hours a day. You do not need to be glued to your phone when you're supposed to be at your kids soccer practice. Raising my hand on that one. You don't need to be obsessed with staying connected and staying in touch in all of the places all of the time. It's just not true. It's just not the way it is. I want you to very first, very foremost let go of that. Get yourself off the hook for that one because it's not serving you, it's not serving your goals and it is not serving your community which is generally the excuse we use to keep doing that.

It's not really a value place and so I want you to let go of that. Again, you don't need to be in all of the networks. You need to be in a couple of places. You need to be in the right places at the right time not everywhere all of the time. I've talked about this in other episodes but it's worth re-mentioning here two primary networks. Yes, two. Not one, two and that's because when you're on only one network you're putting all your eggs in that basket. If they make a major change or that they are down, you're going to feel that. However, if you have another network to lean on, you have a little bit of a security blanket there should something happen.

The best examples of this are in the last probably a year and a half, we've seen some major changes in organic reach on Facebook. The people who are most hurt by that are the people who only use Facebook. Especially those people who only had Facebook and didn't even legit have their own website set up. Those of you who are really feeling it but it really is the people who get hurt by those kind of changes are the people who are relying all on one network. A more recent example is a few weeks ago we saw major, major DNS attack that impacted a lot of our favorite websites like Twitter and Pinterest and Freshbooks and a lot. New York Times, a lot of major sites were down as a part of it.

If those were your only networks you had no place to go. Having two primary networks is really helpful but also, again, it's two. It's not all of them. It's two. That's manageable. That's doable. I also like to have two secondary networks in addition to those primary networks. If you just want to have one secondary network that's fine but these are the networks to support what happens in your primary networks.

They are really nice to have because if something shifts in a site or a community or in your business you can move those secondary networks into the primary position if you need to instead of going I have to start all over now. You

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